Parc! OmegAAH!

Parc Omega, May 2014

Come on, doesn't it sound like that in your head?

A spring day trip to Montebello, Quebec led to this painting. Parc Omega is a safari park and I loved this tiny island in its lake. If you've never been, the ferry route from Ottawa to the park is more picturesque than the road one, and the kids love the car on a boat thing.

Apart from the lake looking a bit nuclear, this one's alright.

Paint like draw

Hog's Back, June 2014

I took an an art class this spring and am proud to show off one of my latest paintings! With a busy job until the fall, there isn't much time for all this, but I figured I could get closer to working on the purse painting by taking another landscape course with Blair Paul. Since that painting will mostly be landscape, something I've got little practice with, this course was useful practice.

From talking to Blair about developing my own style, I realised that I already had a style in the media I use a lot - pencils, pens and markers. To discover my own painting style, I had just had to paint the way I drew. As easy as all that. Who knew?

Once September begins, I move to a new, more relaxed assignment and I will prioritise my favourite pastime again. But until then my focus is on the kids and work. They made me a manager earlier this year, something I had some experience in but not much, and there's a lot to learn. It's wonderful, frankly. I'm not one of those people who'll ever moan about managing, but it is hard and I have some miles to go before I will be comfortable.

This painting is of the torrent that is Hog's Back.

Assume nothing

November 8, 2013

Working out some more thoughts about the purse painting. What would the expression of a girl discovering adulthood be? I'd imagined sobriety and nervousness -- my own anxieties about girlhood in our culture were projected on her face -- but maybe it would be anticipation. A few months ago I realised that I was confident in my son's future and worried about my daughter's - and that rather than transmitting my nerves to her, as inevitably I would over time, I needed to have more faith in her.

What's in her purse?

Thinking about the girl knee-deep in the lake, looking in the purse. It's an adult woman's purse. She's little, though, maybe six. Under the surface her legs bend, distorted by the waves and sunlight coming through at an angle. Her toes grip the pebbly lake bottom. Trees rise behind her, dark between the trunks. It's getting near sundown and the light is behind her, leaving a shine down the top of her head, across her cheek and arms. I am wondering, what do we give our girls?

When I think of this image, I remember... Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. The murky etymological relationship between purse and pussy. The loneliness of coming of age.

Image seeds

Moving slowly, learning and thinking more about the politics of childbearing and motherhood, feminism in art, women's meager inclusion in some cultural elites, the shaping of children's sexuality, socialisation of girls and boys. I know so little. 

But progress! My mind is keeping pace. For the first time I'm seeing how all these things could become pictures. I wanted to collect together references, a big pile of images, made up or found, that could grow into painting ideas. Yet already, yesterday, I thought of coat hangers -- tools of unsafe abortion, modelling industry. Crude, but the first concrete thing so far. Something you could draw. 

Today I imagined a little girl peering into a heart-shaped purse. She's standing up to her thighs in a pool of water. What is in the purse? What is underwater? 

My hope is that through this work I will be able to lay to rest some of the jarring conflicts I feel about my own person- and womanhood. I also want to give to my daughter a world less circumscribed by random customs, as my mother did for me, and this work could be a vehicle for sharing these thoughts with her. I don't know. So little has been worked out yet, and I know my technical abilities don't match my ambitions at this time.

Reading: Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, by Naomi Wolf.

The beginnings of a plan

Kicked out of work on behalf of my union's job action, suddenly I've had time to deal with my art questions. And after a couple of days to think, wander around, no one after me for a snack, change of clothes, whatever... it returns in a flood. The rush of ideas, the fever to produce something creative, the dread of actually delving in. Creativity.

This morning, not finding anything at the bookstore, I dropped in on the Ottawa School of Art and asked Lauren at the counter for advice on planning a series of paintings. Something like How to Write a Novel, but for artists. Everything else is out there, how to paint a face, how to paint cats, painting in encaustic, drawing from life or in the woods, but nothing on how to take a cloudy idea and turn it into a few pictures.

Off the top of her head, she came up with nothing, but luckily for me her Googling skills outpaced mine. She found a two-pager on a website called Empty Easel. And just like that, I have the beginnings of a plan. 

After scanning it intently on the sidewalk, I charged off to Galerie St Laurent+Hill. One of the too-many-to-count things I've learned from reading Alan Rusbridger is that I don't have enough information. The man interviewed scads of pianists, professional and amateur, and subjected himself to the direction of at least four teachers. He read books about his chosen project -- learning Chopin's G Minor Ballade -- and followed the progress of others engaged in attempting the same difficult feat via Twitter and Youtube. I'm too much alone by comparison, progressing slowly or not at all because of it.

I figured, maybe I should take in some series, get a sense of how others might have done it. But the gallery had no solo show on (come back for Leslie Reid on Thursday, I'm told), and both La Petite Mort and Terence Robert were closed.

At St Laurent+Hill I disappointed myself by not asking the man at his desk for any advice on concretising a broad theme that doesn't immediately call up images and turning it into them. He had a battered notebook in front of him, reams of paper, a weary but inviting face. Surely he's the curator, someone often at the side of many artists exploring ideas visually. I also know people so often love to talk - what am I so afraid of? Bothering people? Being a pest? No, it's that I hate to call attention to myself. What if I raise their interest, and then disappoint? Better to make no impression at all.

At home, emboldened, I tell my husband I will take the list of artists I like in Ottawa and fire off e-mails to every one of them. Won't they accept a free lunch from an amateur wanting a bit of advice? Hopefully I will have the courage to do it. 

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Four months I've let go by and I still haven't sorted out what to do next! I developed a lot of ambition this summer -- worked out in a basic way some characters and plotlines for a novel, thought vaguely about a poetry collection, dreamed up two related themes for a suite of paintings. Much of it in my head, but not much over all. I went easy on myself because one kid was starting school, another daycare, and I was going back to work. So no blogging, no art production, no writing. Well, enough time's trickled by, I guess.

I last planned out a major artistic project over two decades ago in high school, and I need advice. Loads of books exist on techniques for project management, as well as subjects like becoming more creative or persisting in spite of self-doubt or time restrictions. Are there any resources on the practical steps to taking a theme (say you wanted to do works on climate change, which I don't, but my themes are as broad) and turning it into a series of works? Is there a word for that part of the process, and does anyone know where you can learn more about that?

Guess I need to talk to people.

I'm reading a good book lent me by a colleague: Play It Again, by the impressive Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. He spent a year learning a difficult Ballade by Chopin, a song I used to half-play and that was outside both of our abilities, and by playing in small bursts, often merely twenty minutes, I suppose he managed it. I always assumed that if you had so little time, you might as well not bother. He also admits to a weak memory (never memorised a song, couldn't remember dates and events), but committed to memorising this complex, 9-minute-long song.

So I'm inspired/chastised on two counts! My lack of time and terrible memory are no excuse for anything. :) The fact that I'm no Alan Rusbridger, maybe I'll just not worry about that.