After Schiele - bodies

"....the urge to look is interconnected with the mechanisms of disgust and allure." From Schiele by Grange Books.

All I want for Christmas is.....

..... postcards, for my Tate Modern eternal calender, please. The pack came with lots of postcards to use, including some on the back of the months and numbers (there's a funny story about that which I'll tell another day). But they're not all my cup of tea. I already have a postcard from Gesa of her own artwork (bottom left in the calender) which is very special to me.

So I'd love more cards to use in the New Year. I'll put the address in the comments.

Artists & Illustrators Magazine

Last month an article of mine was published in A&I. It's a magazine that my dad subscribed to some years ago, and he got me a subscription as a birthday gift a couple of years ago, which I've continued ever since.
A&I magazine is full of works by all kinds of working artists, and hobbying artists, and budding artists. I used to have it in my head that the only artists around were Rolf Harris, Maggi Hambling, Tracey Emin, Damien Hurst and Lucian Freud.
But here's where some of them are featured, and they're a pretty human bunch.

Through blogging I have made many friends like Gesa, Vivien, and Chris. Casey Klahn is another person who has mentored me over the last couple of years. He is an award winning artist based in Washington State, USA, and he has honoured my by featuring my sunflowers on one of his blogs, Pastel.
In the mean time I have been getting on with painting the rosehips I gathered on Monday, and re-organising my studio space. It's becoming a place I like to retreat to, and I'm managing to grab what time I can in between all the other demands on my time. For example, last night I did 40 minutes painting straight after the school run, and painted the two top-left rosehips shown here. Then, after cooking tea and dropping my two kids off at Karate practice, I had another 45 minutes to add the bottom-right rosehip, and fix and re-position a book case in the studio. During which I listened to a recording of Mendelssohn's Elijah. Stirring stuff.

Karl de Vroomen

I visited Newcastle Upon Tyne today to see the Newcastle University Master of Visual Arts show at the Hatton Gallery. I have to admit that I was not grabbed by any of the work there, much to my disappointment, with one exception. The exception being Karl de Vroomen. His work was mighty and majestic. Very simple and strong and quite compelling. I especially loved Old Oak. His statement for the show was;

"The imagery for my paintings comes either from personal memory or is chosen in order to articulate a universal concern. On all occasions I am inspired by man's fractious relationship with the natural world. These paintings are borne out of a mixture of anxiety, hope and love of paint."

I hope to visit the Newcastle Gateshead Arts Fair in October, and I'm drawing up an art calender so that I don't miss out on future exhibitions in the North East.

David Hockney - I'm excited

Some months ago I saw David Hockney's documentary 'A Secret Knowledge' and it changed my world, for a short time. As I tend to do, I immediately rang my dad, then my older sister who is getting into Art, and raved about it for about an hour each. If you've never seen it, David identified links in the way artists used to depict the world in their pictures, and then identified a fundamental change. He goes on to discover the secret science behind that change.

Apart from opening my eyes to pictures I'd only ever glanced at for years as an art student, it showed me how passionate Hockney is about works of art, and about the making of art. He was intelligent, down to earth, passionate, excitable even. This was a guy I wanted to learn more about.

Jump forward to this Christmas and I get a book about David Hockney from said sister, Mel. The foreword alone by Paul Melia dn Ulrich Luckhardt was full of ideas and questions before I'd got to page 9. My mind already buzzing, I flicked through images of Hockney's work and saw the journey he'd taken. Then I stopped dead on page 155, a drawing of a Van Gogh-esque woven yellow chair, drawn with an altered perspective. He explains "In the theory of one-point perspective the vanishing point is infinity and the viewer is an immobile point outside the picture. If the infinite is God, we never connect, but if perspective is reversed the infinity is everywhere, infinity is everywhere, infinity is everywhere and the viewer is now mobile (is this better theologically?)."

This alteration in perspective grabs me and holds me. I know it's wrong but there seems to be some kind of truth to what he's trying to portray here. I am mad? There's potential here for me to investigate. It ties in the with 'Trudging' image I've been playing with for a while which depicts an altered perspective of a pavement and the buildings rising up on either side.

Wow!

I came across this painting about a year ago, though I have no remembrance of how I found it on the Internet. I'll have been doing a Google image search of something. Anyway, I just love it. It's Everett Shinn's 'Tightrope Walker', painted in 1924, currently at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. I know nothing about the painter, but this painting grabs me. Why? Because of the great composition, the white figure top-centre and the chandelier top-left, and the lit archway mid-right. I love the rough rendering of the audience and architecture of the theatre, and the strong verticals of the stage, the acrobats limbs and gaze, and the sense of space he's created. This figure really is teetering on a wire, high in the gallery of the theatre, with a great void below and around him. It's dramatic, an I'm spellbound.
So I thought I'd share it with you because I haven't any of my own works to post about at the moment.

Submerged in art

Sorry for such a long absence. But I'm back blogging again, and I hope to keep it up.

I've been submerging myself in art recently so I have lots to talk about and share with you. I had the chance to visit Liverpool, which has been granted City of Culture status for 2008, an outstanding achievement for the place I was brought up between the ages of 10 to 18, formative years you'll agree. While there I spent some hours in the Tate Liverpool, in the Twentieth Century exhibition. This was split across two floors, covering (loosely) figurative work on one, and abstract work on the other. I went with my younger sister and her arty husband, and we had a great time. We managed to classify all the work into the following categories-

1. Wow, I like this, it really speaks to me. (eg Alberto Giacometti's Man Pointing)

2. Walk straight past, this is pants. (eg Boetti's Nothing to See, Nothing to Hide)

3. Urghh, this is disturbing, it speaks volumes but I can't handle it (this category was discovered by my younger sister, which unfortunately meant I could not stop to look at any Francis Bacon or Arnulf Rainer).

