Laurelines

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. 

 

BLOG UPDATE: I have a new way to subscribe to my blog! All the old subscriptions have been transferred to follow it, the new service. If you have not subscribed before, and would like to, follow the directions in the upper right corner of the page!

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!

New/old house, new garden, new studio-to-be, new life!

I have felt more or less stuck in amber since my leg injury in February. It has been a challenging time.  Since March, of course, we've all been in a stuck-in-amberish situation with the Covid 19 pandemic. 

But now, big new life changes are in the offing and I have shaken my torpor of these last months!

I have mentioned here that my husband and I plan to downsize and leave the beautiful house and garden that we designed and built for our blended family 26 years ago. We have loved it, but it was time for a change.

We have now found our new dream house for the next phase of our lives and it's all a surprise to us!  I did not imagine we'd live in Hillsborough, much as we love it, and much as we love our many friends who live there! But since nothing had come up in the areas we targeted for house-searching, we added Hillsborough to the search parameters. Within two days, this house came on the market. We went to see it and that very night, we put in an offer for it. Our offer was accepted. There is work to be done on the house, so it will be about eight weeks after closing that we will move in. 

Let me show you something of the new place!

This is the Burkett Jones House, aka the Simon B Jones House, built in 1850 or 1860 or 1880.... sources vary in dating the house, though most say 1850 or 1860. 

A farmhouse from Smithfield, NC, it was moved in 1997 to its present location, about 30 minutes from our house in Chapel Hill, to escape demolition at the expansion of the Smithfield airport. 

I love the emerald green lawn, typical of houses in the area, but I will switch to organic maintenance methods as soon as I can. I LOVE the fact that the house has vast open sky, with a perimeter of mature trees. Soon I can stargaze to my heart's content, simply by stepping outside and looking up!

Above is a closer look at the front of the house. And below is the front porch.

The area I will establish for the main garden in is a narrowish strip stretching from the back of the house to the property line, bordered on the eastern side by deer fencing and mixed shrubs and trees. I have lots of ideas for plantings, as you can imagine!

Below you also see the two-car garage that will be made into my studio! I am ecstatic! I have never had a full-sized studio. Now I can make big paintings, I can hold workshops, I can be free in my movements!

Below are raised beds made by the current owners, along the northern edge of the lawn. I will eliminate those to have that space for my new design.

Below, we are standing at the northern edge of the property, looking back to the house, with the garage/studio to the right. 

A two-story log cabin, seen below, is on the western edge of the 1.4 acre property. 

If I were a writer instead of a painter, I'd have my workspace already, as you can see above!

With this move, I can return to an idea I'd had a couple of years ago, to make paint out of soil in the places I love.  Unfortunately, I was not able to fully realize this at the time, because the places I love were/are northern Norway, Wales, Alaska... hard to collect soil in large quantities, absent a long stay in one place.

The painting below is a study I made on corrugated cardboard, using paint made of Chatham County soil, acrylic paint and medium. This will be a point of departure for a new series I have in mind, using soil from Johnston County, where our new house was built, as well as soil from Orange County, where our new house now is.

Analogous to my desire to use mostly native plants in the garden, is my interest in drawing and painting with local, natural materials in some of my work, such as here below. I drew with charcoal made of burnt blueberry bush from a fire pit and two kinds of pigments made from different soils, both collected at the Alamance County farm of two good friends.

Below is a sketch I made using soil found near St Non's Well near St Davids, Pembrokeshire, Wales and the juice of blackberries growing on a hedge nearby.

I'm eager to know as much as I can about the history of our new place, so David and I will drive east to visit Johnston County Heritage Center next week. We will ask the researchers there to help us discover who exactly built the house and who lived there over the 170 years following.  In my own research, I have learned where the Burkett Jones family cemetery is and I want to go and pay my respects to these intrepid 19th-century North Carolinians, whose home an improbable, gadabout, traveling eurocentric 21st century couple will claim as their own.  I will take a bucket and trowel and hope to get permission to dig up soil on the property, now near the airport, where my house lived for most of its life. I want to make of this an art piece to honor our predecessors in the house.

I will post what I learn about the house in the next installment of the story of our new life. 

I'd love to have your company.

 

In Print and at the Nasher: My Colorful World

We left North Wales a week ago today and I am still under the spell of that gorgeous, compelling landscape. Before I post the drawings and sketches I made there, I have a few other things to share. 

In September, I had the great pleasure and honor to be asked to provide illustrations for the menu card of an event celebrating Chef Bill Smith of Crooks' Corner Café. In addition to his wildly successful career as a chef, Bill Smith is universally loved and admired for his kind nature and for a lifetime of good deeds.  I thought at first the assignment was to provide food illustrations, so it seemed an easy one to accept and I did. Quickly, I learned that the job required a portrait of the chef himself!  Not only is he famous, so if I got him wrong, it would be glaringly apparent to lots of people, but Bill's a friend of mine, too. No pressure there ;D.

