Laurelines

Copper runs through it, part two

Here I've been, in the studio, seeing what emerges from my Copper Mountain ideas and inner imagery, my drawings and photos, and the emotions I experienced in my Alaska residency.  I find it surprising how  all over the place they are, and, well, interesting, too... but then I would, wouldn't I? 

I've been trying to figure out how to deal with deeply staining and glossy paints... colors like phthalo turquoise, quinacridone burnt orange, and others that I haven't used much before in acrylic form. I want to layer them, but they don't layer well. They kill whatever colors I have painted under them and then there's that glossy sheen, which I hate. So, much mixing with white and other colors and experimenting has been going on here. I'm learning the best way to use them for my purposes.

I'm making lots of studies, but I also have a dozen or more big paintings started, waiting for me to figure out what the heck I'm doing. Here are some of the studies painted in my latest Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbook, my treasured portable studio and lifeline: 

 I love the verdigris aspect of copper and go back and forth with it in my rendering of mountain shapes.

As I posted last time, I note that the coppery palette now crops up everywhere I put pen, pencil, or brush to paper. I don't mean it to, but I don't mind it,either. Here's a quick warm-up pen and ink sketch made last week with cad red, phthalo turquoise,  and ochre watercolors. 

I purposely didn't mention the fact in my last post that there is a connection between my copper theme and Wales. Both Alaska and Wales have a long history of copper mining, but since I don't do caves and deep underground, I thought I'd never be able to personally experience that fact of Welsh history in my visits there. But NOT SO! Peter Wakelin, Welsh scholar, author, and former head of Collections at the National Museum of Wales, was also head of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments  of Wales. He sent me a link to this video of Parys Mountain in Anglesey. Reader, I'm going!

 

Oregon sketches, first batch

Last week, in spite of cancelled flights due to horrible ice and snow eruptions along my travel route, I managed to make it out to Mt. Hood, Oregon AND back. I went to have some time with my daughter Cecelia, hoping we'd be able to sketch together and to enjoy the mountain together. And we did!

For this volcano-loving, mountain-loving artist, you couldn't ask for a better place to be. Mt Hood is the largest dormant volcano in Oregon. Sitting on a giant tufa boulder (ouch!) to sketch the south flank of the mountain that first morning was thrilling... all was quiet, all was bright. We don't ski, but we were able to snowshoe a bit up the mountainside later in the day and get even closer to this majestic cone of earth.

Here are a few sketches of the mountain and of handsome Timberline Lodge where we stayed, one of FDR's Works Progress Administration constructions from the 1930s.

More sketches to come!

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!

2012 was important... and busy!

This has been a significant year. I've worked on several fronts, most art-related but not all directly involved with the making of art. 

It all began on January 2nd. A friend I saw at a party urged me to apply for a show at a great local venue. I was between galleries and so I thought, "Why not?"

In February, I made an illustration for The Morning News and fell hard for volcanoes as subject matter. I carried on with volcanoes as images for paintings and started a painting series as part of my application for a solo show.

 

So now, I'll be having a show fall of 2013! I'm a slow painter, so I'll need all that time to get the paintings done.

I had some illustration jobs to do, small and large. In addition to the volcano one for the Morning News, above, I designed the logo for a new literary prize that is launching in a few days. My friend Maxine Mills, a brilliant graphic designer, tweaked and fine-tuned. My reading pig looks very polished now, don't you think?

I illustrated the second edition of a local foodlovers' guide.

I curated the first group exhibition of Urban Sketchers, a brilliant idea proposed by Alice Southwick of the Ackland Museum Store in Chapel Hill, NC! My fellow Urban Sketcher correspondents were so generous in donating their work to this successful fundraising show.

I traveled a LOT in 2012. First was Rome in February to see two of our children and to sketch with Concetta Flore!

 

In late June, it was back to Italy again, this time for the wedding of a dear, old friend's son.

In October, compelled to visit the land of volcanoes again, my husband and I went back to Iceland.

Then, in early December, it as off to Vancouver for a brief celebration of our 21st wedding anniversary!

Putting it all together like this, I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for what WAS, clearly, a very important year. I'm reenergized and I'm ready to begin again! I thank you for sticking with me through a year of infrequent blog posts. Life, the blogging world, change...and we change with them. I'll be back with more in 2013! Happy New Year to every single one of you!

Sending you love! Laura

Iceland: last sketches

Much of what I made in Iceland were sketches designed to prime the pump in my painting studio once I returned... more private, more shorthand and oblique than my usual ones. But here are some that fall more into my normal scheme of things. 

The fields surrounding Hverfjell crater are basins of abstract shapes, curves and ovals. I saw dark chocolate with powdered sugar and caramel sauce, too, in the colors and textures there.

I wish I could post these two sections below of the one drawing and show them connected as they are in real life, so you could see the tiny islands scattered pell mell  through Breidafjordur.

Across from Budir bay on the Snaefellsnes peninsula are ridge after ridge of volcanic mountains, stretching as far as the eye can see.

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On the way to northern Iceland, I was sketching in the car, first a little snow flurry and then the snow came thicker and faster. My marks got more stacatto and urgent... all of a sudden, we were in a snowstorm. The car fishtailed. It was quite scary. We made it, obviously, but not without increased reverence for nature's power in Iceland.

The land forms swoop and slide, as below... when they don't jut and jab.

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The pen I used below had water-soluble ink, unbeknownst to me. Thus the grayish casts in the washes. Probably appropriate, all things considered.

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So now, I'm hatching plans for my NEXT trip to Iceland, wherein we will pay a visit to the south and east coasts. I've got glaciers on my mind!

Iceland: made it and back!

It was definitely touch and go, but we made it! And we loved it! We did almost crash our car in a sudden snowstorm, but, well, here I am, wiser than before about the power of that dramatic landscape. You underestimate it at your peril.

This trip, I drew quickly, quickly, as you have to to be able to capture all that energy that Iceland is always emitting, in one form or another.

 

 

If I squinted my eyes, I could pretend that these steam plumes and clouds were little volcanic eruptions. Not to make light of the the danger and power of volcanic eruptions, but you know me... I'm in a volcanic mode this year.

My husband and I scrambled to the top of Mt.Hverfjall, a crater of a volcano that last erupted 2500 years ago. It was, to say the obvious, awe-inspiring.

I made a very, very quick drawing of the land around Budir, on the Snaefellsnes peninsula. We fell in love with this area four years ago and we fell in love with it again this time. I have other sketches of this area to share.

And we visited again our favorite Icelandic café in Hellnar, where the world's best bread and the world's best fish soup are served in tiny quarters, tucked into a hill overlooking the sea.

Here is a sketch I did of this café four years ago, just for comparison.

More to come!

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.

Painting paroxysms, round two

Four more finished to add to the three already done. Three in the wings. After  I finish 8 to 10 of these volcano paintings, I'll move to the next series. Which is still a little glimmer in my mind and heart. We shall see what emerges!