A beer for the replay

Acrylic on canvas
40 x 40cm;16 x 16"
It must be the replay because he is always too anxious to watch his team playing live!
This is another class exercise. The 'brief' was a domestic scene, Matisse inspired - use of some black outline, areas of flattish colour, simplification, spontaneous, - the tutor used Madame Mattisse as an example - but reading later about Matisse working this painting, I discovered he required over 100 sittings - of course many sittings would have been for sketching, preliminary drawings etc. However, I won't be too hard on myself that it looks more like the controlled work of Australian painter John Brack - spontaneous-looking will require a lot more practice! In 'simplifying', I have dispensed with the mess and clutter in our heavily used 'sitting'-room - a great way to 'tidy up'.

Rosalie Gascoigne - Icon painting

Considering Landscape
Acrylic, imitation gold leaf and collage on board
Each section 20x30cm

I have signed up for one more semester of a weekly painting class. This time we are 'imagining what if a medieval icon painter, Vincent van Gogh and Matisse came here - how might they depict the contemporary Australia?'
We first looked at icon paintings from Greece, Russia and elsewhere, especially noting the use of gold leaf, combination of simplified, flat depiction and often heavily modelled forms and drapery. Icon painters often begin with a red underpainting.
For our own effort, we were to think of a contemporary Australian icon - a thing or place such as Sydney Opera House, an activity eg. surfing, or anything else. I chose to depict Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999), an Australian/New Zealand sculptor who worked with found materials, particularly wooden drink crates, yellow and orange road signs, builders' used masonite boards, old sheets of corrugated tin, linoleum scraps and doll parts, to evoke the Australian landscape. She scoured local dumps (and sometimes traded beer with road workers) to collect her materials, being inspired by the landscape of the undulating Canberra region at the same time. Many of her images look like quilts eg All that Jazz and Off the Beaten Track.
This time we had to do a dyptich, carefully designing the composition. I am very hesitant about doing 'landscapes' but considering the genre through someone else's eyes was a good way in.The gold leaf is generally applied last and is very fragile and fiddly but I like the effect.
By chance, I found a book about Justin O'Brien, an Australian painter who lived for much of his life in Rome. He was inspired by icon paintings and painted a number of works which include landscape, interior and still life all in the one piece. There is a retrospective of his work at the Art Gallery of NSW in December.

Shadow tryptich

Acrylic on canvas
50 x 50cm
A class exercise from last semester, we were instructed to produce a tryptich, be graphic, experiment with shadows and use a limited palette with increasing amount of colour from one section to the next. I have played with shadows before in some of my other still lifes and I do like the way they can extend the image. I initially drew up a more typical division of the canvas to create a tryptich but found it uninspiring. I am pleased with the torn paper effect.

Masterpieces from Paris - Maurice Denis again

Dawn Start
20 x 20 cm
Acrylic on board
Last night, our daughter rang to cancel a dinner arrangement for this evening. She and her husband had just been called to help in a bush rescue in the Blue Mountains and they were hurriedly packing before driving 300km in the night, ready for an early morning start. This morning, I googled to see if I could find any details and learned that 6 canyoners were 36 hours overdue from a day trip. There was a photo of my daughter and several other searchers disappearing into the misty dawn. Of course, they were on my mind all day.
On the way back from helping my husband choose new glasses, I stopped off at the Gallery to find an inspiring painting and was drawn to Maurice Denis' Landscape with Green Trees. It is a mysterious picture, figures gliding through a forest towards an angel. I will do a painting about the rescuers.
Late this afternoon, the canyoners were located but tragically, it seems there was a rock fall and one of the group has died and two are injured. My daughter and son in law are back at the rescue base and will be home tomorrow.

Masterpieces from Paris - Maurice Denis

The Gallery was very crowded today but I saw only 2 teenagers. I saw them first snogging in front of Mr Denis' Homage to Cezanne (click to view) and was struck by the enduring appeal and variety of black attire. The men in this painting are all artists, unusually garbed in business suits. They are discussing a painting by Cezanne, the younger Serusier explaining to Redon, on the left, why the Nabis group of artists admire it.

To complete a sketch, I followed the young couple as they moved from picture to picture. At home, I decided to liberate Redon from his canvas..... A is for apple, art and ardour.

Masterpieces from Paris - Albert Besnard

On Thursday evening, I went to my monthly art group get together. We each take something for dinner and whatever 'show and tell' we have. I sketched  Meredith who is doing a project which requires daily stitching. I loved the blue of her blouse, and the shape of her armchair - which she calls the Albatros (the whole lounge suite) because, despite its inconvenient size, she drags it round whenever she moves house.

