Laurelines

February again, on several fronts

There's the fall show front, here represented by a color, texture, and composition study of hyacinths made in my ever-present portable studio, also known as my Stillman & Birns Alpha Series 8 1/2 x 11 sketchbook. This is the fun part! Who knows what relationship the final pieces will have to these studies. We will all find out in time. Oh, and that's a sweet gum ball at the bottom of the page. More fun with textures!

There's the illustration front. This is a portrait of Zach Clayton, a columnist for Walter Magazine, making his debut in the current issue (February 2014.)  He was easy to do. He has lots of facial architecture, unlike some of my other subjects. Do you sense a smidge of frustration in that last phrase? Clever you.

 

 

 

The last two are images from my personal drawing/painting front, a project I started earlier this month. It's a long story, that one, and I'll tell it soon.

 

 

 

 

Four from February

February finds me a little scattered. I'm trying to simplify means and method and media in sketching. Here I had to work quickly (which is, after all, what sketching IS) because baby Miles was sure to wake up any minute. I've used two Pitt Artist pens,  a smidge of watercolor, and a fountain pen. Would love to pare down my sketching gear, for now, to these three basics.

No surprise, I'm back to drawing on my toned Strathmore paper. It's addictive. I first used it 2 or 3 years ago and I've been in love with it since. Below is my tabletop, a view the day after a Norwegian meal I prepared: 

Below: two of many drawings on various subjects in a series. Could I get any vaguer than that description if I tried? 

And I've got to get started seriously on my work (both paintings and drawings) for the upcoming fall show! The theme is plants: mostly flowers, but some trees, etc. I have to figure out a way to produce pieces that are personal and powerful. Otherwise, there's no point ;D.

2014, cutting up and letting go

Two things I learned last year in the studio:

Thing One:

    I am in love with texture, shapes, color... the materiality of my stuff. Seeing brushmarks on board or paper makes me giddy with delight, euphoric. That, and the drive to respond to the chi, the energy that is in and through all things, are the reasons why I paint and draw. It comes to that.

Thing Two:

When I follow my inner prompts, I go places. I know now to stay tuned.... and move aside... when I hear the call of the (inner) wild.

So, having learned all of that:

I'm going to spend the rest of this month playing with paint on big sheets of paper... making all kinds of marks and textures and shapes on page after page.

This will loosen me up and make me happy. The sheets of paper will be used--- maybe, maybe not, who knows how--- as elements in future paintings and illustrations.

See! Look what happened just this morning as I was cleaning up my studio! While filing away old sheets of paper on which I tested colors last year, I really looked at their surfaces for the first time. And picked up my scissors and started cutting. Birds happened. (The big one is maybe 12" across.) A whale happened.

So, cutting up (which also means, in American English, to act in a silly and/or noisy way) and letting go.

Letting go of my need to control. Letting go of foregone conclusions. Is there any art more boring than the same stuff cranked out year after year, where the artist knows exactly what the piece is going to be at the outset? Ugh. 

Of course, I haven't abandoned all need for structure. I'm just minimizing it in my art life.

With another painting show slated for next fall and with, I hope, continued illustration assignments this year, there'll be enough structure in my work days.

Of course, my thinking self is still (mostly) in charge of my wild self. It's a lively pas de deux.  

In 2014, I'll be painting, drawing, writing, cutting up. I'll be using acrylics, inks, pens, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue, and watercolors.

So, from this morning, a watercolor sketch, on pastel paper, of a hyacinth in my studio.  

In 2014, I'll also be traveling (of course) and I'll be starting a secret (for now) drawing project, the idea of which just came to me yesterday!  I'll tell more as the days go on. I'm excited and happy!

Are you coming with?

Happy 2013! It was!

 

Not to whine, for such is life... but simply to observe: 2013 was the first good year around here since 2007. Oh, there've been many good days, minutes, hours, some weeks, even, since 2007... but whole years? Not those. Neutral years, years in which nothing much bad happened? Not those, either.

2013 could have turned out differently. The stakes were high. And the big results weren't in until September. 

But what the first nine months were leading up to culminated in very happy news!

My daughter's adorable baby son Miles, born on September 13, and shown here on Christmas Day, at almost 3 1/2 months: 

 I am beyond besotted! Look at that tender, adorable face!

The painting show I started working on in early January, opened in late September to a very warm reception.  There were moments in March when I thought I wasn't going to make it. But I worked through the problems and ended up finding, as I had struggled to find, my own idiom. I made quirky paintings and they pleased me. The fact that others liked them was delicious.

I made illustrations, you will perhaps remember, for a wonderful new magazine about Raleigh, NC, called, appropriately enough Walter!

I got to do all sorts of things---maps, portraits, foodie things, even the cover of the first anniversary issue! And I had a double spread of garden imagery in June !

