Friday feels

I am approaching my 40th painting of the year so far.  And I’m not even on a challenge or anything.

I think it’s because I paint in a series.   Often I will have two panels on the easel at once, and work on the both.  I work quickly and don’t linger in any one place for too long.  Most of the time.

I always put painting before everything else: networking, admin, photographing, managing the shop, etc.  I don’t ever want to get caught up in non – painting stuff so that I forget how to paint.  Besides, the only way to get better is practice.

However, I’ve accumulated all these works that are sat around.  Hence the recent forays into framing (that’s going so well by the way, I can’t wait to show you!) so that I can release a collection of original art.

But, with all the running an art business requires – and I do see what I’m doing as an art business – I realise I’m not actually paying attention to the business side of things.  More than that, I’m ignoring them.

Admin I can do.  Spreadsheets, web sites (graduated in computer science about a million years ago, before the internet was a thing), yep, all over it.  But the marketing. Oh how I hate a hard sales pitch.  Or even an over enthusiastic one that’s insanely cheery.  It really creeps me out, I feel terribly self conscious, and this is the other reason I avoid taking care of my business.

However.  I do want to sell some art.  And it occurred to me, having done two paintings this week, that I could use some of my week to focus on this a bit more and get my shiz together.

So that’s what I’m doing.  Reading all the books, all the interwebs and try to get a handle of this thing and more to the point detach  myself from my art a bit.  I know I could sell someone else’s art and sleep at night, so why not my own?

So.  Wish me luck troopers.  I’m going in.

Oh, here’s some pretty I don’t think I posted here yet.  Have a lovely weekend everyone.

I painted this some time ago – just love this rose

 

Blame it on the sunshine

Since I injured essential body parts required for painting, I’ve really tried hard to keep making art any way I could, otherwise, y’know, the creativity fairy will fly off and grace someone else with her presence.

So for the first couple of weeks, I carried on.  Then last week, summer arrived.  It really did.  And I just wanted to sit in my garden, catch some rays, and think about tomatoes and sweet peas and pester my husband to cut the grass.

And here’s a thing:  I enjoyed not making art.  I enjoyed not being on Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest.  I enjoyed not blogging.

Blogging for me is how I order the chaos within.  Time to reflect, sometimes about something, often about nothing.  Being in the garden, pottering around, planting up window boxes…those things sort of replaced blogging – but not you all, my blogging gang!

Honestly, I feel like I’ve had a holiday last week.  And yesterday I really had that Monday back to work feeling!  Anyway.  I’ve spent some time catching up on domestic bores chores and had a little tidy in my studio, which sets me up for the next phase, whatever that is.  I haven’t quite decided!  But I have just purchased some acrylic inks.

In other news – injuries have suddenly taken a huge leap of recovery!  Hooray for that.  And framing some original pieces is still happening.  In fact, one of my jobs today, apart from saying hello to all of you, is to test a various shades of white paint for the frames. I limited it to four, otherwise I thought I might go insane.

Now to spend some time catching up with my wordpress feed and seeing how all the daily painting is going!

this is as tidy at the studio gets

A change of pace

Oh, today has been grand.

This morning I sat in the garden and had breakfast.  This is blog worthy, as it means we actually have the weather for it!  It wasn’t too hot, bit breezy, and lovely sunshine.

After, I surveyed the grounds.  Which took about 12 steps as my garden is postage stamp sized.  My very elderly wisteria is in full bloom.  It’s the purple variety, and it’s beautiful.  It’s one of my favourite flowers  (geek fact that just down the road in Devon there is the UK’s oldest wisteria.  It’s trunk is as twistedly beautiful as it’s blossom).

So I spent till lunch sketching and painting outside -and I used watercolour.  Mainly this was in homage to cyber buddies Laura and Margaret , who are taking part in a daily paint-a-thon, the main theme being to challenge yourself.

Well, I like watercolour, it just doesn’t like me.  Actually, this isn’t the worst watercolour I’ve ever done.  I thought it was the best medium to capture the delicate wisteria blossom.  Perhaps I should give it a go in oils too.

I have to be in the mood for flowers.  Most of the time I work loose, but very occasionally I have the urge to get involved in something more detailed, usually a drawing.  It provides a nice soothing pace to get lost in.  I love the act of looking when I draw in detail…I tend to look at shapes, particularly negative shapes to draw, and to me it’s like a satisfying jigsaw puzzle.

Afterwards, me and the man took the dog to the local lake for a nice stroll.  Bliss.

