Laurelines

Woman at work, July-into-August

I've been quiet. The heat, not so bad the last two summers, is here with a big, fat thud. I am never my most effervescent self in this weather. Add to that the fact that this is the third summer in a row when I've had a late August, early September deadline for big projects. So I wait for cooler (and *cold) weather to be energized and extroverted, and I do my work.  

Magazine work:

I had a fun assignment for the summer issue of Charleston Style & Design, illustrating a lively essay (read it here) that didn't have a lot of visual content.  Well, there was a dead baby possum, but my editor and I agreed we'd leave that alone. A door hinge is the central image of the story, so here is my hinge!

 

Charleston Style & Design magazine, Summer 2015

Restaurant job:

In May, I accepted a job making illustrations and paintings for a new restaurant opening in Chicago this September. Along with some pen and ink work, I am to provide 7 paintings to illustrate key moments or motifs in the chef's life...  moments that led to her decision to open her own restaurant, after having been the executive chef at a four-star restaurant for several years. The seven moments/motifs are set out in stories that will be displayed with the paintings.

I love a challenge and this is one: the hotshot interior designers want the paintings done on vintage cutting boards! The boards have come from France, and Texas and the lord knows where. I've had to have the surfaces sanded and filled to be able to paint on them. Here are some of the boards in progress, along with some studies I made on regular gessoed boards to figure out palette and technique. This is not my usual kind of work (is it anyone's?), but the chef and her business partner are so nice and are great fans of my work and the featured cuisine is northern Italian. Could I say no? I could not.

Here are some boards and some studies, some things-in-progress. To give you a sense of scale, the large round board is 22" in diameter, the smaller round one is 16":

Here's a close up of a study for the painting which  will illustrate the chef's love for fishing in particular, and for nature in general:

Sketching classes at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University:

I'm going to teach classes on sketching at the museum for three Saturdays in September. I will tell more soon. I am SO excited about this and am full of ideas of things I want us to do! My approach will be different from the norm, but flexible enough to accommodate those who want and need more standard instruction.  I'm eager to get back to sketching myself. My effervescence is revving up, just thinking about this!

Travel to *cold places:

My husband and I are going to the Bavarian alps and to Munich and Salzburg with friends in December! The idea for this grew directly out of my trip to the Dolomites with the same friends last October. I need cold. I need mountains (my mountain paintings series have gone into pause mode for the summer and fall.) Going back to the Alps, as I learned while in the Dolomites, connects me with the happiest moments of my childhood. I haven't forgotten Scandinavia, though! It's on the 2016 To Do list! Effervescence, here I come!

 

I hope you are cool or warm, whatever works best in your hemisphere.  I'll be back soon with updates!

Around the World Blog Hop: My Turn

I want to thank my friend and fabulous artist Kris Wiltse of Whidbey Island, Washington for passing the Around the World Blog baton to me.  If you don't know her exquisite, multi-facted body of work, please check it out. You will be so happy you did.

Here's how this works.  A blogger answers four questions and then invites another blogger to answer the questions on their own blogs the following Monday.

Here are my questions and answers.

What am I working on?

 I'm in the beginning, exploratory stages of paintings with mountain imagery as a point of departure. I've written about this recently so I won't repeat myself too much, I hope. 

I have on paper, on board, and in my memory, images of mountains in Italy:

Mountains in Norway:

Mountains in Iceland:

 

I'm not sure how the new mountain pieces will go and what they want to be. We will find out in time. Of course, I have to go and see more mountains! I am a passionate traveler, always looking to get back to the Source. (Most any excuse will do ;D.)

Why do I create what I do?

The real subject of my work, and my reason for making it, is my deep response to the energy I feel everywhere around me. Call it the ch'i, the life force, the vibrations that, according to string theory, are the pulse and generator of the universe.

It is present in the landscape and it is present in and through human beings and other creatures:

 I foresee for this year at some point and as a complement to my mountain paintings, a return to my first love in art, the human figure. Somehow, some way. I'm seeing, with my mind's eye, loose portrait-ish pieces made by drawing with paint, incorporating some cut and torn paper and some pattern elements.  My recent illustration work using pattern and cut paper has fueled my imagination. 

How does my work differ from others in my genre?