After dozens of drafts, I got him! I did!  And I used my Magic Pencil, which gave me color subtly, but unmistakeably. It was just right. For the card's border, I painted loose watercolor versions of honeysuckle blossoms and leaves, in honor of honeysuckle sorbet, one of our chef's signature dishes. This made a garland that would frame the portrait without overwhelming it.   

Here's the original illustration:

And here's the final product:

 

A few days ago, an essay I wrote and illustrated on the topic of my garden was published in the Fall 2017 issue of Charleston Style & Design Magazine. I chose a simplified ink and watercolor wash method for this assignment, to match the lighthearted tone of the essay itself. Here are some of the originals:

This is the main illustration of my garden, showing my boxwood topiaries and their allium companions:

And here is one of the garden vignettes. The shapes and sizes and layout of the page where these appear imposed lots of challenges for me! You can see them all and also read my essay by clicking on this link!

Finally, in preparation for a 3-session drawing series I'm teaching at Duke University's Nasher Museum in November, here are a couple of prep sketches I made showing the loosely structured, gestural approach I use.  We will focus on and engage with the important Carlo Dolci exhibit now on view at the Nasher. We will draw from live models for half of each two-hour session and spend our other hour in the galleries, drawing from the figures in the Dolci paintings. My approach will be non-dogmatic, non-academic, lively, fun, and, I think, very rewarding!  Come join us if you can!! Here's a link with all the info you need to sign up.

Please come back next week and see what happened in North Wales! See you soon!

My Places Project part 1: Beginner's Mind

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."  from Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice.

 

For my Places Project, I'm choosing locations that, for all sorts of reasons, send my heart reeling. Alaska, Wales, and Bavaria are on the horizon in the coming months. I'm sticking closer to home for now. 

For this work, I'm adopting Beginner's Mind, reaching back to the four-year-old Laura with her box of unlimited possibilities, aka the 48 crayons. I want her spontaneous response to her surroundings, a response unfettered by the history of stylistic shticks and tricks that any artist working for a while has. Shorthand techniques are useful, but rely on them too much and your art becomes inert. Inert is the opposite of what I want my work to be.

My first numinous place is Peregrine Farm, in Alamance County, about 30 minutes from my house.  This is land owned by friends of ours, Alex and Betsy Hitt, who have farmed it for 35 years.  Their place exerts a pull you'd have to call spiritual. Here there is natural and human-made beauty, order, and, though it's a mightily productive farm, here there is peace. 

The things Alex and Betsy grow are of a rare quality, both in taste and in appearance. Terroir is at work here. It is a concept usually applied to wine, but I think it explains so much about anything alive and issuing from the earth.  

noun ter·roir \ˌter-ˈwär\

1. :  the combination of factors including soil, climate, and sunlight that gives [....] distinctive character

 

I want to embody (literally!) in my art this phenomenon of terroir, a distant country cousin to the ch'i, and to do so, I start with la terre itself, the soil.

Soil is our everyday experience of our earth, whether we are just trodding on it or working it for a purpose.  This spring I have been digging soil, collecting rocks, and making my own paint out of that very earth where the Peregrine lettuce and the flowers and the peppers grow.

This is my first time making  paint and I feel like a magician.

 I am bowled over by the granulation of my paints made from the earth! I could make them more refined, but then I would lose what I love most... a sense of the paint's/soil's essential nature and energy. 

  

 Soil into paint is just the beginning. I'm also making drawing tools and materials out of found objects, like the incidentally formed charcoal Alex led me to in his 35-year-old burned brush pile.

Here is a sketch of Big Branch, a tributary of the Haw River that provides one of Peregrine Farm's boundary lines. Sitting on a large rock in the middle of the creek, I drew with a piece of burned blueberry bush from Alex's ash pile. Later, I will make ink out of some of those ashes and I will draw with it, too. 

More blueberry bush charcoal put to work:

In keeping with the many possibilities of Beginner's Mind, I am branching out in lots of directions. In early May, I made use of rainwater I collected and the sun to produce my own images of Betsy's gorgeous anemones:

Mixed media: watercolor and rainwater:

Cyanotype: sun and anemones:

I'm at the beginning of Beginner's Mind, on this Places path. I'm where I need to be.

 

I'll be back soon with more images from Peregrine Farm and some thoughts about origins. Happy June to you!

In print, recent past and near future!

An update on the recent illustration front. I did 8 sketches for an article on Saxapahaw, NC for Walter Magazine for their May issue. Saxapahaw is a happening little town, about an hour's drive from Raleigh. Here you will find great natural beauty, music, art and craft, delish food, and lovely people.

Here are some images from that article. Click on link above for full text. All 8 illustrations appear in the print version, but not online.

 

 

My oyster illustration appeared in the Florida Weekly/Charlotte edition newspaper on April 24, 2014, on behalf of The Nature Conservancy, as part of their Coastal Awareness campaign. 

 

And today, I start a new assignment for the August issue of Walter, having this week finished one for the upcoming issue of Charleston Style & Design, a new client. I'll share these after they are published.  

Now to paint!