Laurelines

This artist's house: art now! garden later*!

We are in our second spring here and the house and garden are firmly ours. There's been the typical settling in and tweaking, furniture moving (and moving again), repainting some rooms whose first color didn't work, adding and taking away this and that.  Most importantly, we have artwork given or otherwise acquired especially by us for this house from some of our dearest friends, along with new work from me. And the garden is filling out exuberantly. God willing, we'll have many more years here to add to the story.

Here's a selection of recently acquired artwork currently hanging on our walls.

My recent painting, one in a series with the linear shape of our house as the point of departure. This one is called. "House: Garden." Pretty inventive title, eh? 18" x 30", acrylic on board.

This is "Carpel" by brilliant friend and fellow Hillsboroughan Robbin Gourley. The impressive gorgeousness of this photograph (48" x 32") has transformed the dining room, if not the whole house. You can see for yourself why. I even repainted in dark gray the large mantelpiece in the dining room to provide a response to the dramatic tones of this sublime piece. 

A centerpiece of the whole house is "Swimming Pool" by another brilliant friend (all my friends are brilliant, aren't yours?) and renowned photographer Elizabeth Matheson. I first saw a monumental print of this luminous image at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke years ago. My print is 24" x 24," smaller than the Nasher one, but it has a big voice.

The fabulous, and I believe untitled piece, above is one of a series of copper and calligraphic pieces made by my mad genius (aka brilliant) friend Roger Haile a few years ago. He knew I had lusted after it long ago and for my recent birthday, much to my  jawdropping and all unawares self, gave it to me, all wrapped up! It's copper, enamel, and ink,  24" x 24."

Finally, here is a stunning drawing by our (brilliant) science-publisher-turned-artist-at- age-83 friend and Hillsboroughan Neil Patterson. The title is "Octo," celebrating his now 88 years.  24" x24."

*Garden later. I have run out of space, so next time I will share this artist's garden with you. It's come a long way since you saw it last.

Finally, a shot of my studio with work in progress, another in the house series, on easel. For context.

More to come!

2022: Begin Again

Another year of disruption and acute distress for our world in so many ways. I look to this new year for a fresh start in my own world and a return to work and themes.  

I've spent a lot of the year outside of the studio, due to family obligations...

 

...obligations I entered into voluntarily and with deep love.  We thought the remote schooling process would be over in June, at the end of the school year, 

and it was, but a resurgence of Covid meant I was needed again this school year, with a different and greater time commitment.

My passion to make sure our new old home was ready for us, was beautiful, was a true reflection of who we are, has grabbed me with tsunami-like energy and has taken most of the time I had left over from child responsibilities.

. 

My house and my garden (see preceding post)  were my major artworks for the year.

But in these days after Christmas, I've cleaned and reorganized my studio. It and I are ready. I have several different series going on and I don't know where I'll go with them,  

but I'll find out. I also want to make another 12' long concertina book of the second year of my garden and I wouldn't mind making more portraits of the kind I did of the original owners of our 1860s house:

I continue with my red clay painting studies:

 

I have poured every single thing I have this year into family, house, garden, and regaining of health. 

It's time to pour every single thing I have into my work. Begin again. There's no end to the beginnings.

Let us join together in a fervent wish for the health of our planet, its people, ourselves and our loved ones, and for a world in which virtue and truth are once more the standards we strive to uphold. 

Happy 2022.

The story unfolds at last: my garden book finished!

Phase two* of my art projects relating to my new home, my new garden, my new life is finished! Using a Seawhite of Brighton concertina sketchbook, as I love to do, I painted, drew, collaged a narrative of images from May to October. Starting with my grapevine in spring and ending with the same grapevine in fall, I chose highlights of the garden to include in the record, and with each spread, I chose whatever method and media I felt like . The result is 12', unfolded, of colors, shapes, movements, textures, and, since it is a pollinator garden, a few bugs and birds hover here and there.

 

The clip above was made in dim light and the resolution is not great, but you get an idea of the whole. Below are shots of half of the book unfolded in sunlight, in the very garden the book was made from and for. Below that are double spreads of a few key images,  scanned to give a more accurate idea of the colors.

 

For years, I have loved accordion books to record travel images as well as my Caledonian Orogeny drawings made on site in Wales and Norway.  Open these books up, and you find the very format for a story, moving from left to right. My blog's name is a clue to my love of the storyline, both visual and verbal, and these books give me a perfect springboard.

Here is one more example of my use of this format, my first record of the Caledonian Orogeny project, made on Whitesands Bay near St Davids, Wales, in 2017. Here you get a better sense of the spread, although this one is not completely extended either. It's hard to find a 12' long surface! 

Now I can move to phase 3 of my new house and garden art project: paintings made with pigment from the red clay soil we live on here and/or new pieces working with house and memory imagery.  I have started several of these and am eager to get back to them, now that the garden book is done!

 

*Phase one was the pair of portraits I made of the original owners of this 160 year-old house. 

 

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SO much to share after a too long hiatus! New work, new garden, new life!