I work in several ways, with different approaches, purposes, and different media. Maybe my  pronounced mutability is a key difference, though the other artists I most admire are seekers like me and their work is always evolving and varied, too. 

How does my creating process work?

I keep a deeply personal, introspective sketchbook journal in which I record ideas, images, as well as observations and facts. It is the wellspring for my work as well as a record of its progress. The work I care about emerges from this dialogue with my deep self.

In terms of the physical making of my imagery, I feel more and more as if I'm becoming a kind of human divining rod. I approach a subject or idea with an open and inquisitive heart and I wait to feel the energy that I know is there. That process, when I'm lucky, gives me a gestalt, a sense of the basic gesture and forms involved. Looking at the examples I've included here, you will agree with me that they are nothing if not gestural!

The materiality of my work gives me so much pleasure, too. Really, on some level, I paint and draw just so I can immerse myself in paint and ink and graphite, crayons and paper and gessobord.

I have asked my brilliant and multi-talented friend Beth Adams of Montreal, Canada to follow me in this blog hop. Beth is a publisher, writer, editor, graphic designer, painter, and printmaker. Her blog The Cassandra Pages is worth a long, long visit.  

From an island in Washington state to a college town in Piedmont North Carolina to the major city of Québec...we're hopping!

 

 

 

2015, the gift

It's early Sunday morning as I write this. The delicious, protracted hiatus of holidays and my January birthday is about to end and, oh, it's been a heavenly two weeks! I have loved (mostly) every second of it... the quiet (mostly), dark, pulling-in time of the year is my time.

For the first time in two years, I haven't had the sword of Damocles in the form of a big show hanging over my head as I start the year... and no small deadlines for now, either.   Just my beautiful new Paolo de Faveri Alpine wall calendar hanging in my studio to inspire me and one more day to get that studio ready for painting paintings.

This new year is a gift and I want to make sure I use it well and wisely. 

And it's clear to me that using it well will be to be mostly inner-directed in my work.

 I am full of excitement and very unformed ideas about how to respond to the places I have fallen in love with recently... the Scandinavian world, the alpine world. Oh, those Italian Dolomites that I loved for themselves but also for how they brought back the best of my childhood memories of time spent in the Swiss/French alps! There is a deep, pervasive energy in that northern world, a primal source for my life, that sets me vibrating like a divining rod.

Part of this inner direction will be... to let go and see where my heart takes me. When I was making paintings for my Iceland-inspired show year before last, I had as my mantra the Icelandic line, Hvert liggur thessi vegur?  Where, then, does this path lead? 

I had little idea of what sort of work would come out of my passion for Iceland and Norway and I accepted and ran with that unknowing.

Last year about this time, I wrote the post Cutting Up and Letting Go.   (In my ten years of blogging, I've made a habit each year of posting my intentions for the coming year.)  There I made the case for again running with the unknowing, for following my inner sign posts.  But it didn't quite happen. I had lots of deadlines and obligations.

In that post from last year, too, I talked about how much I love the materiality of my work, the textures, the shapes, the colors that can, if I do it right, appear on my paper and my gesso board.  They have a life of their own. It's my job to open my arms and catch them.

In addition to painting, I'll, of course, be drawing and sketching. Drawing has been a major part of who I am since I was 3 years old, if not before. 

So this year. Feeling more humble and grateful for the gift of another year, less breezy and complacent, I'm ready to run down that path, not knowing where it leads, but knowing I have to go there.

May 2015 take you where you want and need to go.

2014 in the rear-view mirror

If 2014 were a road trip, I'd be dizzy from the speed and velocity of it! Whoosh!

For the second year in a row, I've had a significant show of my work in the fall to work toward. In 2013, it was my Iceland-inspired paintings at the Horace Williams House. This past fall, it was work on a floral theme at the Ackland Museum Store, UNC-Chapel Hill. They were two very different shows, the 2013 one featured all paintings, the 2014 show included ink and wash and mixed media on paper pieces, among others.  And the pieces were too big to be scanned and I didn't have time to take good photos of them... whoosh!

 

Having deadlines is a powerful motivation, but I learned from these two shows not to say yes to another show unless I have over half the pieces already finished when I agree to show! (Yikes! and pass the ibuprofen!) Still, the show went really well and I loved working with my fellow exhibitor and friend Ippy Patterson and my buddies at the Ackland Museum Store.

