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.

How do you expect me to work under these conditions!

Big sigh. I'm getting there. Clearing out the studio, that is. Dad bought me a big floor-standing easel, because the canvas for the self portrait I'm working on is too big for the table easel and my upright one, which he half-inched from school 25 years a ago for me, holds the canvas too high for me to reach it. I wonder if Toulouse Lautrec had to stand on a box to paint? And he was 2 inches taller than me in his stocking feet. Probably in his fishnet stocking feet, if the stories are true, but I digress. So I need to clear floor space for the new easel, which is still in it's box because there's no room to assemble it (I knew that 'mantle' wasn't the opposite of 'dismantle, and it took me a moment to remember what was). Luckily, some of the tables I'm currently dumping stuff on have screw-off legs, so they'll be coming down. I was desperate for storage space, so shelves have been put up in odd, and now inconvenient, places but I can work around those. It would just be nice to have nothing above waist level, so that my line of sight reaches all four walls, giving the appearance of space. I also need some wall space to hang my completed work and other images that stimulate me. However, the walls were built with industrial brick which is a bugger to drill into. The wall is too uneven to blue-tac stuff too, and it's brick painted with emulsion, so blue-tac slides off it eventually anyway.


Also, the idea for this self portrait is to depict both me and my studio, so I want to position myself so that the background is interesting, not just a chaotic mess of irrelevant stuff. At the moment it's filled with pink plastic boxed of mega blocs, camping equipment, the broken windsurfing gear our neighbour upstairs left behind, and other funny stuff. Actually, that makes it sound quite interesting. BUT, there isn't room to swing a cat, or a feather boa (sorry Toulouse, I couldn't resist. Given me ideas for another self portrait, but, again, I digress).


Last week clearing out I dropped off 10 bags and boxes at a nearby charity shop, and there's another three in my boot from yesterday ready to donate. I can now see the light from the tiny window in the corner, but there's still just too much stuff in there. I mustn't grumble, at least I have a space of my own to work in.

Much loved.

Here's the cards and pictures my beautiful two children made me for Mothers Day. In fact I was sitting on the loo when my son came in for a cuddle wished me a 'Happy Mothers Day' at about 6am. What a way to start the day. Followed by a fluffy pink-with-brown-dots dressing gown, a box of chocs, and a set of gardening tools enamelled in ditsy flowers. How cool. I don't think it was for Mother's Day, but Lisa got an amazing gift from her hubby.

After hubby cooked breakfast, we headed off to check out a kickboxing group I'm going to join. This is a totally not kind of me thing to do, but I'm really fired up about it. Just think, soon I'll look like Stephanie the Vampire Slayer.

When we got back I spent half an hour clearing the bottom end of my studio, and have spent this afternoon reading and lounging around with the family.

Anyway, roast duck for dinner after a long hot LUSH bath, me thinks. I hope everyone else is having a lovely day.

No room to swing a cat

My studio space in the garage at home. We are lucky enough to have a double garage, so hubby's car is in one side, my car is outside, and my art gear is in the other side.
But, it's a mess, and it's too full of stuff so I have to move things in order to work on other things. It's also used as a storage space for our camping gear, and large kids toys, spare clothes, bags of LPs, ......... You get the idea.
Well, now I'm having a clear out, Flylady-style. In a nut shell, that means 15 minutes a time.
Today I've binned a load of ripped cardboard boxes, and bagged baby toys to drop off at a charity shop, and I've offered our old travel cot on the NCT e-group I belong to.
All of this is to make more room so that I can fit in the new easel my dad has bought me (yet to be delivered - excitement mounting) and so that I have room to be working on more than one piece at any one time. I currently have 5 tables, ranging from a huge old coffee table, to a spare dining table, a school desk, and a small computer desk, and I don't want to get rid of any of these. I just need to get the space organised.
So, I'm not painting at the moment as I have other demands on my time and mind, but I am still pottering in the studio, 15 minutes at a time, with an eye to the future.

Studio self portrait - guided by Muddy Red Shoes

The painting I'm starting today follows on nicely from my previous entry; I've recently been following Sarah's site, seeing how one of her paintings comes into being, and she raised some interesting points about composition. This is something I've never given much thought to, but decided to try out for myself.

I am starting a new 3/4 length self portrait showing me painting in my studio. My canvas size is 24" by 30", a size I've never worked on before, but I'm in an ambitious mood, and I have a very good feeling about this one.

So, I start off arranging the canvas and mirror (this is harder than it sounds, but boring to read, so I won't go into detail). Then I grab a sketch book and draw a rectangle the same proportions as the final canvas, only smaller. I look and I draw, and I have a first draft.

Now, to follow Sarah's rules (or guidelines... you know what I mean);

1. Check the flow- where are the lines leading the eye?

Well, here my arm and brush are leading the eye across and out of the painting. Is this what I want? Hmm?

2. The rule of thirds - divide the painting into thirds, and the 'hot'spots' are where the lines intersect. This is where the action should be.