These past months have raced by. I am aghast that so much time has elapsed since I last posted. I have three ways to explain what's been taking ALL my time:ongoing repairs and renovation, helping with first grade remote schooling, creation of my new garden obsession!  But life should be freer for me now, so here we go!

Here is work directly related to my new house and my projects related to living in this area. 

A quick background recap from my earlier post:

The one-story farmhouse was built in the 1860s in Smithfield, NC, by Burkett Jones, a cotton farmer and entrepreneur, an exConfederate soldier, who had been injured early in the war and sent home. The structure was moved to its present site in Hillsborough in 1997 to prevent its demolition at the expansion of the Smithfield airport.

Since the house's story is now part of mine, I want to weave its history into my art life.

I have several lines of work within this general subject and I hope now to be able to begin work on all of them.

First, the portraits of the original owners of my new old house, Burkett and Mary Ann Jones. Acrylic on board, 16" x16". I worked from a blurry many-times copied photo so felt quite free to simplify their images, paring them down to what I felt to be their essences. I will hang these over a doorway in my kitchen where they will preside over a long interior vista from back to front of house:

 

Second, one of very few drawings (to this point!) of my surroundings. I SO look forward to getting back to this! Reed pen and ink sketch of the view from my studio window on a cold February afternoon.

Next a couple of studies done in my ongoing project to make paint from our red clay soil. I have not had a chance to take up this strand again but will do so very soon. I truly have no idea where these will lead, which is fun. My life, as I said, should be freer!

 

Finally, a series of photos showing my garden's progress from the early bare days to the present. I struggled to keep this concise! Ish. ;D. I have hundreds of photos of the garden already!

Here are two shots from early October:

  

And here are recent ones:

This does not look like a garden of only a few months, does it? The topsoil I had delivered and tilled into the red clay was obviously what the garden wanted! I consider this garden a full-fledged member or my art life.

More to come and I am so happy to know that!!

Happy summer to those in this hemisphere and happy fall to our southern hemispheric friends!

Atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere: why I love toned paper

 

Yesterday, I posted on instagram a sketch I made of a still life in our new/old house on that cold, rainy afternoon. I made this on a Stillman and Birn gray Nova sketchbook, using colored pencils and other assorted materials.

This sketch took me right back to another interior still life I made at the house of dear friends four years ago at just this time of year. Atmosphere!

 

These started me looking back at the many drawings and sketches and some paintings I've made on toned paper for many years. 

Gray and tan paper automatically provide a lovely mid tone to give lines and colors a soaring start in life. This has many advantages. For a traveler like me, who takes only a carryon suitcase even on long international trips, I can pack a few pens, crayons, pencils and still have the range and flexibility I want.

Crucially for me, this paper guarantees the kind of atmospheric work I strive for.  And since I love to travel to, shall we say, atmospheric places like Norway, Wales, and Iceland, quite often in atmospheric seasons like winter, it is perfect for the task.

I have used three kinds of toned paper over the years: kraft paper, pastel paper (very rarely), and both Strathmore and Stillman and Birn toned paper in sketchbooks.

When I went to Alaska for an art residency a few years ago, I took along some high quality kraft paper to use for landscape studies. The ability to make atmospheric drawings with an economy of means was critical. Here are two of many from that project:

Toned paper has traditionally been used for pastel drawings/paintings. I'm not a pastelist, but I have used it occasionally, for my own purpose. Here I've used watercolor on pastel paper. The toothed softness of the paper gives the watercolors a texture boost and the bright colors against the gray/tan paper come to life.

Finally, I have so many of the above-mentioned atmospheric travel sketches to show you that I'll have to sit on my hands and just pick a few. Before there was Stillman and Birns toned sketchbooks, there were Strathmore ones and I used them plenty. Below are examples from both brands.

If you've seen this blog before, you've seen scores of my cold weather outdoor atmospherics on toned paper, so I won't repeat them, but here's a link to work from a recent December trip to Norway.

 

Atmospheric indoor scene at a Norwegian café in December:

Woman waiting at the Vienna train station on another chilly December day:

Blue jellyfish washed ashore in Abersoch, Wales. I adored how the cool colors and degrees of opacity behaved on the warmish gray Stillman and Birn paper!

New Year's Eve warmth and light in our seaside cottage on Whitesands Bay, Pembrokeshire, two years ago:

Hot chocolate helped ward off the cold at an outdoor market in Vancouver a while back in a Strathmore sketchbook:

I'm now sitting on my hands. Enough atmospherics! I do have other uses for toned paper, particularly in the making of expressive drawings and museum drawings!  Let that be a story for another day.  

New house, new studio, new work, and a new poem from a friend

 

As I've written here before, I'm researching the history of our new house and its people.

A quick background recap:

The one-story farmhouse was built in the 1860s in Smithfield, NC, by Burkett Jones, a cotton farmer and entrepreneur, an exConfederate soldier, who had been injured early in the war and sent home. The structure was moved to its present site in Hillsborough in 1997 to prevent its demolition at the expansion of the Smithfield airport.