However, since then it’s gone down hill a bit.  Let’s just say it involves a small boy, a dentist appointment and too many biscuits, if there can be such a thing in an eleven year olds life.

not loose, bit fussy, not really me

Slips, trips and falls

 

Well. How ironic my last post was around my search for balance and being in the now.

On Tuesday, I tripped and fell badly, bashing up both knees but more catastrophically wrenching my shoulder – the painting shoulder!

Falling over when you’re past the age of 7 is just awful. Grown up bodies aren’t made for taking knocks like this! Well mine isn’t. The pain was so bad I almost puked on my garage floor. Too much info? Well let me tell you getting a bra on and off has been nigh on impossible since.

Thing is, when you hurt youself like this as an adult its such a big deal! It’s a bloody shock for a start. Which was why I needed cake and chocolate after. Medicinal.

Anyhoo. The whole thing certainly has stopped me in my tracks and made me focus on the now!  It’s amused me a little. What else has made me laugh a bit is my poor husband who, as you already know is the Patron Saint of husbandry, now has even more to do! If that is even possible.

So, what’s to do when your laid up? Thank Gods for Tim Berners Lee, as I’ve read all the web. Now I’m about to get on Pinterest so leave your username in the comments and I will look you up!

this was painted pre – drama

 

Monday musings

Balance. All my life I’ve sought this elusive state.

I don’t mean mentally (ok, perhaps sometimes I mean mentally), I mean balance in being. Balance in how I spend my days: achieving an amount of everything required in order to feel nourished and whole in my life.

For someone that has a bit of an “all or nothing” approach to the activities I choose to pursue, I think I’m remarkably level headed in a general sense. Well I would say that wouldn’t I?!

I’m ruminating on my balancing act, as I often have enormous guilt over my single mindedness when I’m creating art, which is most days. Chores, cooking, and family life often take a back seat.

On a practical level, my husband is made of stellar stuff: he cooks, he cleans, he supports the household and me so I can pursue my ambition. All whilst holding down a  successful career of his own! I often wonder how he achieves this balance. He gets stuff done, and seems to be able to switch effortlessly between tasks, and domestic life. I’ve asked him, of course. He doesn’t really know, he just does what needs doing.

Whereas I find it a terrible wrench to leave a painting and disrupt my flow to cook a meal or walk the dog.

This last week has been more balanced than usual, and it’s been lovely. Sunny days with family, walks in unfamiliar places.

Yet as Monday comes around I know the minute I step into my groove, the cycle will begin again – the flow of my creative life will carry me far from shore. Like an unsuspecting tourist bobbing around in an inflatable on unfamiliar currents, I’ll eventually look up and have no idea how I drifted so far from the beach!

Sometimes they just paint themselves

Sometimes, very occasionally, something magical happens.  From your brushes, from the sweep of your palette knife, emerges something so nice, you wonder if you’ll ever be able to top it (actually I already know this, since I painted again since, and produced utter tripe).

You can’t win ’em all, but you can  bask in what it felt like when all the planets aligned and somehow you made good art.

And it’s not that these paintings are perfect.  But when I painted these it was like I was merely holding the brushes.  A human conduit.  Perhaps I got out of my own way for a change!

Sunset on the Somerset Levels

I had one of those perfect days recently, where you’ve only been out for the day but feel like you’ve had a holiday.

On the journey home across the Somerset Levels, there was the most amazing sunset.  I did my best to capture it in my sketchbook from the back of the car, scenery whizzing by.

What I couldn’t capture were the flocks of egrets majestically and slowly flapping their huge wings across the sky.  There were geese, swans, buzzards, sparrow hawks.  Even deer.  They must have had soggy feet.

The Levels are a haven for wildlife, and are an integral part of the Somerset countryside.  They do flood, as they have done for hundreds of years.  This flat huge expanse is hemmed in by the Mendip Hills to the north, and the Blackdowns and Quantocks to the south. The mist of early morning and dusk lingers longer here.   It’s a place of myth, legend, and times past.  It is beautiful.

The next morning, the memory of that place still imbibed me, so in pyjamas (when all the best painting happens), I quickly got down a sketch in gouache and pastel (see above).

Close up – love the texture of pastel and layers of gouache, yummy!

I do love this sketch, however it’s rather high key, whereas in reality, it was actual much darker, particularly the land.  It’s not often I paint the same painting more than once, but on this occasion I did a quick oil sketch on a piece of board I had that I though would be a good format.  It’s different, but I like it.

It’s cooler than I intended, but captures the light more accurately I think.

