Laurelines

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/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.

 

Surfacing from the maelstrom

Or as I like to call this period, My Cuisinart Life! Ouch, there are way too many, big and life-changing things going on.  I do feel like I've been tossed in a giant Cuisinart and chopped and mashed and swirled for several months. I assume I'll emerge relatively intact, but I know I'll be transformed. In many ways, it's been an exciting time. It's been stressful. It's been necessary. It's not over yet.

Anyway, I will tell more when I can, but for now, let me share a bit of what I've been working on in the studio and to say I'm so looking forward to a return, with my husband, to Norway in December!

I've got several paintings going in my Places Project, as I mentioned, and some of them are even finished! I'm applying for a show of this first phase of work, excluding, unfortunately, my Caledonian Orogeny drawings (they can't be exhibited in the place I'm applying to,  because of their unusual format.) But I've got several paintings, acrylic on board, of various sizes, and I will keep working on this series in the next year.

My trip to Norway is part of this Places Project... it's been several years since I was in Arctic Norway in the winter and I need to go back and get an inspiration re-infusion. And, my husband and I love that part of the world anyway, so it works out well.

Here are some of my finished pieces. I won't hog your bandwidth with photos of all of them.

 Polar Twilight 1. I've attached a number to this one, because I plan on making several more in this sub-series, after our trip to Norway. I can't WAIT.

More Norway:

Wales, a painting of a stormy scene from Anglesey I have shared only a detail of in the past:

More Wales. This painting was inspired by my polar swim on Whitesands Bay last New Year's Day:

On Whitesands Bay, one cold and damp day last January, the sky was covered in a network of chevron-shaped clouds:

Just to show there are blue skies in even my cold places, here's a painting I made of Dulas Bay in north Wales, after a recent autumn trip there.:

After Norway, I still have northern Scotland to go to, my last place in the work inspired by the Caledonian Orogeny. Not sure when that trip will happen. 

I'm now turning to that age-old question: which art supplies should I take on my coming Norwegian trip??!  This is an issue we traveling artists always wrestle with, but for me, who travels only with a carry_on (that has also to hold my winter gear!!) it's a real puzzler!

I'm so glad to have resurfaced and I send thanks and love to all who (still) follow my wanderer's (recently subterranean) life.

 

Starting the New Year in Wales, a glorious beginning

There's a lot of story to tell, too much to try to share tonight. 

But before I post a few sketches, I will share quickly some memories: my exhilarating polar swim in the Irish Sea on New Year's Day; seeing the Quadrantid Meteor showers on my birthday night while wrapped in many layers and sitting on the front lawn of our cottage on Whitesands Bay; with the help of a traveling professional astronomer on the same birthday night, seeing nebulae, a galaxy, the Milky Way in bright form, many constellations, the fuzzy green comet 46P/Wirtanen; at Evensong of the first Sunday of Christmas at St Davids Cathedral sitting in the choir stalls with choir and clergy, hearing hymns and the liturgy in both Welsh and English.

I walked and walked and walked and walked some more until my heart was overspilling.  My husband and I slept deeply in that quiet, safe, numinous place. 

It's been another rough re-entry to real life (like the one from Norway last year) but I have several paintings going, a few from before the trip, but several newly started ones, all inspired by Wales. This circular and multi-pronged approach has me nudging each one along until I finish one, then another, then two more, etc. I'm happy in the studio.

So, sketches, just a few. I spent more time being, being outside, walking, resting, being with my husband, taking it all in.

Looking out over the Irish Sea to Ramsey Island and beyond, from the warmth of our cottage by the sea. This is white marker and pencil on brown paper. In real life, the sketch goes across the gutter of the sketchbook, making a double spread. I will add the other side later. 

Brush pen sketch made on site at Whitesands Bay, color added later.  These rocks and the ones below are old friends. They figured in the 12' long concertina sketchbook I made in May 2017, part of my Caledonian Orogeny project!

The first thing I bought on New Year's Eve day were two votive candles and holders. With these and the wood fire burning in our cottage living room, we had light and warmth.

After the polar swim on New Year's Day, I was cold and starving, so David and I repaired to our favorite St Davids café at Oriel y Parc and had lunch. I drew the family at the next table.

Sketch of St Davids Head, made standing on Whitesands Beach in the cold and wind. This and the one above are roughly and quickly drawn (the cold! the wind!), with color added later.

I'll be staying at home more this year, finishing paintings, being with family and friends, walking and trying to get more sleep! Wales spoiled me in that way and in so many others.

