Laurelines

Journal sketches... and Portland, here I come!

Trying to get back into the habit of sketching before my trips to Portland and to Norway... and just because I miss it!

Truth is, when I'm not painting or illustrating now, I seem to use my journal more for writing than for making images. But this won't last. I've been drawing since at least the age of 3. I'm sure not going to stop now.

You know I've have used this kind of floral imagery in my journals and sketchbooks many times. Drawing my flowers helps me loosen up in the studio first thing in the morning. Plus, it's fun.

Sometimes there appears an object in your life that you've got to sketch. This vintage hen figurine was one. I'll let you read about it on the page itself:

Looking at this sketch on toned paper I just shared, I realized it's  a convenient segue to my Portland trip.

I LOVE my gray-toned sketchbooks, especially for trips to the cold, snowy, and/or rainy places I'm besotted with. So this is what I'm taking with me to Portland tomorrow, a Strathmore gray-toned sketchbook and, of course, my Stillman & Birn Alpha series book, for those moments when I'm not being rained upon, in case there are some! Here are a couple of images from Iceland and Vancouver... cases in point:

My trip to Portland is a short one...my first visit to my daughter Cecelia since she moved there last August. I'll be going a lot. Not sure how much sketch time I'll have under those circumstances, but I KNOW we'll be meeting up with some sketching buddies at the Portland Museum of Art to sketch there, at least! Portland, I'm ready for you!

September's last story: my painting show

 September was full to bursting right to the very end, so its last story is October's first one.

My painting show of work inspired by Iceland opened last week and it was such a happy event! Lots of people came and there was great enthusiasm! For my part, I felt as if the work was a kind of breakthrough to a way of painting that felt personal, quirky, and real... to me. What anyone else thought/thinks of it is beyond my power to arrange. So the enthusiasm was surprising and very much appreciated.

Here's the artist statement I was asked to write to accompany the show:

I’ve recently returned to painting after a several-year hiatus spent drawing, sketching, and maintaining an art blog with an international following.

Inspired by the primordial grandeur of Iceland, I’ve struggled to find an idiom that would express what I experience in that country. I’m not interested in making traditional landscape paintings, but the landscape motif is hard to avoid entirely when you are dealing, no matter how abstractly, with land forms and masses and the elements that shape them.

Earth, air, fire, and water... these fuel the Icelandic drama, in some way, every day. There the life force, or chi,  is practically audible, visible, and tangible.

I am still in the process of trying to express what I feel there---and I will be for a long time to come.

 Here are some shots of the installation, as well as some images of a few of the individual paintings. The relative sizes of these images do not correspond to the relative sizes of the real things. I had to compress some to make this post less bulky.

All of the work is acrylic on board. The sizes range from 18" x24" to 11" x 14". 

 

 

 

Four pieces from my 2012 volcano series are included in the show. 

Many people were generous in their responses to the work. I loved my Icelandic friend Snorri Villafuerte Valsson's unsoliticed comments --the fact that these pieces felt somehow right to him means a LOT:

"Gritty and vivid paintings of Icelandic landscapes, I love them all. Laura catches the beauty of our nature but doesn´t forget to add the rugged part that is so unique for Iceland."

So, there we are... the last of September's big events brought to a happy, happy conclusion! I am over the moon about all of them and I look forward to my December trip to northern Norway. Who knows what paintings will come from those dark and brooding land forms and that palely luminous arctic night?

September Laurelines re-entry; a smorgasbord

Are you, by any chance, still there???

 I've never EVER had such a long hiatus from Laurelines, but I have had my reasons!  Life and work have been particularly meaningful, as you will see. Still, I hope never to have such a long lapse again. 

So that's the re-entry part. The smorgasbord part is that I'll only serve tidbits today, with separate posts on these topics to follow in the next days.

First and most important, is the fact of my daughter's giving birth a week ago to a beautiful baby boy named Miles. Longtime readers of this blog (if there are still some left) will know why this is a particularly joyful birth for our family. All births are important and to be cherished, it is true. But some births are anticipated with an intense prayerfulness and met with great gratitude and relief...and this was such a one.

Second on the menu of recent events is the appearance of several of my illustrations in the current issue of Walter Magazine, its first anniversary one! In fact, my watercolor portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh appears on the cover! There's also a full-page interview of yours truly and four other interior Laura Frankstone illustrations within the pages of the September issue! So, more to come on that subject!

 

And, finally, my painting show is to open a week from today. The work is based on my responses to Iceland. The pieces fall along the abstraction continuum (some more, some less), with lots of fire and ice motifs and with some indication, I hope, of the intense movement and energy of that majestic land.

Today is the first day of fall, my favorite season. It's a good day to celebrate completion, bounty, and fruition. Then we can clear the decks for what is to come... whatever it is, it will be fresh and exciting!

 

Are you still there, then? Happy turning of the seasons!

Bringing the far North closer

When my beautiful daughter Cecelia won a scholarship to live and go to high school in Germany at age 16 for a WHOLE YEAR (!!!) I missed her so desperately that I started painting paintings of her at all stages of her childhood. In a miraculous way, those paintings brought her back to me during the endless 12 months of separation.

In a similar way, the paintings and studies for paintings I'm making for my upcoming show bring Iceland and Norway back to me. The studies below are quick and gestural, drawn from sketches and from the images in my mind's eye.

 

The trick will be to make finished works that share some of the energy of these studies. If I could, I'd spend one whole year just making large scale study after study like the last one shown here, acrylic on board. I wouldn't worry about producing a certain number of finished pieces, I'd just paint my heart out. And at the end of the year, I'd see where I'd been. Maybe that will be what 2014 holds for me. We'll see. There's a still-fresh 2013 to live first!