2014 brought more illustration work for me, including images for Walter Magazine, Charleston Style & Design and Chapel Hill Magazine. Other clients this year were The Nature Conservancy and Edible Hudson Valley.

Fireflies for Charleston Style & Design.

Person Street illustrations for Walter Magazine.

Blue crabs for Edible Hudson Valley.

Continuing on the art front... my work appeared in an excellent new book on drawing by Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark blog fame.  Her book Drawing 365 is now available here in the US and will be released in the UK and worldwide in January. This is a book you will want to own if you have any interest in drawing. It's hands down one of the most informative and useful of this popular genre.  Here's a small peek at one of my contributions to it... a blind contour drawing, demonstrating one of the 365 drawing tips Katherine writes about:

I travelled a lot in 2014, but since this is already sounding like one of those annoying Christmas letters, I'll mention only the trip that relates directly to my art career, my October trip to Italy. I had the great fortune to have been invited to Rimini, Italy for a conference organized by the Italian tourism industry, one designed to connect people whose passion is travel with people whose business is travel, to see what kind of synergy might result. My years of travel writing and sketching on my blog led to my being chosen to participate in this exciting new conference, now in its second year.

It was exciting, fascinating, informative and fun. I learned so much about the travel industry and about the power of social media and about what it is I do as a blogger and why I do it. I met many lovely people from all over the world.

I will be forever grateful for the organizers of TBDI 2014 for having given me this opportunity.

While in Italy, I fell in love with the Dolomites

and they, along with my passion for the mountains of Norway and the rugged topography of Iceland, have filled me with ideas for new paintings... some kind of response, I know not yet what, to this mountain splendor and energy. More about this in my 2015: A Plan, to be published in the next couple of days.

Finally, on December 20th, I led a sketching session at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. This was a kind of reaching out and giving back as an artist that I have done very little of,  but I so enjoyed that I am eager to do more, more, more!  I had a fabulous group of sketchers, almost all beginners, and they reported having benefited a lot from my talk and our working together. It was such fun and very rewarding!

So, I think that covers it... though I can't be sure, dizzy as I still am from all the 2014 action! 

I have many thoughts about what is to come and will share those, as I said, in the next few days.

Happy 2015 to you, dear readers. I hope 2014 has been kind to you. Thank you for sharing this journey, many of you, year after year. I am so very grateful for your interest and support.

Italy sketches, October 2014, part 2

I call this post Italy sketches, part 2, because I didn't want to use the adjectives 'last' or 'final.'

 I am now so thoroughly in love with Italy that I'm superstitious about using such words. I will be back. Italy calls me.

Still, here we are... for now.  A few representative sketches from my last, my final days ON THIS TRIP.

How, again, to render the Dolomites in a small sketchbook? It's a tough one. Here's the best I could do... just the energy, lines, subtle colors, and basic textures. 

Here is the double spread from that day in the Dolomites. I have Photoshopped out the big wire rings from my sketchbook and joined the two pages as best I could.

Can you believe this...those jagged peaks were once coral reefs at the bottom of a sea! This was in the Miocene epoch, 20+ million years ago. I remember it as though it were yesterday.

Enlargement of righthand side of spread:

My friends and I spent one glorious night in a hotel above Cortina. At the bar we drank our favorite aperitifs and I caught a moment on paper of the mother of the family who runs the place. She was looking a bit tired after a long day of dealing with guests.

 

After our trip to the Dolomites, my friends and I returned to their lovely home overlooking the Val Liona. Sitting on their terrace, I sketched Penelope's peach tree, edged by a bed of lavender, with the valley and Eugenean hills as backdrops:

And then it was one last round of coffees together before they drove me to the train station in Vicenza:

 

I miss Penelope and Michael, and I miss Italy. I'll be back sooner rather than later, that I promise.

(Oops, here's a sketch I forgot to include yesterday, the icing on the cake, as it were!)

Italy sketches, first batch: TBDI 2014 conference and more!

At the wonderful TBD Italy conference in Rimini week before last, I had little time to sketch! Our days were busy from 8am to bedtime! But I managed a few drawings, mostly made during talks, and here they are.

Backs of heads, fronts of heads,  people sitting,  earnest speakers making important points and opining!

And, oh, yes... profiles!