 

 

 

  

 

 My work appeared on other pages, too. In the June issue of Watercolor Artist Magazine and in Playing with Sketches (the fourth book my work is included in!) by Whitney Sherman, director of the graduate program in illustration at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art. I'm so proud to be represented in both publications.

I made trips to Austin and to Portland, OR, to see my darling peripatetic daughter Cecelia. In Portland, I had a delightful sketching meetup with some Portland Urban Sketchers.

As you may know, I ended up my year with an exciting trip to northern Norway. More sketches from that trip to appear in a few days. My scanner is still hiccupping and the holidays are still intervening! 

I will also talk about my art goals for 2014. I've done this before ;D. See you in just a few days!

And happy New Year to all of you, wherever you are!

 

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!

January! We're new again!

Because my birthday coincides with the new year, I'm always ready to get clear of the past and start again, with hope and gusto!

And so, here we are, starting again. My primary goal for the year is to get paintings painted for my show next fall. 

But, of course, I will always have drawing and sketching and writing in my journal and occasional illustrating to do. Once I have shared these images with you, two from my new Stillman and Birn Alpha  9 x 12 journal (this is my eighth!), two from a drawing session I had here yesterday with two friends, I'm going to finish tidying up my painting studio. And THEN I'm going to paint.

These drawings are of my young friend Meg, who is obviously quite beautiful. But there is a quality to her that has made me really want to draw her from the first time I met her. I can see the tiny child Meg still there in her features and I can also see the spare beauty of a Byzantine saint as well. Her soul is both old and new.

Finally, some palette cleansers, as I call them... today's sketches from my new journal. I make these images first thing in the morning in my studio, as a way to sweep away yesterday's struggles, to invoke new energy for the day. I love the natural calligraphy inherent in flowers, so when I have them, I draw them.

In the upstairs studio, woman at work

My purpose-built painting studio is small and, me being me, messy. There I fling acrylic (and rarely, oil) paint and am generally pretty scattered.

This photo shows the studio... after I'd cleaned it up for company, i.e., YOU!

There's not room in this downstairs studio to make paintings AND to make more precise work, work on paper, work with ink or watercolor, without endangering their surfaces. So I have another room, an upstairs room ...one advantage of an empty nest...where I can work on illustrations and, in more contemplative moods, paint in my journal.

I'm in the middle of an illustration project that calls for pristine surfaces and rather quiet imagery.

I'm, in short, upstairs. At work.

I'll show you the illustrations when the job is done. 

For now, here is a page from my journal... where I can still channel the chi (see post just below), albeit within the constraints of a journal page. My black and white, quieter work isn't threatened a bit.

 

 

And here are some glimpses of the upstairs studio. I like to start work there very early in the morning.

In less than two weeks, I leave for Tuscany and Umbria, where I will attend the wedding of my dearest, oldest friend's son, and where I will FINALLY get to meet up with fellow artist and blogger Robyn Sinclair, a cyber-buddy of many years' standing and a true kindred spirit. Joy, celebration, food, wine, gorgeous countryside and sketches will ensue!

Riding the chi: my artist's statement, illustrated

I'd dreaded coming up with the artist's statement I needed to have to apply for a solo show in 2013. Not to disparage artists (one of whom I am, you'll have noticed) but their/our "statements" are often, well, boring and pretentious. Lots of words are used, though!

Don't ask me why this is. I'm already in hot water enough by revealing my feelings about these darned things. Besides, I don't know why. So that's reason number two not to ask.

(By the way, most of my artist friends dislike writing these statements... it's never really OUR idea in the first place.)

My particular main task, it seemed to me, was to figure out and explain what unifies the various, seemingly loosely related, paintings and drawings I produce. 

Here are two recent ones, as cases in point. Keep in mind, too, my volcano pieces, though I may be at the end of this series for the moment.

This is a study for what I think might be a return to a theme I've dealt with a lot in the past: rocks and water. I'll do lots of these studies and then see how they might translate into larger paintings.

And here's a drawing I made yesterday with a garden subject:

And here is my artist's statement. It incorporates what I've done in the volcano series, as well as some of my other past work, and tries to anticipate how I might be doing over the next months. Pretentious it probably is, but it feels true.

I’m a restless artist, a shape shifter, a seeker, never able to stay in one place, keep to one mode of making art, for long. Painting hasn’t come easily for me. Drawing is my native language. Not long ago, on reading Michael Pollan’s wonderful book A Place of My Own , I was reminded of the concept of ‘chi:’

' "Chi" is the Chinese word for the earth spirit, or cosmic breath, which flows in invisible currents over the face of the earth... . This earth spirit animates all living things.'

It’s when I address in paint this chi, this force that thrills me, that animates the world as I experience it, that I begin to be a painter in a way that matters to me.

In these pieces, I'm leaping back and forth between the particular and the abstract, all the while reveling in texture and color, in energy.

I feel like I’m reinventing myself as a painter... or I’m being reinvented. When you’re a shape shifter as I am, and you’re riding the chi, it’s hard to tell.