Contribution

It is busy these days. My deadlines are looming and there seems less time than usual to get everything done. Busyness. It is time to reconsider. This is the first week of Advent, time to pause and make room at the inn for peace, hospitality and joy. I will take some time today to sit, or, even better, to walk. A little exercise clears the mind. In the meantime there is one out of three projects done for Wednesday. Two panels are due, one on the contribution of two extraordinary people in the medical field and another on celebration in the form of parades and processions, plus a maquette for a third panel on local hospitality establishments, the hotels. A maquette is a sketch illustrating preliminary ideas made for approval of the concept before the painting is done. I have found that the more complete a maquette image is, the easier it is for my client to decide whether or not he/she approves of it. The three panels are destined for the St. Jean Baptiste Park in Morinville. It is a lovely park and the installation of the murals and panels is very pretty. This is the medical themed image. It is less complex than the parades and portraits are always fun. Of course the ease of the project depends on the clarity of the source photos which is not always the case. I am usually very thankful for the hours I spend drawing from life. It is amazing what can be fixed with a little knowledge and experience.

Sticks and Links

It is Monday again… Some weeks are shorter than others I swear. This one is especially short because I do not have anything written for this morning, so what do I write about? Well, I do have a new mini series of pen and ink studies that I am preparing for Centre d’arts visuels next month. It is mostly about sticks and stones and chains that bind and robinlace. I have eight of the ten I plan to show done. This project has been so much fun I plan on continuing the exercise. Drawing has always been my favorite thing, pen and ink my favorite medium. Pen and ink helped me discover the mystery of disappearing lines. I rarely use an eraser. The trick is to start off lightly. With pen and ink ‘lightly’ usually means a series of dots. It is important that the instrument used is consistent. I have trouble when the ink suddenly starts to flow more abundantly at the moment I need a light, barely visible line…. Grrr. If it is early in the drawing the heavier line does disappear too. As the drawing progresses, as I add darker and more, all the mistakes in the beginning fade into the background. Unless one is looking for mistakes, they remain imperceptible. Of course the mistakes remain because I leave them there. Can you find any?

Vignettes

It is true. There are no vines running through the images nor is there much shading. Some would call the collection of images charming, one of the qualities of a vignette so the dictionary says. Why vignette? Well, it is a convenient way to differentiate between sizes of murals. A vignette in my corner of the world is a three foot by four foot panel which will be mounted in a steel frame set beside a path in a park. A tableau is a four foot by eight foot panel and a mural is any size after that. So these are two of the three vignettes that I have been commissioned to paint. I prepared the panels as usual with molding paste and several coats of iridescent colour. The base is the same for all three: ultramarine blue and burnt sienna with a touch of silver. A little alizarin crimson adds a further dimension. I chose a purple watercolour pencil to do the drawing on the medical image. Purple is the colour of healing they say. My favorite poppy red watercolour pencil delineated the collection of parades, a complicated piece. Parades are lively, red is lively. Now all that is left to do is paint.

My world

This is so much fun! It looks like chaos but it is really organized chaos. We see here the feeding of my life’s blood, not one or two projects but ten, or more. Lovely! Boredom be gone! The three panels on the tables are commissions. Christmas money…maybe. The six panels on the left, leaning up against my moveable wall are the beginnings of a new series, again done in triplets. The untouched canvases on the easel are waiting for my attention in another series entitled, for the moment, “Pilgrims”. I have still-lifes set up all along the shelving to the right for pen and ink studies. The finished panel for Mural Mosaics sits just above the toaster oven and unobtrusively amid my lunch is a pad with a mechanical pencil. I have an incredible story to tell. The beginnings are down, prologue and a few sentences in chapter one. As with my paintings I have a vague idea where to begin, how it ends up is anyone’s guess. Well, the commissions are calling me. They are ready for an undercoat. I think I will pick my ultramarine blue/burnt sienna mix. All three will match that way! Once that is dry I will tackle the problem of having created the sketches in the wrong format, a ratio miscalculation. Sigh. Math.

Finishing Touches

Obviously the white hand had to go. The white bridge was a little shaky too.  I picked up the paint brush in my left hand again. I am not really left handed. The left hand fit in the picture. We artists make all kinds of sacrifices and use all manner of lies to create the illusion. Truth is expendable in painting. Purple people come into existence at the flick of a brush. Anyway, to get back to my left hand, I could see that the quick block in that I had previously made was somewhat inaccurate. The fingers did not quite work… That kind of truth is not expendable. So taking my other hand, a brush and a little gesso I adjusted the drawing to suit the circumstance. I considered the colour. The underpainting had been a pale green. I wondered what I could get away with. A green hand would work if I were careful about the rendering. Green is also part of the colour of flesh. The first layer was burnt sienna followed by yellow ochre and a touch of alizarin crimson with a dash of ultramarine blue. Yes, quite satisfying. I took out the phthalo green and brushed over the back of the hand and grazed a few other spots in the shadow areas. Just the ticket. Now for the bridge. It needed some understructure and a few fine negative spaces. Much better. As a finishing touch I wrote a poem, bilingually as usual, and enhanced the needles of the pine tree in the foreground. Perfect. All that is left is a protective overcoat and my signature…. Not in that order of course.