Out of order, but time is a construct. Sketchbook study.
Day 5 Watercolor Self-tutoring
Day 6 or 7 Watercolor Self-tutoring ~ Crow
I’ve sort of lost track of time. Things have been weird lately. After a long crappy day, I went back to a sketch I did late last night and this evening spent a half hour adding pigments and ink to it in the sketchbook.
It helped a lot.
Almost Equinox
Today was the first full day of Spring. The Equinox officially arrived sometime yesterday. These photos were taken a few days ago.
I was reading about the megalithic passage graves in Ireland and Brittany, aligned with the solstice or equinox. Our house is oriented on the cardinal points, and around those astronomical events it becomes quite apparent. Near the Equinox, the sun rises and streams through from one side to the other.
As we grow older, and parents and friends depart this world, makes you think.
We spend our days in a Passage Tomb Souls suspended Waiting for the return of the sun
I’m OK with that.
Day 4 ~ Watercolor Self-tutoring
Got to play some more yesterday. Had to throw away two to get here. Amazing how much you can lose the groove in a week.
This one is done with paint, graphite, and fountain pen. Again using cards and paper towels and some canning paraffin – things that didn’t come from the art supply store. I seem to get better results with unconventional materials.
Watercolor Tutor
I’ve been teaching myself some things about watercolor. It’s harder than it looks. That was the easiest part to learn.
The hardest part to learn – which took me until the third day, and half pad of paper – is like many things you can ruin a good thing by overthinking it.
Next after overthinking, is just knowing when to quit. Surest way to ruin something halfway decent is to keep messing with it when it’s done.
This started a couple of weeks ago. While waiting for some cheap paints and paper to arrive, I played around with a digital stylus on a tablet. That has been fun, and I learned a lot from it. Essentially, it lets me use a photo for reference, picking up color from the image to load in the stylus, then you paint over the photo on a new layer. With all my experience editing photos with digital tools I got the hang of that pretty quick, and like the results – enough that I’ll keep doing that. It’s quick and fun.
When I finally got analog materials, I wasn’t surprised to learn that working with those is a whole lot different. And a whole lot harder. My first attempts were, to my eye, overworked and overthought. This was the best of that batch:
I couldn’t seem to disconnect my brain from my hands, and it was pretty obvious my brain didn’t know what the heck was going on. Today, I finally gave up on “trying” and just did a handful of mindless experiments, letting the brush and paper lead. That started to show promise. Not only less frustrating, but less effort, and the results are better.
This let me realize that, when it comes to visual art, at least, breaking the rules is better than following them. The painting at the top of the page was done less with actual paint brushes. Instead, I used a combination of credit card, spray bottle, toothpick, paper towel, crappy glue chip brush, fountain pen, and yes, a watercolor paintbrush or two.
I hope to try more of this soon, and hope to remember to forget what my brain tells me.
Self Portraits
I
Circle, Circle Back
T finished up 38 pieces of art for a show that opens Friday. We delivered everything on Sunday. It’s a really great body of work that’s been underway for most of the past six months. She was quite the dynamo in a fit of creative fervor.
I’ll post more updates here of the opening and the final gallery space over the coming weeks.
Here’s a blog post she just published of some background. Since the onset of COVID, when we had a lot of time and nowhere to go, she cut nearly 10,000 circles of paper. By hand. Some of those are now included in four pieces in the show.
We had a nice trip over the mountain to Staunton, one of our favorite nearby towns. And a very nice gallery space, too. They’ve posted info about the show here, featuring some of T’s work in the poster:
https://www.saartcenter.org/cut-up-and-put-together