Since the house's story is now part of mine, I want to weave its history into my art life. First steps in this process have been making loose portrait drawings of the original owners, drawing a cotton plant from life, collecting red clay soil to turn into paint for use in the coming weeks.  Below are a couple of early examples.

Cotton bolls and stems bought at the state farmers market. Acrylic, ink, soft pastel on paper.

Drawing from a copy of a copy of a copy of an original photograph of Burkett and Mary Ann Jones, provided by the Johnston County Heritage Center in Smithfield. No doubt these faces will appear again in different format and media. Graphite, water-soluble crayon, and soft pastel on toned paper.

Recently, Rachel Victoria Mills, a local poet and a new friend, as yet unmet in person due to Covid restrictions, saw on Instagram my image of cotton above, and, in her words, "the fields opened up", and, after a long period of quiet, a new poem emerged. 

Here are Rachel's own words as they appeared in a recent blog post of hers:

On the nowhere road between home and office, those 18 years I lived in the Eastern part of the state, this time of year the fields flatten and turn to short-haired flax, much like the farmers driving their loads along the highway next to me.   Along the road, the cotton workers go about their work, hatted and gloved, darker and more serious as they gather the seed-specked balls in combine-waves across the landscape.  Trip by trip, I must have absorbed that common scene until years later it has impressed itself indelibly in memory.

But it is Laura Frankstone's Instagram photo of her painting, yesterday's "warm-up" (as she calls it), which brings that vision back to me.

 

Cotton, in its various envisionings, has been a sort of opening of the field, to borrow Robert Duncan's phrase. Laura has been writing about the slow work of getting back to art after a long time of personal trials and removals, and her days finally in her new studio,"warming up" again to the field of making.  Whether, like her, there is now a new, big bright space to work in, or like me at this small table before a window which looks out, just as brightly, to garden beauty, insights come from all the windows we look out of.

 

I feel happy and deeply moved by Rachel's response. Who knows what will prick the creative spirit and when? As for me, I have light and color, rich stories, new energy, and lovely new studio windows to look out of. 

Colors! It is not only red clay that is warming up my world. Christmas flowers in the new place have thrilled me. Ink and wash on paper:

Quick sketch of flowers I'm adding to my new garden. I will document this new creation of mine in the next blog post. Ink and watercolor wash.

 

And last, a glimpse of my beautiful new studio, until recently a two-car garage. In 2021, may you, too, have new windows to look out of and opening creative fields.

Happy new year!

Here. In the new/old house, with before and after photos.

 After a wrenching several months, we are here, in our 160-year-old house. Our renovations are mostly done, with the art studio last to the finish line (and still not quite there.)

The meaning of a house with deep history like this one has seized my imagination, turbo-charged as it has been by 'Here,' a sublime, a peerless, a brilliant book by Richard McGuire (2014, Pantheon Graphic Books), with its illustrations of the same house, mostly the same room, the same land, over hundreds, even thousands of years. I bought 'Here' the year it was published, little knowing the importance it would have in my life. I now see the wainscoting, the fireplaces, the 12' high planked ceilings and heart pine floors of MY 'here'  through McGuire's kaleidoscopic vision and imagery, two examples of which follow:

Note the years the images derive from are noted in these McGuire spreads:

So now, here, our narrative, with some before and after photos. The before photos come from the MLS listing, our introduction to the house that was to be ours.  Those photos show a very handsome house, well-loved, well cared for, but not one, I admit, I felt particularly attracted to. It didn't seem us. Our old house, designed and built by my husband and me, was spacious, with many windows, lots of light, and perfect traffic flow, all things that mattered greatly to us, and not qualities I saw in the photos of the listed house

My friend and real estate agent, along with two of our daughters and my longtime best buddy, however, urged me to see the potential in the house.  "You have to buy it," said my hitherto-skeptical daughter, minutes after actually crossing the house's threshold. "It will be our new family home!" said her sister, who had felt the loss of our old house very acutely. "It will look totally different with your furniture and artwork! You will love it!" said our agent.

So, thus persuaded, we leapt. And here is the beginning of this new chapter in the house's life, and ours.

BEFORE, the living room: 

AFTER, our living room:

BEFORE, the hallway:

AFTER, our hallway:

BEFORE, the dining room:

AFTER, our dining room, still very much in progress:

 

BEFORE,  the family room:

AFTER, our family room:

 

I can imagine the stunned bewilderment the original owners of this house, a mid 19th-century farmhouse from Smithfield, NC, would feel were they able to see it now. French furniture?  Modern art? Shocking pink chairs? But the glory of this house, this beautiful house the Jones family built all those years ago, is how generous it is. It has opened its arms to us... I do feel that.

We are not finished with our changes. I have more rooms to show you. I have the garden transformation to document. I have my studio just on the cusp of being a useable work space and I canNOT wait for that.

Now that I am fully ambulatory again, I'll go back to Smithfield to collect soil, that deep red clay, to make paint from. I have images of the original family to explore. I'm not sure how this house will make itself seen in my work, but it will. It will.

I am out of the woods now, recovered from my leg injury. I've rolled up my sleeves and I'm ready to work. See you soon!