Rocks, studiously

High Falls Gorge, Lake Placid

I hung the new landscapes of the Eastern Townships over the fireplace last week and, for a lark, quizzed three-year-old Ada on the effects of different lights on the paintings. We have several lamps in our living and dining room, each with different light colours. She surprised me by easily pegging how each light brought out different colours in the paintings.

Above is my rendition of High Falls Gorge near Lake Placid, which we visited last year. My teacher describes painting as problem-solving. I found balancing the palette and finding the right brush and stroke to be the most challenging parts. I already knew that colour and line mattered a lot to me, but texture was a main event this time.

Scratchify no. 2

This picture fits with my toys post from January. Never drawn toys before, which seems odd when I think about it. Since they're everywhere. We have a small house, no playroom, so our home mixes Rainbow of Plastic with Roadside Furniture Treasures. (Or, as I like to call it, "British Colonial.") It's a mess. Chewed over playthings can be found every which way, including the kitchen table, which is where I was when I began this drawing.

I stopped working on this eventually, though I think it would look better with another, larger toy at bottom (maybe the side of a doll's face?). Scratchboard is great, but I don't think it's for me. I can't figure out why. That's probablyy why it took a month for me to realise I was not going to finish this picture -- because I didn't want to!

I have a terrible time knowing which voices in my head to listen to when it comes to picking subjects, media, and whatever in art. My teacher told us about a book called The Widening Stream, which is apparently all about that sorta thing. I checked it out of the library but found it too spiritual for me. It doesn't fit my reality [ref. para. 1, above]. Oh well, onward I trudge.

Ottawa art: what's stirring me these days

Painting rocks and water and skies lately. It's hard and delightful. I feel my work developing quickly and I think I will really miss this stage. I struggle with which colour to use or which brushstroke. Something is growing but I can only help it along through trial and error. Areas of my current painting are getting re-painted over and over. It means I have nothing to show right now, so I thought I'd share some artists and paintings I'm loving lately, mostly by local artists. First, three paintings, then some series of works. Yum yum yum.

by Claude Marquis. Title unknown.

(Marquis has no art website because his thing now is his music with the Ottawa-based band The PepTides). This painting must have been tough to do. First there's how well he executed the landscape, then there's the what's-that-she's-holding-oh-it's-a-gun moment. The two realities sort of... throb... against each other. Even if you don't like the subject, it's an amazing piece, I think.

Paul Huot Africa

Pierre Huot is an Ottawa-based artist who paints abstractly now. How has he managed to balance so many blues?

Rufino Tamayo Landscape with Rocks

Rufino Tamayo's Landscape with Rocks appears to have been a bit of a departure. The other paintings I could find online by this Mexican artist were quite different, often a bit violent in tone, featured roaring animals and barren land. Very compelling as you can imagine. In this painting, I love all the different shapes and brushstrokes. It's so alive!



Adrian Baker I gasped when I saw the series on women giving birth. I've never seen anything like this, ever.
Click Labours of Love.

Karen Bailey Check out her work for the Artists in Afghanistan program. The medical staff paintings compel you. She has an interesting style for such a project -- it's not gritty, which contrasts with the subject matter. Would I ever love to join the Artists in Afghanistan program! Such an incredible, multi-dimensional challenge.

Philip Craig and his gorgeous landscapes. His mastery of colour! These are enjoyable, soft pieces that I want to look at again and again. My favourite is The Boat Slip, in catalogue 2008.

Sarah Hatton I linked directly to her series called Role Models. These close-up paintings of children wake the protective mother in me who never sleeps soundly anyway.

Jaya Krishnan has gallery after gallery of gorgeous scenes of Cambodia, but my favourite is his last gallery of amazing Ottawa snow scenes.

Mer Bleu out to pasture

February 2013

This is Mer Bleu peat bog... transformed into a wet September farmer's field! I wasn't equal to the challenge of painting tundra. Aw, be kind. It's my very first landscape. I finally finished it this morning and it's still wet!

Landscape!

Eastern Townships I

Since my Acrylic Landscape class with artist Blair Paul began, sketching has taken a back seat to painting. I'm so happy to paint again. I manage my three hour class and often another hour or two during the week.

Eastern Townships II

These are two paintings of a trail in Quebec. I don't feel finished with this subject, and hearing that, my teacher suggested I do a larger canvas. I'm mulling it over. 

Get perspective

January 2013

Savouring the AMAZING art on this agency website, I'm struck by all the slanted streets and fish-eye perspectives. See how this artist sloped the floor to emphasize our hero's fall into the pointy bits.

To play with perspective, you've got to get perspective. Well, I thought I did. And then last week I tried drawing simple road scenes. Like, generic road disappearing into the horizon from the viewpoint of someone standing on it.

Hahahahaha. Feels like you're about two storeys off the ground, no?

Tried the same with a piazza. Again, 20-foot tall viewer. Tried doing a car coming over a hill -- it looked like a beetle because the perspective on its back end was wrong.

In art class, my painting of a boardwalk receding into the distance looks like we're standing on a balcony. I mean, this is a problem. It sucks that my painting doesn't look the way I want it to, simply because I don't know how to do what I want!

So this week I'm passionately about understanding perspective. My goal is to be able to draw a scene with the viewpoint and depth that I want on my first try. Curvy road winding down a hill and behind some mountains? Street scene seen from around the corner? These should come easily, right?

A bird's eye perspective on the Chrysler Building's gargoyles from a 45 degree angle, okay, that would be a headscratcher for anyone.

I already know about two-point perspective, even though I don't understand why we stick these mysterious vanishing points in one place or another. I have (yay me!) figured out the horizon line is the viewer's eye level. If a line of trees is coming at you in the picture, the canopies will slant upward above the horizon and visible tree roots will slant below it.

And that's where I run into a wall.

Help, Internet? Ah, says Internet, perspective's way more complicated than you thought, Lia. For example, Rule #4:

4. For two sets of parallel lines at some angle in the scene, the two vanishing points form that same angle at the viewer's eye, regardless of the orientation of the angle in space. In particular, the vanishing points for any 90º angle in space form a 90º angle at the viewer's eye.

Get it? Me neither. But I am persevering!

The Montreal poets of 1998

Every once in a while (an embarrassingly short while, to be honest), I Google lost friends and lovers. What ever happened to...? Listening to CBC Radio's The Next Chapter this week, I heard an interview with someone who edited a book of poetry by Canadians named Susan. She'd managed to narrow it down to 47 Sue's. With difficulty, apparently.

I was barely listening. She started to name them. "...Susan Musgrave, Susan somebody, Susie blather, Susan Elmslie...."

Sue Elmslie?

In the old days before I threw over the arts in favour of government and diplomacy, I helped put together a small poetry workshop that made up for being short-lived by being terrific. (I guess that doesn't make up for it. Makes it worse, really.) There were five of us. And we wanted to keep it that way. The local self-avowed poetry maven who ran a workshop that fairly vomited wannabe-poets even rang our members up and excoriated us for being exclusive.

Our group was excited about words. We loved how they fondled and frowned together. And, getting back to Google, Sue Elmslie was one of us. So were Rachel Rose, Fran Hahn and Masarah Van Eyck. They were terrific writers. More shockingly, some of them still are. (Well, I could never find Fran online, but I'd bet she's still at it.) I hardly write poems anymore but if you want to pore over my verse, be my guest.

Here are some poems of Sue's and some of Rachel's. Masarah's site is down, but maybe she'll post again someday and I will edit this entry.