The Masterpiece work that I chose to guide me in painting this piece is Albert Besnard's Portrait of Madame Roger Jourdain - for the colours - white, pink and blue with highlights of yellow. Working from just the sketch, on sand, gessoed board to prevent over-detailed working, I have managed to get a likeness and perhaps the quiet mood. The composition is not ideal - perhaps it would be better croppped but then I would lose the shape of the armchair. Although this sort of portrait is not really what I want to do, it has been a good exercise. The scanner does not deal well with the rough surface.

Masterpieces from Paris - Emile Bernard again

Today I went to the funeral of Jean, an elderly friend of one of my friends. It was a very intimate ceremony with just a dozen or so mourners, at a peaceful lawn cemetery. I didn't know Jean well, but I heard many stories of her from my friend, who has visited her weekly for years. The eulogy, given by her son and only child, was beautifully written. Some time after the war, in England, when Jean found herself pregnant and 'let down' by the father, she bravely decided to have the baby and raise it herself. When her son was still small, she emigrated with him to Australia, knowing no one and with no support.

After the funeral, I went to the Gallery and popped into the Masters' exhibition to find a painting that spoke to me of Jean. I decided upon Breton Women with Umbrellas(click to view). The catalgue says that Bernard saw the Breton women as living simple, pious lives but it seems to me that four of the women in the picture are gossiping savagely about the young women seated in the foreground. She holds herself very still, refusing to rise to the bait - developing nerves of steel, maybe. Perhaps she is in the same situation as Jean, many years ago.
Back home, looking at the catalogue for a way to use this painting to make one about Jean, I noticed that the background is very reminicent of Canberra - the brown and yellow hills, blue/purple Brindabella mountains, central lake - even our (white) Parliament House. So that forms the background of my painting.
Jean loved the colour green and knitting, twice she travelled first class round the world with only carry-on baggage, and she was vigorously engaged politically. She was a forthright and determined lady. Sometimes it was difficult for her son to be her only family. At the end of the funeral, after we had scattered delicate, crimson rose petals onto the coffin and listened to meditative music, her son said there was just one more thing. He fumbled in a plastic shopping bag and drew out a net of oranges - "It's a mother and son thing", he said as he tumbled them into the grave. Australians will likely understand! For others, it is necessary to explain the reference. In the 70's there was a sharp comedy (called Mother and Son) about a confused, controlling mother and her long suffering son. On one occasion, they attend a funeral and somehow the mother drops her shopping - a sack of oranges - into the grave. It is a hilarious image which remains in the mind of many. Jean would have been heartily amused at her son's final offering. Everyone laughed and clapped. So that explains my painting for the day.
I find green a very difficult colour to work with.

Masterpieces from Paris - Emile Bernard

Emile Bernard's The Harvest is one of my favourite paintings at the Paris exhibition. It is only 56 x 40 cm, graphically striking with its contrasting, simple colour shapes and the strong diagonal. When Bernard hung this painting in the dining room of his lodgings, the other guests demanded it be removed and so he exchanged it for a work by Gauguin.
I have wanted to use the round shape of our dining table in a composition for a while and it seemed to match Bernard's curve of the hill. I had endless trouble trying to do the table surface - I find it hard to visualise what I want - and then there's the question of how to achieve it.
Acrylic on board
20cm x 20cm

Masterpieces from Paris - sleeping baby

Acrylic on board
30cm x 30cm
We are lucky to have an exhibition of post-impressionist paintings from the Musee d'Orsay on at the Australian National Gallery and I have bought a season ticket so I can ride there for my daily exercise. Last Friday, after I got tired of looking at paintings, I took to people watching and was able to sketch a man who had finally got his baby off to sleep. I loved the arrangement of his arms and the totally relaxed form of the baby.
I think I have over-worked again but am pleased to catch the image anyway and I am pleased with the composition - I like the two pink shapes, the central entanglement of the father and baby - and the way Van Gogh's Starry Night provides a depth in the flatness of the wall. Recently, I purchased a small painting from Sheila Vaughan who told me that over the past few years she has done over 800 painting - perseverence is the way to go.

Charcoal value study
A5

Hot-Glass Polka

40 x 50cm; 16 x 20"

acrylic and sand on canvas

This is another class exercise. We have been looking at Degas - particularly the way he caught a moment/movement, use of 'empty' space, working from photos, blurred edges and lack of detail. I made a trip to the local glassworks to find some interesting subject matter. From photos, I did a charcoal value study - rather more 'finished' than was necessary. Before painting, we created a rough surface by gluing a fine layer of sand on the canvas. The value study was roughly reworked in charcoal on the canvas and fixed. Then we were instructed to build up the paint layers with a soft, dry-paint brush, gently stroked over the canvas. I found it difficult to get the composition working well as the kiln opening pushed to be the focal point and behaved like an eye, small changes in shape shifting the way it 'stared' and diverting the viewer's eye out of the picture.