I don’t think I’m going to work this up into a final piece though.  Sometimes I like to make art just to journal my daily life.  I never was any good at keeping a diary, but I love keeping a visual reminder so that,although for the most part, and like most people, my life is ordinary – there are these little vistas of the extraordinary.

The difficulty of simplicity, feat. the pebble

It is irritating to me that in some situations (usually of course, ones that don’t directly involve or affect me), I can immediately get to the nub of the thing, to distill whatever it is quite clearly in my own mind and to anyone else who’ll listen.

It’s an uncanny trait most of us possess, actually; to be able to know exactly  what we’d do if we were in your/their situation.  Getting out of our own way to have clarity for ourselves however, is something else entirely.

Abstraction and simplification with my art work is a constant rumination lately – I long to take what inspires and motivates me, and reduce it to it’s barest form…and then reconstruct in a way that is more personal to me, hinting at reality but full of feeling.

My current creative process

When I first started painting, I focused very much on painting from life.  This worked well with simple forms (like an apple), but when I took myself off plein air painting, I found I was often overwhelmed with what was in front of me, enslaved by the detail, even if I started out loose.

Out of this I developed a process of painting in the afternoons after my lunchtime walks, and I’d paint from my memory of that walk.  I’d take photos with my phone, so not large or great quality, and I use these back at home to establish composition and value, but that’s the extent of their use.  I found my paintings to be more colourful, looser expressions of my local landscape.

Though I’m mostly happy with this process – a process I now realise lots of other artists use, to avoid become overwhelmed and tight with detail – sometimes it’s still not loose enough for me.

Exploring approaches

So, I began to think what other ways are there that I could abstract my landscape work.  What other materials or objects could I use to construct a composition?  I came up with three (mainly because I had them round the house):

• beach pebbles
• collage from magazine cuttings
• my photographs

I know this last one seems pointless  (given what I wrote earlier in the post), but I have a ton, and if I could learn better how to use them in an abstracted way, it might bring surprises.

In this post I’m exploring my idea with the humble but beautiful pebble. 

I gathered a pile of pebbles (usually they gather dust in my bathroom), some rough garden twine, and a view finder,  oh and a white envelope I had to hand as my “canvas” and started arranging them.  This is the best (yes really) of what I came up with:

The idea was, well, a few things.  One, I was trying to use the definite shapes of the pebbles to suggest something that might pass for a landscape, and that those shapes add interest, particularly to the foreground, two, squinting helps, as always, three, see how I used the twine to make a path! and four , it amused me that I was using something from the landscape to create a landscape.

I did in fact construct several compositions, but they’re really not noteworthy.  And…this is also the stage at which I began to feel a little bit foolish.  I wondered if this was a little too contrived.  After all, this wasn’t purely about enjoying a process as such – it was exploring a new way of getting to a slightly familiar place.  Or, perhaps I wasn’t really open to this concept as I thought.

I did see the exploration through though.  You can see in my sketchbook I have thumbnails of the different compositions I tried.  I thought actually the size of the pebbles too small, so I grouped them into larger shapes, outlined in blue pen, then re-drew them below.

 

You can see from those large shapes there is something vaguely landscape emerging from the thumbnails.  I couldn’t resist doing a couple of colour thumbnails at the bottom.    From my notes I seem quite pleased with how things are turning out!  Though I do question whether the approach felt authentic for me.

The thing about this process is that it isn’t, and I suppose can’t ever be, random and therefore abstract.  I arranged the pebbles and twine.  I had landscape in my head.  Perhaps it was always going to turn out like that.  So I’m undecided about the value of this approach, to me anyway.  I also think I need to be clearer in my mind the difference between abstract and simplicity, as I’ve realised I use both words interchangeably and they’re not the same thing at all!

The next part of the process was to do a few small size colour studies of the same composition.  Why I brought colour into it I don’t know – this was about simplifying landscape compositions.  At this point though, I was having a ton of fun…

 

I used acrylics for this (not my usual medium).  I used the same colours on each painting, aaaanndddd – I used not only a smaller brush to make lively marks, but it was a filbert!  And I usually use a one size flat throughout, so that was a little experimentation I really loved.

And at the end of it?

The main headline from this little experiment is – where’s the inspiration?  Arranging beach pebbles on the back of an envelope doesn’t inspire me as much as taking a walk then painting what I feel when I get home.  Only I can’t quite manage to paint what I feel.  Which is where this whole thing began.

