Plastic Pyracantha

I painted this canvas working from the pencil drawing I'd done earlier. I'd wanted to paint it from life, but I was busy with the children all day and then it got dark.

So, after tea, while the rest of the family watched Blackadder, I sat in the corner of the living room and painted, gently rebutting my four year old daughter's kind offers of assistance.

I worked in acrylics, because my husband has a bad chest and turps fumes aren't nice to him. Anyway, I only tend to paint with oils in the garage, or in the kitchen with the back door open for ventilation. And oil paint, turps and kids aren't a good mix.

The acrylics' drying rate was good and, at the same time, bad. Good, because I could use a hairdryer to dry the under-painting. Bad, because I got mixed results when I worked back over areas I'd only painted 20 minutes earlier. I need to read up to see what I can mix with them to keep them workable for longer.

When I'd finished this painting I immediately started preparatory work on a larger painting based on the nine charcoal studies I'd done. Fortuitously I had a ready-cut piece of board measuring 50cm square, perfect for 3x3 10cm blocks with a 5cm boarder. I painted the boarder in white acrylic gesso in an overlapping grid, which echoes my garden trellis. Now I'm pondering what colour to use as a background for the blocks. I may just use the neutral pink which I used on the long canvas yesterday, or I may use a range of tones. No, I want the Pyracantha branches to be the main feature, and varying the backgrounds will just be an unwanted complication. I'll keep it simple.

Oh, the title of this post comes from the fact that I used acrylic paints which are, after all, plastic.

Pyracantha!

Thank goodness I got that sorted out. The species of the tree in my garden has been bugging me for weeks now.

The wind is blowing, but leaning against the kitchen back door I have a great view of my pyracantha in the corner of my back garden. Soon it will be covered in blossom, and then the leaves will come out, though there's still a fair covering of dark green leaves high up as it's an evergreen. Even later in the year there'll be masses of small orange berries, which the blackbirds will feast on all winter long.

But for now it's bare and graphic against the wall.

Once Upon a Time.....

.......I was an art student. I studied Glass and Ceramics at Sunderland Polytechnic, which became the University of Sunderland in my final year when the government decided to scrap 'poly's and turn them all into 'uni's.

I was based in a lovely old Victorian building called Backhouse Park, sitting in it's own grounds. It was nicknamed Fraggle Rock, and we art students were referred to by the more 'academic' students as Fraggles, because of our colourful hair, clothing and nutty behaviour. I loved being a Fraggle.

This is me as an art student, holding Yellow Ted, who is my life-long friend, quite literally.

Before I went to college I loved art; drawing, painting, doodling, designing..... College killed it for me, having to justify everything all the time to tutors who's work you didn't actually rate, and who seemed more interested in coming out with glib comments, instead of actually teaching you anything. It was artistically draining and exhausting.

College social life was great, I had fantastic friends, and that's where I met my husband. But the time doing the course was life-sucking, and it has taken me nearly 15 years to start drawing again.


How I dream of being immersed in a stimulating environment, surrounded by like-minded bohemians, with tutors who are mentors, and access to facilities I could only dream of at home - printing presses, kilns, woodworking and metalworking workshops, glass furnaces, acid baths, sandblasting guns, sunlight, hot chocolate, the smell of turps, the sound of Mendelssohn....
But I don't think that place exists anywhere. Van Gogh wanted to create such an environment when he invitied Gaughan to his Yellow House. But it quickly fell apart. If I won the lottery, I'd build my own Yellow House, and you're all invited to join me.

Keep your mind on the driving......

But it's so hard. If I'm in the car with the kids it's actually easier, because I'm making an effort to ignore their antics and drive carefully. But when I'm on my own, especially on the drive to and from work, it's easy for my mind to wander. This is one of the sights I pass on the way into my work each day (in fact this would be the view in my rear-view window on the drive home, as I took this photo on a late December afternoon, but you get the idea, yes?).

This time of year, when driving on a morning I'm heading west with the sun low in the sky behind me. This can cast a gleaming pale yellow light onto the buildings I pass. And if there's a stormy sky in the west, blowing down from the Scottish Boarders, then the gilded houses are set against a dark grey-blue sky. That's when I say a prayer of thanks to God, and start singing 'Then Sings My Soul, or suchlike.