I like the idea of painting people at work. I recently discovered English painter Kate Lynch who paints studies of traditional crafts people at work.

After posting this blog entry, and seeing both pictures together on the screen, it looks as if I should knock back the intensity of the coloured kiln opening so it doesn't dominate quite so much - as in the value study.

Dog Star Strathspey
60 x 45cm; 18 x 24"

acrylic on canvas

At last, something to 'show'! I have started a new painting class where we are looking at and being inspired by Chagall, Degas and others. I cycle 20 km to the class so I am using quick drying acrylics on smallish boards. Chagall's paintings often feature invented compositions, inspired by his Jewish childhood in a poor Russian village or Biblical stories and evoke a sense of child-like whimsy or naivety. They include non-literal narratives, theatrical, with distorted scale and strange perspectives. He uses non realistic, reduced or full pallette luminous, jewel-like colour to evoke mood, time of day. A heightened sense of drama can be achieved by employing contrasting elements eg dark/light values; warm/cool colour; coloured/black outline; hard/soft edges.

My 'Chagall' piece is inspired by my childhood in St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland - the bully gets his come-uppance at last and the fields are represented by painting the designs from two tiny scraps of fabric that I have saved from 60's A-line dresses my granny made for me.

I made a very pleasing discovery when Googling to confirm my memory about the dog star (Sirius or God star) being used by east coast fisherman to guide them to harbour - the only reference I found was from a wonderful folk singer/song writer, Tom Fairnie, in his song Rolling Home (avail. under creative commons). When I am creating, I often listen to just one piece of music (not necessarily related in any obvious way to the work) . I find that switching on the music puts me instantly in 'the zone' and I think provides a consistent harmony to the piece. Rolling Home is the background music for Dog Star Strathspey. Thank you for sharing your songs with the world, Mr Fairnie.

These are the pieces I did in the second semester of a water colour class, one evening a week with lots of homework.
The purpose of the first piece was to experiment with guache, mixed quite thickly. We used black and white photocopies of flower photos to provide form and relative values. We combined flowers, leaves etc from several photos, as we pleased. Using black and white guache, we first did a grey scale and then light, medium and dark plant sections. Next, mixing permanent rose and ultramarine, we did a purple value scale. Mixing the purple with cadmium yellow we produced a yellow to ochre value scale and painted the plant strip on the left. Finally, we had to use the range of purples and yellow/ochre to do the piece on the right.

In the next piece, above, we were to combine guache with watercolour which we had studied last semester. First, we laid sheets of A4 paper on top of our stretched watercolour paper and spattered with watercolour. Removing the A4 paper, we had white, paper-shaped spaces in which we had to use watercolour to paint copies of pages removed from art catalogues. Then we had to use thickish guache to paint a variety of things on top. It's meant to be from the perspective of looking down but I think I have several perspectives here so it looks a little odd.

In the third piece, above, we began by spattering with watercolour onto a wet surface, then drew direct with nib and ink from 'forest floor findings' that we brought in. Then we used guache to colour some items and watercolour to do shadows. I haven't finished this one - nature studies out of context aren't quite my thing.

Finally, we had to combine watercolour, guache, pen and ink and watercolour pencils in a 'cupboard' piece, one door open and the other closed with a poster or similar on it. In the cupboard, we had to depict a 'collection'. I chose some of my son's trophies, with the idea that once successfully caught in a picture, we could throw the gaudy things away - he took the best trophies away when he left home - these are the 'seconds'. There are also some of his war hammer creatures and 'Potato', a soft toy I won at a fair five minutes before my son broke his arm playing on a bouncy castle. So Potato became the hospital friend but now, after this immortalization, I think he too, is headed for the bin. We were shown how to do one point perspective - all the interior lines of the cupboard, except the hoizontal floor and ceiling lines inside the cubbies, run to the centrepoint of the whole rectangle - then had to do the collection with watercolour pencil, mixing from primary colours. The door is guache with pencil over the top to provide the pattern and the calender is done with pen and watercolour.

I have learnt a lot about the various watercolour mediums in this class, though the style is way more precise than I expected. I still would like to learn 'loose' but must finish my memory paintings first.

And here is Shula again. It's hard to sketch her other than asleep as she is quite mobile and our house is not baby-proofed so I have to be ready to jump up at any minute. To think - there used to be playpens.

Here are a couple of my homework efforts for the water colour class I'm taking. Because I cycle to the art class, I have a half board with only a half sheet of paper and I have to divide it into three so I get this odd shape. But I like the challenge of making it work - in the landscape format, it's quite theatrical. As you can see, I use the homework exercises to play more with vessels and shadows.