Sketchbooks

Faces Project
watercolor 4" x 6" sketch


I have been collecting artist's sketchbooks for a couple of years. These are four you might not have heard about. ( Of course everyone has heard of Danny's wonderful books: Everyday Matters and Creative License.)


The sketchbooks of Hiroshige

I love Hiroshige's art work but I love these sketchbooks for their spontaneity and freshness. With an amazing economy of line, he conveys the essence of his subject. Using sumi ink and watercolor, he brushes a zen like vision of his travels between Edo and Kyoto. Eventually these sketches led to his series of wood blocks called The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. (Now that's an idea for a project!)This book is actually tow shetchbooks in one. The second half is filled with illustrations for Japanese folk tales. Again, he used his signature economy of shapes.


The Diary of Frida Kahlo

This book is an exact replica of Kahlo's last journal. It includes drawings, collage, writings and sketches she later worked into paintings. The second half of the book offers and English translation of all the Spanish writings. Her lively pages provide a glimpse into her troubled heart and her deeply personal art process. I was very moved reading this journal.

True Nature by Barbara Bash

"This is the story of four solitary retreats spend in a cabin in the Catskill Mountains of up state New York". Barbara Bash, a children's book illustrator, blends her Buddhist meditation practice with sketching. I love the simple but elegantly rendered sketches in this book. You might also want to check out her children's books too. They are beautiful.


AYear in Japan by Kate Williamson

Kate beautifully illustrates her year in Japan and all of the unusual, cultural experiences she had. Its a beautiful, little travel journal.Danny Gregory introduced this author with a wonderful interview when she visited him last year. You can find the interview on his web site.

Faces Project

Watercolor 4"x6"

I've been moving toward work on my faces project and thinking of ways to integrate this with my interest in flowers. This is the first such fiddling around to test some ideas and get my creative juices flowing. I have not abandoned my waterways project. Rather, I'm visiting bridge sites and thinking about what direction I'd like to take the work.

Flowers

After dropping Kelsey off at school, I've been visiting the Chaney Mansion garden which is in full swing. The flowers are so beautiful and there are parts of the garden that have been crafted to look lively and loose....My style in paintings too.

I've been appreciating Katherine Tyrrell's Garden Project. She is posting her lovely art work, book recommendations and images of master painters who have also working on this theme. Very inspiring! (But everybody knows about her blog already.)Working in a series or on a project really helps to focus and artist.

Vivien too has wonderful flowers on her web site. Hers are really close up flowers and each one is a jewel! She also recommended a book by Shirley Trevena called Taking Risks With Watercolor
This is a great book for learning how to loosen up. She has a really great technique of putting a painting together bit by bit. She starts with the part of the still life that interests her the most. (Thanks Vivien!)


watercolor in large moleskin

August Floods

I'm happy to be back and have been thinking about and working with lots of new ideas. Kelsey is settled in school after her 9 month absence. She is doing 1/2 days at school and 1/2 days at home studying. It was a bit bumpy at first but she is gaining strength daily. A HUGE relief.

Taking a blog break allowed the space to think about new ways of working and approaching my work. Blogging has been an amazing experience...meeting wonderful people, seeing exciting and evolving art and getting feed back on my own. The down side is that sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed with input and have to clear my clogged creative channels. When I start to feel envy nipping at my hand, it's time to step back a bit and re gain my balance.

Build an Arc:

We have received more than our fare share of rain in these last two weeks and many counties have been declared disaster areas due to flooding. The Des Plains River has had the most damage both in Wisconsin and here in Illinois. This is a photo of the parking lot where Kelsey and I park when visiting Thatcher Woods. We usually park back by the trees in the mid ground. A bit shocking. Chicago avenue was closed and sand-bagged the day after I took this picture.

You can see here that the North Avenue bridge is inches from inundation!


One night Craig and I spotted a coyote trotting across the road. Clearly, all the wild life has been disrupted. Deer are now foraging for food in areas that are less private than they prefer. The ducks appear to be blissfully appreciating the increase in their real estate.