A tardy, but very Happy New Year's greeting to you!

Christmas sketches past and a wish for all of us

I am putting discussions of painting on hold until I return from Wales in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to make a December post to wish you happiness, a festive spirit against daunting odds, and to thank you for your support and interest, still. I feel and cherish the warmth you send in your messages to me and in our real world encounters. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Being the cold-seeking missile that I am, I travel in the winter a lot.  Here is my Christmas card to you, some sketches from such travel over the past years.

Here we are in Bruges, on one December a while back. I sat quietly in front of our hotel's lovely fireplace and Christmas tree, sipped a glass of sparkling something, and drew:

Next, a trip to Vancouver in early December one year found David and me running for cover from a rainy late afternoon walk on the harbor. The Fairmont Hotel bar had empty seats. I had great fun drawing their winter-themed lobby:

Oh, Copenhagen, how we love you! This was another time we headed for warmth on a cold winter night. It was Tivoli Gardens in December, where explosions of millions of lights and colors vanquish the dark.  My sketch was made in a bar in the gardens, where a stately tree dominated the impressive room.

For love, there is no equal to Norway in my heart! Here's a glimpse of a very cozy café, we repaired to when we were staying in a small village near Tromsø:

And how we love Munich, too! This was from the first of two trips we made in successive Decembers. We couldn't stay away!  Orlando Café is busy and touristy, but nevertheless beautiful and the pastries (and beer!) (and soups!) are superb.

Finally, here we are in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a village where I spent important time with my family in childhood.  Walking from the parking lot just outside the village toward the center, I suddenly felt the intense presence of my late father. The last time we were there together, I was 6 or 7. His very real presence, and the memories of all my life with him, overcame me and I sobbed and sobbed. 

Later, having collected myself, I drew this scene from the warm interior of Restaurant Alpenhof.

 

Love and joy come to you, no matter where, and no matter how or what, you celebrate. 

See you next year! Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

 

 

Going Places

The thing about working on a Places Project, as I am, is that, well, you go places. And that going does interrupt the work flow (not to mention the blog stream!!), though it keeps the inspiration rushing at flood tide! So, it's a matter of trying to do both, of staying balanced. i won't always be at the flood tide stage and in fact, I see 2019 as more of a steady work year, with less travel. (But Iceland! Back to the source!)  More about that in December.

Anyway, here are some paintings, or parts of paintings, I've been making. I have so many more in process and am delighted and vastly relieved to feel that I am at last in a kind of flow here in the studio.  Withdrawing from illustrating and teaching and my various Other-oriented art activities this year has been a hard but very fruitful thing to do.

Before turning to Norway as a subject, I have been thinking of Wales. There is something so compelling to me about western coastal Wales. Like Norway, it is a land of pronounced darks and lights... or so I see it. And it appears, at my hands, to be a land of shards and angles, too,  and infinite atmospheres and textures. In short, it's heaven (one of several)  for me.

 

Lligwy Bay, afternoon drama. Acrylic on board, as are all of these paintings:

 

 

 Lligwy Bay, after rain:

 

Dulas Bay, blue hour. This is the very first stage of this painting. I have since gone farther, but haven't finished. I want to remember this early, airy stage! I love painting on natural wood surfaces.

 

And my latest start, a detail of larger painting... another dramatic sky over Lligwy Bay! The foreground of this painting isn't shown, but once it is done and the whole pulled together, I'll be so happy. Won't be long now.  Texture! Atmosphere!  Yes! You can see my mind is turning to Norway! My numinous places connect in many ways. 

A sketch of my dear friend Michael, a Yorkshireman who took Penelope, his love and my dear friend, around Yorkshire this past October. Yorkshire proved to be a magical place and one that I learned, to my great surprise, is a very important part of my life story!  I drew this in a delightful pub in Whitby, where Penelope, Michael and I had lunch one cold and rainy day.

And, last, an image I treasure from the Yorkshire trip: I'm in awe before Gordale Scar, imagining the ancient glacial melt processes that created this striking topography.

I'll be back in December! My emotional logjam has broken and I'm once again a member of the visible world!

Happy Fall-into-Winter to you!

Back on track:Norway story, continued

Summer heat has cast a pernicious spell on me, it's clear, but the winds are changing, the light is changing, and, finally unwilting, so am I.  Weather aside, reentry to normal life has been very difficult after such an exalted and inspiring time in Norway.

