Laurelines

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, 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.