All this water has inspired me to work in water color again but this time with a change. I've flooded damp paper with waterproof India ink the worked back into it with water colors and oil pastels. This way of working was inspired by a recent post of Vivien's. The paper assignment in this post really got me excited. Also, I finally had a chance to really dip into the Christie's catalogues I picked up in NYC in July.

These drawings are worked on Fabriano Soft Press Paper. (Fast becoming my favorite surface!) I also piked up a few new water color tubes: Quinacradone Red and Gold. I just love these two colors and they really add punch to any color they are mixed with. The pale color you see that looks like mist is a Danial Smith Duo Tone color. This pigment has tiny chips that have two different colors on their sides so they optically "flip" depending on which angle you view them.


Thatcher Woods Flooded # 1
ink, watercolor and oil pastel on Fabriano SP paper



Thatcher Woods Flooded # 2
ink, watercolor and oil pastel on Fabriano SP paper


Thatcher Woods Flooded # 3
ink, watercolor and oil pastel on Fabriano SP paper

Here are a few images of artist's who have used ink and water color with really strong results. (From the Christie's catalogue Spring 2007)




Karl Schmidt
This is watercolor and ink on paper
Here is a link if you want to learn more about this amazing Expressionist artist. He is new to me and this small watercolor is a jewel!

Maruece De Vlminck
Also watercolor and ink on paper







Here is a link for his work also. I love how completely he captured a mood in his paintings.

Gone Fishin'

I'm taking a bit of a rest from blogging. I have heard that many Europeans take off the month of August for vacation.Next year I might do this and give my blog a month's rest. I'll be back in September with up dates on my Waterways Project and more. Hope everyone enjoys the rest of summer!

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

We are back from our vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Like all vacations, we had our wonderful times and our challenges. On the plus side, it was great to see my extended family from LA and spend time joking, eating (copiously), sweating and laughing.

This was our first visit to the south and I learned some new things about this area of the country. Many northerners make fun of hill people. I think this is true of rural folk in general. They suffer from being miss understood. I read a very interesting book by Horace Kephart called "Our Southern Highlanders". Kephart was an outsider who lived among and studied the people of Appalachia. He wrote at the turn of the previous century trying to capture a way of life that was dieing. The original settlers had come from Northern Ireland and were called Scotch Irish. Because of the rural isolation of the hills, they lived as they had done for a century with little change as of his visits to the area in 1910. Even though some of the language is archaic, I loved reading his work. Shortly after his work was published, he and others worked to save the land from the lumber companies who were beginning to strip whole mountains of old growth timber. In the 1930's The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was formed. All the mountain people were forced to leave or in some cases granted life time leases. The mountain way of life died with its last residents. Preserving the land however, was a great gift to the nation.

As we hiked some of the trails in the park, I was thinking of his description of life for the highlanders: rarely any running water, a simple diet of found food and what ever they could grow on a mountain side, miles from any sort of transportation. Often these people would have to use a sled to bring in supplies because the trails were not even accessible to a wheeled vehicle. The area holds the richest diversity of plant and animal live in the whole of North America.

IF you are interested, the film "Coal Miner's Daughter" tells the story of country singer Loretta Lynn who was born near this area. She, like Dolly Parton, was raised in a mountain cabin in extreme poverty and became fabulously rich from singing.





We visited Dollywood and let me tell you, this was an experience! Although I'm not really a huge fan of country music, Dolly Parton has endorsed a great little theme park. It was interesting to see the country (yes, commercial ) touches to this theme park. The staff, even in brutal 95 degree heat was genuinely friendly and helpful. The park was clean and had many air conditioned resting places. The one room cabin where Dolly Parton was born had been recreated and furnished by her mother to look as it did when she actually lived in it. That tiny cabin was home to her parents and her 10 sisters and brothers. Quite an amazing journey from Appalachian poverty to world wide star. If you like theme parks, I recommend it. (Kathy, Ruth: I'd say, NEVER is the soonest we three will be riding ANYTHING like that roller coaster again!)