My chief reason for going on this trip was in pursuit of my Places Project,  to see and draw another vestige from the Caledonian Orogeny, circa 450-250 MYA.  I had fewer days to do this than I had for my first two drawings, made in Wales, one in Pembrokeshire, one on Anglesey.

The accordion sketchbook I drew in here was custom made for me by book artist friend Josh Hockensmith. It is 10 1/2' long when stretched to its full length and each page is bigger than those in the Seawhite of Brighton concertina books I used in my first two drawings. The paper is ivory and slightly toothed, not white and smooth, and so the resulting drawing has a slightly different look from the first two.

The rocks I drew were very different, too. The rocks in Wales were faceted, sharp, angular, with mostly smooth surfaces. The rocks in Norway were flowing, textured, and multi-colored in shades of grays, ochres, some siennas and subtle blues. These outcrops will lend themselves to later studio pieces, some collages, some linocuts, perhaps,  and I am looking forward to seeing what will emerge!

 

In between my days of Caledonian Orogeny drawing, I sketched, as you will have seen in my last post. Here are some miscellaneous moments, caught in my sketchbook. On a remote island in the Barents Sea, magenta saxifrage grew improbably and brashly between rocks in the tundra.

Later, in the Lofotens, I drew another view of the majestic Olstind mountain, seen from our cabin near Reine.

My husband and I love Bergen and it was in Bergen that I had this delicious vitello tonnato dish for lunch at a café near the Kode Museums. Note the candle, lit in the middle of the day in sunny, summery Bergen. This is one of the things I love about Scandinavia, the use of candles, a profound celebration of light, at all times of the year, at all times of the day, in the Polar Night or in the time of the Midnight Sun. I have taken this to my heart and I do the same thing in our home in North Carolina.

Circling back to Longyearbyen, here is a drawing of a bus passenger, who was a wonderfully monumental figure, compelling to draw:

On the painting front, two recently finished pieces.The first is another work belonging to my Places Project. This is a Copper Mountain sunset painting, inspired by my artist residency in Alaska, fall before last:

The second is an example of What I Did for Love, a snowy owl painting requested by my four-year-old grandson Miles. I have two more requested owlish pieces to finish, but I am returning to Norway in the studio in the next days, too.

I won't wait so long to post again. Soon I am taking a shortish trip with two dear friends to Yorkshire, not on the trail of the Caledonian Orogeny. The main focus will be to spend time with my friends in the birthplace and childhood region of one of them. Though I have lived and traveled widely in the UK, I have never been to Yorkshire. It turns out that my long-ago ancestors from Norway, settled in Yorkshire (coincidentally near where we will be), before much later emigrating to the US, so I will be, in some small way, returning home. Who knew??? See you soon!

80° North, anyone? Art supplies for the Land of the Midnight Sun!

 

That's where we'll be the first part our trip!  Far, far, far northern Norway, off the mainland. I am going to try to get some sort of memento with that latitude engraved on it! I'm a north-going spirit, that's for sure. 

This being such a once-in-a-lifetime trip, I vow to document it fully in writing and sketches, in addition to the separate group of drawings I'll do for my Caledonian Orogeny project.

But what supplies to take with me?? I travel only with a carryon and that has to contain clothes for winter weather (still there in May and early June in Svalbard) as well as for cool spring days, which I hope we will find in the other parts of Norway we are going to. Yikes!

Wakeful at 2am today (and you can understand why!), I looked at past sketches of similar atmospheric situations. Here are my tentative choices. If you have any suggestions, by the way, please do make them!

I know you've seen most of these before, but bear with me. I have to think.;D

1. Caran d'Ache watercolor crayons: I use these often. Here are some examples from  the past:

Iceland, Budir Bay

More Iceland. Here there's a wash of Daniel Smith Lunar Black with the crayons. I'll take that and Lunar Blue and those will be my only watercolors. Right? I can add more washes later. if I want to.

 

Mt Hood, Oregon. Unlike my previous trips to Norway, which all took place in the Arctic Twilight, this trip will be, as I mentioned, under the Midnight Sun!

    2. Pentel pocket brush pen. These are practically extensions of my hands. I use them everywhere.

In Bergen, Norway, with white gel pen and watercolor wash

 

In E.Lansing, Michigan, with watercolor crayons! Two for the price of one!

    3. Inktense pencils? When you must have bursts of juicy color!

Don't you love how a mere spritz of water makes inktense sketches ebullient!