Damn. I'm slap bang in the middle, making the arrangement static. The upper 'hot spots' are the wall behind me, the other misses my head completely.

So I bring the canvas I'm painting on into the painting itself which gives a good balance of weight between myself on the right, and the canvas on the left, with my arm connecting the two in a lovely triangle (a very Renaissance trick). On the 'hot spots' are my face, the end of the paintbrush, the intersection of my arm with the canvas, and (almost) my elbow. I am very happy with this arrangement.

3. Pretend it's a lanscape - where's the horizon - what's in the distance, middle, and foregound and does this work? Well, maybe I'm a large neolithic rock and there a building next to me. The sky fills 2/3rds of the canvas behind and the horizon is suggested by the bench along the back wall. This drawing shows that I'm keeping it simple, and reminds me not to make the backgound too 'busy'.

4. Light & dark - the contrast between areas of light and dark are going to be important in this painting, so I rough in the shadows to see what shapes they create, and to see what the balance is. Well, the shadows slim me down, as I was looking rather bulky, and I can blur where my body stops and the background starts, playing round with that. I'm still a little concerned about the empty space behind my back, so I may shift myself to the right slightly, leaving only a suggestion of the horizon behind the small of my back. I think that so long as my hood touches the edge of the canvas I'll be okay.

Well, speak now, or ferever hold thy peace, because I'll start the painting in the next few days.

... arghhh!

Yes, I've grown a beard. I'm fed up with my chin, so I'm going to ignore it for a bit. I ended up tonking it ;laying on paper and pressing to remove some of the paint, because I'd re-worked it so many times that the paint was now thick and anything I tried to paint over it was just mushing in with the layers underneath.

Good news - the nose is now the right width, but I can see from this photo that the bulbous bit is still too small.

I'm happy with the way the forehead is shaping up, and I've found the perfect palette - alizarin crimson, lemon yellow, burnt sienna, cobalt blue, paynes grey and titanium white.

The reflected light from the white wall in my studio is lightening the left side of my face and adding complications, so I'm going to hang some black paper to cast that side of my face into shadow. Hopefully that will simplify the shadows for me.

Will I ever get there?

My own space

I just love having my own studio now. It's nothing grand, but it's all mine. I share the rest of the house with all my family, but my studio is all mine. I must say that the kids and hubby have quickly picked up on this, and respect my space and the time I get to spend there. Here's some of the treasures it holds: There's a big easel which my dad (bless you) collected for me from his old school, along with a quickly diminishing stack of A2 cartridge paper obtained in a similar way. My hubby pout up the shelves which were again ex-school property. The hard concrete floor is a patchwork of our carpet off cuts from over the years, and there are old chairs and benches from my art student days. There's also a fantastic low chair which my auntie gave me recently. It will make a great setting for future life studies, if anyone is mad enough to brave the elements. Old scraps of plywood are now stacked against the wall, primed with gesso and begging to be painted on, and there's a ceramic head which is a self portrait which my mum encouraged me to make.
The walls of the garage are made from some kind of industrial brick, and though they would probably survive a nuclear blast, they're a bugger to drill or nail into, so any time I want to make structural amendments, or even hang the mirror I got from a charity shop three weeks ago, I have to be very nice to my hubby so that he'll spend the required hour finding drill bits and extension leads.......Not to worry!
There's even a sink in there, and lots of electrical points for my homemade light-box (an empty crisp box, with a low wattage clip-lamp inside, and a transparent plastic storage-box lid on top) my tape player, various lamps, and eventually kettle. I only have to pop back into the house when nature calls, or when my get so numb that I can no longer dance round to Sheryl Crowe whilst painting.
Eventually I'll clear the rest of the stuff from the bottom end of the garage to use as a photo-life drawing area. I want to hang a huge rug on the wall, and set up a sofa with more rugs. But for the time being, it's a heavenly haven. And it's all mine.

Not enough hours in the day

I have images in my head of paintings I want to do;

a large canvas split into three showing cast iron machinery from Beamish Open Air Museum and the old mining works in quite a graphic form

a series of landscapes showing the North Sea viewed from various points on the coast with railings, balustrades, wooden fencing, etc...

studies of the negative spaces found in crochet doilies and lace work

some tall narrow views across North Dock in Roker rising from the pavement looking across the dock at the embankment and the houses and flats rising above that

the view I see of the path stretching ahead of me when I'm trudging along the pavement, with the picture plane tilted down

I'd need to give up my day job (which I actually enjoy, if not love), farm the kids out (just chop one of my limbs off, why don't you) and drink lots of caffeine (I don't think my bladder could take it). I'd keep my hubby around as he's a great cook, and he keeps my feet warm at night, and I would wash occasionally, if only because I got a great big stash of Lush goodies for my birthday which are shouting to be used.

I spent most of yesterday clearing out the garage to reclaim some studio space in there. When I went back int this morning I was surprised at how much I'd got done.