When my brother-in-law heard we were going to rent a car for the trip (our aged and well loved Rav 4 has 105 ,000 miles on it and rides like a tin can), he offered us the use of his cushy sedan. Thanks Glenn and Kathy!! It was one of the high point of the trip! We are still getting use to the fact that we no longer have a built in temperature gage, compass and seat warmers which we used when the air conditioning got too cold. (JUST KIDDING!!!!!!!!!!!)

The down side was the weather. Most of the US was blanketed in a huge heat wave the whole week and the south saw record temps reaching triple digits for days. This was exhausting.....We spent time recovering from our forays to the land beyond the cabin. A few brave souls played mini golf in 107 heat and why you all weren't prostrate is a mystery. Some of us hiked the beautiful and extremely vertical Hen Wallow Falls trail. (Robert, have you recovered????)This was a very beautiful trip for which the admission price was a gallon of sweat. Well worth the journey.

The other down side is that occasionally the food requirements and preferences of 11 (!) people would drive some of us to distraction. Luckily, we had three wonderful, lively dinners at the cabin due to the cooking skills, cleaning skills and supervisory skills of various people.

I've decided I'm a really wimpy plein air worker. The heat really made me UNMOTIVATED as far as drawing and painting on the spot. I have plenty of photos to work from however and plan to do a couple of small series. These two are the best of a handful of pieces I did there.

Hugs and kisses to all my family. Thanks for all of your many gifts and thoughtful gestures too numerous to list here!

Waterways Project: Thatcher After the Storm

oil pastel over acrylic

Last month Kelsey and I visited Thatcher at the tail end of a huge thunder storm. (Seems to be pretty common this summer.) At the end of the storm, we walked the trail. It was predictably very quiet, except for some pretty insistent mosquitoes. It felt as though the land gave a great sigh of relaxation after the storm. The soil opened, flowers drooped a bit under the weight of water, everything seemed calm and still. We could not hear the furtive scufflings of small rodents in the under growth. We breathed in the magical calm.

Day Lilies

Two years ago, I divided up my day lilies and replanted them in several places in the garden. Last year, I had a pretty anemic show. This year, my senses have been assaulted by that urgent yellow/orange bursting out all over the place. I think I fed them some compost this spring so with all the wet weather, the blossoms are amazing this year. I'm using up all my New Gamboge watercolor paint! I'm loving the riot of color and planning for more riotous colors for two years from now. (cone flowers and Black Eyed Susan's)



The roses have long since finished blooming but the plants are growing like crazy. I love the rhythmic way the leaves grow 3 or 5 to a stem.

We have had some really wonderful news about Kelsey. Her blood numbers have all returned to normal! She is regaining health and strength and is looking forward to her Senior year of high school. We are all celebrating!

Anne Neely

While I was in New York City, Derek took me to an amazing book store:The Strand. This store is two floors crammed with new and used books to satisfy almost any one's idea of reading. Tucked up on the second floor was a bin of used Cristies Auction catalogues. They were very inexpensive and I bought several ones that covered auctions for masters works on paper. Hidden in between was a tiny catalogue on a show byAnne Neely called "What the Weather Brings". Her work is very dynamic and and abstract. Since it pays so much attention to water and atmosphere it snagged my eye. I also love her use of color. It's too bad the show was in March or I could have seen these beautiful paintings in person. If you go to her site, click on recent work to find the paintings from this show.

Waterways Project: Fog Over Zion

Oil Pastel over Acrylic

This is another one from the Zion series where we were camping last month. After the storms had rolled over the area, the temperature dropped and the mist rolled in over the beach. I have tried to capture the changing, dusky light here along with the fog. I had done a few watercolor sketches at the moment and used them along with some reference photos to work this one out in the studio. I have such vivid memories of this trip even though it was so short. The beach holds a special place in my heart( but I miss the Atlantic Ocean too).