4. I like this. Why do I like this? It's not the kind of thing I usually like, but 15 minutes later we're still stood here talking about it.

Sorry not to link hundreds of images here, though I'd dearly love to, but I just want to show a study of one of the pieces that fell into the last category; Man Caught Up with a Yellow Object by John Latham.

It is a big image, with a fantastic torso against what may be a crucifix standing on a dark landscape. His head may be uncomfortably twisted up towards the sky, it's not clear to make out. There's a lot of ambiguity in this image, but underneath there's a great knowledge of anatomy and composition. What appears, at first glance, to be a mess in the middle of a roughly painted canvas actually held our attention for nearly half an hour. If there'd been a bench and coffee on hand, we'd have been there longer.
Well dont to the Tate Liverpool for compiling such a wonderful collection of works.

I'm lost for words...

Chris Bolmeier has just granted me the Arte y Pico Blog Award. I'm lost for words, so here's what she said about me;

This young girl is a breath of fresh air. She loves to draw and right now involved in a Moleskine exchange. She loves sketching and her mark making is quite amazing and beautiful. She drew and washed a self portrait in the buff. Yellow wrote about the process of deciding to do this. Her observations and comments are very humorous so are the comments of her readers. She is from the U.K.

Now you can see why I'm gobsmacked.

Moleskine Exchange beginning

A while back I invited a group of artists to join me in an exchange of Moleskine sketch books. We bought one each, and each chose a theme for the book. Then we drew or painted in them and sent them onto the next artist on the list. My subject was Genesis, and here's the start I made in it before I sent it on to Casey in America. I couldn't post the image immediately because I wanted Casey to be the first to see it when the book arrived on his door mat.
When I first thought of the theme I had no idea what I was going to depict, so I started reading the Bible (as you do) for inspiration. It then became clear that, as I was going to be the first person drawing in this book, I was the creator of the book. So I chose to paint myself as the creator, with chaos above, mimicking William Blake's pose in his 'The Ancient of Days'.
I am very excited to see what Casey draws next in my book. Since then I've received Vivien's book themed 'Landscapes', and Gesa's book themed 'Lines', but I can't post images of them yet because Casey hasn't yet received them.

Energy and life

I was looking up other artist's self portraits on the weekend and I came across this one by Sapphire Frater. As she's a living-working artists, as opposed to a dead, mouldering one, I emailed her to ask permission to post this picture and she graciously agreed.
I love it, just love it. It's direct, honest, and it communicates so much about the way she works.
Sapphire mentions Jung and Der Blaue Reiter as some of her influences, which is funny because I was just thinking about synthesism the other day, specifically regarding music and the visual arts. I am a Romanticist in my choice of classical music, and my younger sister has been mailing me CDs to listen to while I'm working. When I'm drawing or painting I admit to not being able to 'hear' the music playing in the background, but it is there, and I'm sure it has an effect, because sometimes I'll take it into my head that the music is all wrong, leap up and change the CD. Something is definitely going on there.

Moleskine Exchange

I've just come across some of these while reading other artist's blogs. What a fab idea; a small bunch of artists, from about 3 to about 12, decide to buy, draw or paint in, and them swap Molekine sketchbooks. They're the small Japanese accordian ones, only 3.5" x 5.5" small.

I know someone who participated in a quilting round robin, and it sounds like a similar idea.

In the group who's activities I'm watching, Moly x 12 , some have chosen a theme for their books, such as 'green' and 'horizon' others are just letting it go with the flow. Sounds like a great idea.

I've contacted one lady who missed joining the Moly x 12 group, and am hoping she'll respond. So if anyone's interested in setting up an exchange, please get in touch. Here's hoping.

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.

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.

Art Collecting

A year ago, around about now, I started drawing and painting after a long gap (long story) and I also started looking at other artists works. I was in a muddle as to what I liked and what I didn't like, and I'd never before looked at the work of people who are making art NOW either, as my sources had been history books and museum galleries.

Anyway, I've discovered some great artists in the last year (I'll blog more about them in the future) and I've also learnt that these artists have works that I can buy.

Now, I know a lot of you reading this will be thinking "Duh! Well yeah!". Well, okay, probably not those exact phrases, but maybe something along the lines of "My goodness me, this girl is slow". But really, this was an eye opener for me at the time.

So, having looked back through the blogs I view on a regular basis, I have recently decided to purchase some works of art, and this is the first one I've bought;

It's called Winter Sunshine by Sarah Wimperis aka Muddy Red Shoes and I hummed and haa'd for a day or so before I decided that I really wanted to have this in my house and took the plunge. When it arrives I'll tell you what it's like in the flesh, but just from the image on Sarah's site I was fascinated by the way that so little detail on the characters themselves could communicate so much, and yet there's a multitude of colours in the background which only add to the story. The perspective she's used is strong and simple, and the shadows the people cast are as much of a draw for me as the rest of the painting put together. I'm very excited for this to arrive. I don't yet know how I'll frame it or where I'll hang it. And I wish Sarah all the luck in the world as she's currently moving home, and I look forward to her picking up the blog again when she's settled.

Jared Shear - Working on a theme

I found the Cougar Peak site earlier this year, and I've followed it on and off for some time. Jared Shear has been painting the scene across from his house (lucky guy to have this view) every day through 2007. It's just amazing how diligent he's been and how he's managed to re-invent and keep the momentum.

The painting I've shown here is number #317 done on 13 November 2007.

Some of his paintings are serene, some very overcast, some are livelier than others. But they each tell a story, and as a collection they're astonishing.

When he's done he intends to hold an exhibition showing all of the series, but as he's from Montana my chances of attending are slim to nil. Still, it's lovely to dip into his site on a regular basis.

http://cougarpeakaboo.blogspot.com/