2012 was important... and busy!

This has been a significant year. I've worked on several fronts, most art-related but not all directly involved with the making of art. 

It all began on January 2nd. A friend I saw at a party urged me to apply for a show at a great local venue. I was between galleries and so I thought, "Why not?"

In February, I made an illustration for The Morning News and fell hard for volcanoes as subject matter. I carried on with volcanoes as images for paintings and started a painting series as part of my application for a solo show.

 

So now, I'll be having a show fall of 2013! I'm a slow painter, so I'll need all that time to get the paintings done.

I had some illustration jobs to do, small and large. In addition to the volcano one for the Morning News, above, I designed the logo for a new literary prize that is launching in a few days. My friend Maxine Mills, a brilliant graphic designer, tweaked and fine-tuned. My reading pig looks very polished now, don't you think?

I illustrated the second edition of a local foodlovers' guide.

I curated the first group exhibition of Urban Sketchers, a brilliant idea proposed by Alice Southwick of the Ackland Museum Store in Chapel Hill, NC! My fellow Urban Sketcher correspondents were so generous in donating their work to this successful fundraising show.

I traveled a LOT in 2012. First was Rome in February to see two of our children and to sketch with Concetta Flore!

 

In late June, it was back to Italy again, this time for the wedding of a dear, old friend's son.

In October, compelled to visit the land of volcanoes again, my husband and I went back to Iceland.

Then, in early December, it as off to Vancouver for a brief celebration of our 21st wedding anniversary!

Putting it all together like this, I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for what WAS, clearly, a very important year. I'm reenergized and I'm ready to begin again! I thank you for sticking with me through a year of infrequent blog posts. Life, the blogging world, change...and we change with them. I'll be back with more in 2013! Happy New Year to every single one of you!

Sending you love! Laura

Iceland: last sketches

Much of what I made in Iceland were sketches designed to prime the pump in my painting studio once I returned... more private, more shorthand and oblique than my usual ones. But here are some that fall more into my normal scheme of things. 

The fields surrounding Hverfjell crater are basins of abstract shapes, curves and ovals. I saw dark chocolate with powdered sugar and caramel sauce, too, in the colors and textures there.

I wish I could post these two sections below of the one drawing and show them connected as they are in real life, so you could see the tiny islands scattered pell mell  through Breidafjordur.

Across from Budir bay on the Snaefellsnes peninsula are ridge after ridge of volcanic mountains, stretching as far as the eye can see.

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On the way to northern Iceland, I was sketching in the car, first a little snow flurry and then the snow came thicker and faster. My marks got more stacatto and urgent... all of a sudden, we were in a snowstorm. The car fishtailed. It was quite scary. We made it, obviously, but not without increased reverence for nature's power in Iceland.

The land forms swoop and slide, as below... when they don't jut and jab.

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The pen I used below had water-soluble ink, unbeknownst to me. Thus the grayish casts in the washes. Probably appropriate, all things considered.

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So now, I'm hatching plans for my NEXT trip to Iceland, wherein we will pay a visit to the south and east coasts. I've got glaciers on my mind!

Iceland: made it and back!

It was definitely touch and go, but we made it! And we loved it! We did almost crash our car in a sudden snowstorm, but, well, here I am, wiser than before about the power of that dramatic landscape. You underestimate it at your peril.

This trip, I drew quickly, quickly, as you have to to be able to capture all that energy that Iceland is always emitting, in one form or another.

 

 

If I squinted my eyes, I could pretend that these steam plumes and clouds were little volcanic eruptions. Not to make light of the the danger and power of volcanic eruptions, but you know me... I'm in a volcanic mode this year.

My husband and I scrambled to the top of Mt.Hverfjall, a crater of a volcano that last erupted 2500 years ago. It was, to say the obvious, awe-inspiring.

I made a very, very quick drawing of the land around Budir, on the Snaefellsnes peninsula. We fell in love with this area four years ago and we fell in love with it again this time. I have other sketches of this area to share.

And we visited again our favorite Icelandic café in Hellnar, where the world's best bread and the world's best fish soup are served in tiny quarters, tucked into a hill overlooking the sea.

Here is a sketch I did of this café four years ago, just for comparison.

More to come!

Iceland, interrupted.

I was on my way. I'd left my home airport and was at JFK, waiting to board my flight for Iceland. But wait, my passport.... it was gone. GONE. VERY gone.

I, a most meticulous and frequent traveler, obsessive about my passport, had lost it... and then someone must have picked it up and kept it.  I, along with my husband, airline, airport, and TSA employees at JFK AND my home airport looked everywhere. Gone.

SO. My husband and I drive to DC Monday for an appointment with the US Passport Agency where, I HOPE, they will give me a replacement one. Then we drive home.

Then, the very next day, we begin again our journey to Iceland. I have rebooked all hotels, flights, etc. exactly the way they were... just seven days later.

Cross your fingers all goes well this time!

This forced hiatus has allowed me to test drive some of the supplies I'd packed to take. I was very eager to try  a Strathmore sketchbook with toned gray paper, my new Stillman & Birns Delta sketchbook with heavy-duty cold pressed paper.. and to use again my old trusty favorite drawing tools from art school, Caran d'Ache watercolor crayons. I figure I'll be sketching fast and loose (even more than I usually do) and in inclement weather... so the crayons will be perfect for getting down tones, gestures, textures FAST. I'll use them with other drawing materials, too.

I made sketches from photographs and sketches from my last Iceland trip and from references I found on the internet...just to get the feel of Iceland again. Some of these remind me of my sketches of Norway, which makes complete sense.

Here are some I've done. It will be so interesting, don't you think, to see how the ones done on site will differ from these? These do have, of necessity, a slightly generic feel about them.