There were dozens of indoor and outdoor booths. Here's one of the latter, drawn while I was waiting for my buddies to meet me for lunch:

You can see I ended up using mostly pen and wash at the conference. One brush pen sketch I made was a bust, so I ditched it for the rest of the trip. I was busy and I had to make each sketching minute count!

I have more sketches from the second part of the trip... mountains and food, mostly. To try to capture the magnificence of the majestic Dolomite mountains in a tiny 4" x 6" sketchbook was daunting, to say the least.

More about this next time and more sketches, too.

Here's a sample, though. Quick and loose, Cretacolor oil pencil and wash: the view above Vipiteno, the northernmost town in Italy. 

I fell in love, love, love with the Italian Alps. They brought back beautiful memories of childhood trips to the Swiss and French Alps... they are the same and they are very different. Ahhh.

I am deeply grateful to the organizers and sponsors of TBD Italy 2104 for hosting me! I met so many charming people who are now new friends and I learned so much about the travel industry in Italy and beyond. I became clearer about what it is I do as a blogger and why. It was a priceless experience in very many ways. 

Art supplies for Italy, that age-old question

It's the eternal question for us traveling artists. Which art supplies to take? On my upcoming trip to Italy to attend the TBDI 2014, I'll be taking only a carry-on bag, so the lack of space makes the question even more agonizing. 

I am usually a quick decider, but on this question, I waffle with the worst of them.

 The truth of this hit me hard recently as I was choosing some of my sketches to be published in Cathy Johnson's upcoming book, provisionally titled, "Sketching on the Spot.'  The first decision, then as now, boiled down to which would be the default sketching tool: pens or pencils?

I most often sketch with pens, such as my Pentel Pocket brush pen, which feels like an extension of my fingertips. Being a painter, I love the brushiness of those lines. They do robust, they do atmospheric, they play well with color or on their own. 

Bouziès, France

 

Copenhagen, Denmark
 

Bergen, Norway

Other times I want a crisp line, so I use a fine-tipped pen like the Ecco Pigment pen... again, with or without color:

 

Fontaine de l'Observatoire, Paris

But lately, my heart is leading me back to pencil, that most sensuous of drawing tools. There is NOTHING like the skidmarks, the fractured trails of a big, fat, soft pencil on good paper. With or without color added.

 

 

 Brittany, Presqu'ile de Rhuys

 

Middleton Place, Charleston, SC  Northern Norway

And then there is the matter of the which and the how of taking watercolors! I think this time, I'll take a few squeezed-out blobs from my paint tubes in a very lightweight plastic travel palette.

So here's the plan for now: two pens (one brush pen, one hard tip), a couple of pencils, limited watercolors and, if I have space, 4 or 5 watercolor crayons. And did I mention which sketchbook to take? I did not. That's a thought, alas, for another day. My decider synapses, now exhausted, have taken to their beds.

Italy, here I come... again!

In the midst of trying to get everything ready for my art show (it opened last Saturday! See below), I found an email in my inbox inviting me to come to Rimini, Italy this October to participate in a three-day conference sponsored by TTG Italia, designed to connect people passionate about travel (in particular bloggers who tell their travel stories and influence others with their enthusiasm and trip narratives) with the people in Italy whose business is travel.

The conference organizers appointed four specialists in the field of fashion, food and wine, culture, and travel to  choose the 'top 100 bloggers' from around the world in these fields and offer to pay their way to come and participate. My group is the Culture one and I'm the only practicing artist in that group, though there are lots of visual arts, architecture, and museum devotées/specialists as well as photographers, to mention a few.

It is SO exciting! Our Culture Cluster, as it is called, is already getting to know each other through our group on Facebook and we have the most delightful leader in Lorenzo Bonoldi, art historian of Mantua!

 I have two other trips slated for this fall, one back to Portland (to be with my daughter while she is having non-emergency surgery) and one to Santa Fe in November. So, as usual, I'm on the go!

My art opening was thrilling and gratifying.  LOTS of people came, in spite of the fact that it was Labor Day weekend, and a football Saturday (thus no parking) here in Chapel Hill. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who came.

 

Here are some peeks, before the opening and during! 

 This is very early in the opening, with Ippy Patterson on the left, with the writer Elizabeth Spencer, and me on the right talking to my friend Karen.