But it's also when I am known to start swearing too. You see, hubby got me a compact digital camera for Christmas, and I have cursed often for not bringing it with me when I see such a glorious sight. When we went to Vienna last year I only took out my other camera once on the whole trip, as it's a digital SLR, and it's very bulky. That's why he thoughtfully bought me a teeny tiny one, for my arty stuff.
So, at last, I've found how to re-charge the battery for it, and how to download from it, and now it's residing in my bag.

So if you're driving behind me on the way into work, and you are familiar with seeing me swerving as I catch sight of a bird, or a nice view, please now keep your distance even more, as I might just slam on the breaks and leap out with my camera in hand. You have been warned.

Wordless Wednesday

Clock #3, put to bed

I much prefer the canvas this way round. Portrait ways up rather than landscape.

I spent about 5 minutes just looking at it, then I drew in some verticals, and added some lines to a vanishing point in what I think of as the middle of the clock face. Then I added some yellow and grey oil pastels, and drew the numbers in more detail.

I think it doesn't work because I have no idea what I feel about it, what I'm trying to portray here. There's no message or clear emotion coming from me. So I'm going to set it aside for the time being, and leave it until I think of something that could give it purpose.

My tree

It's really starting to bug me, what kind of tree this is. If I remember rightly it's technically a shrub which was planted by the previous owners, and grew tall as there's little light at ground level.

This is an oil board, about A4, which I covered with a thin layer black and red acrylic. When it was dry I squeezed out a load of white acrylic, and smeared it around with a plastic palette knife, then started scraping back to the black to describe the trunk and branches. After a while I added some green, and then some red as a contrast, and mixed all three to make a pale grey/lilac to suggest the floor and the wooden planter.

I hate it as a painting, but I loved it as an exercise. I should really do some more of these to see where they lead.

William Hunt

I love my dad. I really do. I can't express how much I love him.
Some years ago, dad and I drove in his camper van up to Northumberland. Just the two of us for a long weekend. We had little idea of where we'd end up, apart from a list of Caravan Club parking sites he'd looked up.
We pootled along at about 45mph, both of us peering at whatever took our fancy. We stopped here and there, followed road signs which looked inviting, or tracks which looked intriguing. I'll never forget that weekend. I took a photo one evening while dad was writing in his diary, which he'd give to mum to read when he got back. The photo is on my bookcase at home. Yesterday afternoon I had the urge to draw, so I looked round to see what struck me, grabbed my charcoal, and took my time on this.
I love my dad. I really do.

Alnmouth drawings

Following on from the previous post, here are the drawings I did from Derek's prints at the Schoolhouse Gallery. The home-made accordian sketchbook was perfect for this exercise. Thanks again, Laurelines, for that great idea.
At Alnmouth beach there were huge blocks of concrete positioned along the high-tide line, protecting the sand dunes which lined the small golf course beyond. They reminded me of the desolated city shown in the Terminator films, and I wondered it they had been purpose made, of it they'd been reclaimed from a broken building somewhere, to be put to this good use. The beach itself was spotless. I'm used to Roker beach which gets a lot of regular local use, and a lot of summer visitors. It's strewn with small pieces of worn plastic, glass and pottery. the only man-made debris at Alnmouth were a couple of washed up lobster pots and the odd broken tennis balls discarded by over-enthusiastc dogs. There were also hundreds upon hundreds of yellow and orange conical shells. I collected a bagfull, and I may draw them sometime.

Art by Derek Jones

Yesterday my cousin Amy and I drove up to Alnmouth to the Schoolroom Gallery to see an exhibition of prints by Derek Jones. I was blown away by his work. His use of Intaglio, my first exposure to this technique, was astonishing, and the addition of coloured tissue to the prints added areas of colour which enhanced his work. But what I really loved was his composition. The way he arranges a figure on a page, the way he positions a head on a face, and what he chooses to omit spoke of a feeling for composition which seemed more intuitive than contrived.

His work was displayed opposite another printmaker, but both my cousin and I preferred Derek's work of the two. Unfortunately I couldn't afford to buy any of Derek's pieces, but I did choose a print by another Northumberland Artist, Mike Bell, but more about that in a later post.

After coffee in the galley, the owner of which was a very friendly, helpful and chatty chap, we drove the Alnmouth beach and sketched in the sun and the wind. We took the coast road back down to Roker and had fun the whole while. My cousin Amy is such good company and, being a fellow artist, knows what I'm raving about, at least some of the time.