Inktense pencils at Carn Llidi, Wales. Speaking of atmospheric, as we were:

     4. Cretacolor Oil pencils in Nero. I have to have these for regular drawing, right?  With these, you can be both gestural and precise:

And I'll need these for my Caledonian Orogeny drawing, of course;

    5. Sketchbooks: I'll have a couple of custom handmade concertina sketchbooks for the rock drawings and then two Stillman & Birn softcover 8 x10s, one in gray, one in white.

    6. Blue and red colored pencils, not watercolor ones. Oh, let's add orange and green, too. I just like to draw with these and they come in handy if you want quick, dry color.

 

 Oh, I've given myself a headache now.

I'm serious... if you have any suggestions, any new products you like for travel sketches, or old favorites of yours (not watercolors, though, or fountain pens for this trip, unfortunately,) I'd love to have them!

Takk!

New moons and portals

I've been in a long new moon phase, hidden from sight, but very here. Just recently I've begun to see  the 15 or so (!) paintings I've been making start to gel a bit.  Of these, how many will eventually be finished, I have no idea. The ones that need to be finished will make themselves known and I will just keep at it until I know which they are.

This process is very slow but it appears to be mine for now, so I accept it. Deadlines and rushing can come later.

Here's a detail of one of these in progress. This is one of what I call 'portal paintings,' small at 12" x12", but big enough for me to squeeze through to the next incarnation. All of the pieces I'm working on are inspired by my numinous places, this one in particular is inspired by a bay in northern Wales.

 

 

I've also been learning to make linocuts and I love that medium! After a semester long ago spent learning etching and aquatint, and workshops in lithography, and silkscreen, I've finally found the  printmaking method that calls to me. I feel it lends itself very well to my Caledonian Orogeny project, as a way of working back in the studio, after making  my on-site drawings.

Here's an example of what I mean.

 

Here's another. I beg your indulgence...I LOVE learning this art form and I love tweaking for color and texture changes! I will force myself to stop at posting two here.

 

 

My garden will be on view this weekend to at least 1300 visitors, so I have had garden prep very much in my life these past months. I am sharing, therefore, two garden images, one from my journal documenting two recent plant acquisitions and one sketch I made a couple of years ago at J C Raulston Arboretum, a sketch I recently rediscovered under a pile of other work.

My trip to VERY northern Norway is coming up in May! To say I'm excited is an egregious understatement. I have lots more to tell before I go and I will!

Going to the source: Part 2 of the Caledonian Orogeny in Wales

After a  busy November, I'm finally able to turn back to Wales and that ancient mountain range, once as high as the Himalayas, that dominates my imagination.

Below is a wobbly handheld video of the 12' long drawing I made in a concertina sketchbook over a few days on Anglesey in October. This is the second of two such drawings, the other having been made in Pembrokeshire this past May. I am also reposting the earlier one, for comparison.

 

 

The outcrops on Whitesands Bay are a giant's cornucopia of thousands of rocks of all shapes and every orientation! That landscape is a feast for eyes such as mine.

Here is a still of the Anglesey rock deformations, which are calmer, more markedly horizontal, but still breathtaking to my eyes:

These drawings are made on site, frequently with strong winds whipping my hair across my eyes, my hands struggling to hold a very long, folded (and unfolding at the wrong moments) sketchbook, working fast while the conditions are right.

There weren't huge problems in Pembrokeshire, other than frequentish rain, because the beach was very deep and I didn't have to pay attention to tide times. But on Anglesey, it was quite a different story. Finding time when it wasn't raining AND when it was low tide was difficult.

I post this photo of myself having just THEN completed the drawing, in spite of the challenges of weather, tide, and limited time. My relief and happiness are evident! This was our very last day on Anglesey, thus my very last chance to finish the drawing. The weather had been forecast to be rainy, but, look, it was perfect!

Next stop on the Caledonian trail is northern Norway. Near Bodø is the dramatic outcrop pictured below, part of our mountain building event that spanned a couple of millions of years and great distances.

Big thanks to Battleboy on Flickr, who gave me permission to use his stunning photo, taken from a boat. 

Brilliant Norwegian photographer Reidar Hernes lives in Bodø and is helping me research possibilities for me to be able to stand on land and draw these deformations. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

This time I will use a different drawing surface: still a concertina sketchbook, but one not as long and with bigger pages, I think.

I leave this post with two images of the two books: different, connected.  We will see what awaits us in Norway.