I’m tempted to by pass the collage exploration and go straight to photographs, as I’ve learned from this that I prefer to feel an emotional connection with a place to paint….and yet, having said that….I really loved doing these little colour studies, and to me they are full of feeling and emotion.  Do I need to stand back?  Get out of my own way?  After all, feelings come from within don’t they?

Not too cool for school

For a while now I’ve really felt like I’m going round in circles with my landscape painting (I may have said this already, in which case I’m turning into my mother).

I wonder if my lack of formal art education and limited experience (I’ve only been painting for around 2 years) is really beginning to show when it comes to moving through blocks and getting to the next level in my work.

One of my problems is I still feel very much in the exploratory stage of landscape painting – I don’t want to put my stake in the ground just yet and fix on a style.  I know I’m not a realist painter.  Detail overwhelms me and I quickly lose interest, so painting every hair on a cat isn’t ever going to happen.  On the other hand I also struggle to really distill the essence of a landscape, to simplify it so it just hints at what it might actually be.

So I’m somewhere in the middle – painterly, impressionistic, expressive, veering in and out of these styles to varying degrees depending on how I feel about what I’m painting that day.

The other thing that’s tripping me up lately is colour.  I can’t believe I’m saying that, but it’s true.  It’s not often I use local colour in my work, but I had sort of forgotten that what I used to do was start with a more localised colour palette, and then add some bling to it.  I’ve been in this phase lately of starting with the bling and getting in all sorts of muddles.

The other thing I’m always looking to improve on is composition.  My landscapes tend to be large scenes in the distance, with a lot of sky.  For the most part that’s what I like, but I also feel a need to explore life through my brushes from a smaller vista, closer up.

So, it’s back to basics for me:

Blocking in and the first pass

These are my first rocks ever!

 

The Instagram connection

Well, this graphic is a little dramatic but I liked how it sounded!

It’s Friday night, I have a toothache, a ton of stuff to do and really all I want to do it have someone cook me dinner and bring me a glass of wine.  Oh wait. Someone is cooking me dinner. My man really takes care of me, and in case you think I don’t know it, believe me, I do.

 

I love Instagram.   I’ve mentioned it before here.  But, I just have something I need to get off my chest.

My approach to following accounts on Instagram is this:  I proactively follow people I am genuinely interested in.  Yes, mostly they are other artists, but I also follow people who’s feed show me things I wouldn’t otherwise see – pictures of glaciers, cute puppies, the snow in Boston last year, the view from a hilltop in Cheshire, the mountains of Estonia.

I never start following someone unless I like what they are posting, for it’s own sake.  And I don’t expect a follow in return (okay, that’s a lie.  There’s an exception to this, which I’ll explain later).Of course some followers aren’t going to follow you back.  Like National Geographic.  Why would they? And I don’t take it personally.

However, I do generally follow back most people that follow me first, unless I really dislike their feed (spammy, porny or just… not awful, but not my cup of tea either). And I kind of like that – I don’t mind reciprocating the follow, and I’ve met some fabulous people that way that I otherwise may never have come across.  After all, we’re all there for the same purpose:  to promote ourselves and what we do.

So that’s my two pronged approach – a proactive follow and a reactive follow, both equally valued.

Then there is this:  those people who spend their energy following random accounts they have no interest in, other than to garner a potential follower in you.  They might even comment and like posts.  They follow you.  You like their feed and follow back….and then they promptly unfollow you. It’s like they don’t know there’s an app that tells you who unfollowed you.  What sort of networking is this?  It seems so misguided to me.  And shallow.  I imagine in real life these people either used to sell used cars or mobile phones and wore shiny suits.

I’ve no problem with people changing their minds: sometimes you follow someone and after a while you find their feed is not for you.

Then there are other folk, who you kind of think might follow you back:  they have a similar number of followers, they make art too, so you have something in common.  And if they’re local to my region – well that just makes me so happy!  So I follow them for two reasons – one because I like what I see in their feed, but also because they’re local.  And I hope they follow me back, because who knows, one day we might bump into one another at some event or other, eh?  And then they don’t.  There is silence.

And this, I realise is the problem.  Whilst I have no shame in saying yup, too right I’m on Instagram trying to promote my work ultimately and grow an interested audience, I’m also looking for meaningful connections.  And I have found them with some folk – you know who you are 🙂

It’s this game of Instagram I don’t like.  This is where, sometimes, the veneer slips, the disingenuous stands out and it all looks rather self serving and meaningless.

Besides, I really can’t quite believe folk would want a quantity of followers over quality of followers.

Christ my toothache really has put me in a bad mood!  Time to chill and stop brooding.  Cheers!