Looking back--old work

I had to boot up my old Mac OS 9.2 tonight to find a speech I had written a few years back, to update it for a speaking engagement I have this week, and I took the opportunity to look around. I found a few scans of old work of mine that I did waaaay pre-blog, and decided to post a few of them here. One reason is just because I never have; but another is that it reminded me that I am capable of working larger, longer, and more intricately, and also that experimentation always pays off.

This first picture is one of a series I painted for a class I took at Los Angeles Valley College back in the early 2000s. Our assignment was to pick one object (I selected my blue teapot) and paint it every week from a different perspective. We were to look at the work of one particular artist and incorporate something from his or her work into ours--not to copy slavishly, but simply to try to work from that artist's perspective or sensibility. This was one of my earlier attempts, and now I have forgotten who the artist was after whom I patterned it--but I do like the excess of pattern! This was my first use of "resist," which is how I reserved all the whites in the tablecloth (some of which were then overpainted with turquoise).

This second picture was something ambitious I attempted for the birthday of my second cousin, Harley Maxfield Lavitt. Can't remember what birthday it was for, but since he's 18 now, he couldn't have been more than 11 or 12. He loved to fish, the catfish was his favorite fish, and he had (has) an orange tabby-striped cat named Gus, so the conflation seemed like a natural one. Some people have told me it looks like the fish is EATING the cat. This painting is pretty big--18x24, I think--and I haven't worked that large in quite awhile. When I was taking watercolor from Carol Bishop at LAVC, she always encouraged us to work large, and we were required to turn out one or two paintings per week, so they took awhile to paint. I haven't worked that big in a long while, and I think it's time to revisit that ambition.

And this last one I'm putting up simply because I like it, and because it reminds me of bygone years and cats. This was Alberta, who was so hyper that it's a miracle she sat still for this pose. I sketched her swiftly in charcoal, and then went back in with watercolor later. This one reminds me to be spontaneous and fast sometimes, instead of meticulous and slow.

Sketch journaling

I don't do too much spontaneous (or even planned) sketching or sketch journaling--I never seem to be sitting in one place (other than my reading chair, in which I am otherwise occupied) long enough to capture something. But this morning I had to take my car to the dealership for its 30,000-mile service, and an hour into the two-hour wait at the greasy spoon across the street, having finished both my breakfast and the book I brought along to pass the time, I pulled out my lovely little sketchbook my friend Anarda gave me for my birthday last year (which I faithfully carry around just in case) and did a little sketch of a stretch of this industrial area of not-quite-Glendale. (I watercolored it after I returned home.) Although my dealership is called "Glendale" Kia, I have my suspicions that it's really Atwater Village or even Los Angeles proper, since it seems too far away from anything recognizably Glendale.

This kind of sketching is good practice in observation. Nothing is ever quite where it should be, and details get compressed or expanded to fill the page, but at least it's a sense of the street. Drawing with a pen always seems to render a rather cartoonish result for me. I should make more opportunities for this kind of practice.

Bandouille

This one was a long time in coming--I took my trip the first week of October, and I'm just getting to this in January!

This is a window on the 18th century farmhouse at Bandouille, with grape vines framing it (and yes, there were grapes, though not in this picture). There are a few overworked sections, some weird shadows, and a few details I lost that I wish I'd kept, but I'm pretty happy with it. I love painting windows, and stone, and old wood. I am less confident with foliage, especially specific foliage, but this has at least the feel of grape vine. I did a pale wash of Naples yellow (Daniel Smith) cut with gray behind everything, so it gave a nice dull warmth to the "whites."

I focused exclusively on painting this afternoon (instead of splitting my attention between painting and TV), and therefore missed two hours of fashions on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, but I'm glad I did--I at least managed to get the proportions and angles right! (see previous post) This will be a nice reminder of my trip to France.

Window in France

A small vignette from one of the many reference photos I took in several picturesque villages in France. I drew and painted this while watching TV, which could explain the very odd perspective! Oh well, just fooling around to keep my hand in, no big deal. Faber Castell sepia pen and watercolor.

Casual contour

Watching TV with my cat…

And making little book sketches to go with my next blog post for the library…

That is one lopsided hunchbacked teapot!

Drawing from France

I went back and had a look at some reference photos, tonight, from my trip to France last October, and decided to do a little more drawing on the first day of the new year. This is a street in a village called Saint Loup Lamairé. Several of the guest artists at Bandouille have painted this particular view; and I think I would prefer painting it to drawing it, since you can do the side of a building in one stroke of the brush instead of a bunch of shading with the side of the pencil! Maybe I'll give it a try.

But first I think I need to go back and review Bixxy's perspective lessons…what was it, Bix? Elbows down, knees up?

Drawing first

I can't decide whether I am lazy, fearful or impatient. The fact is, I don't enjoy drawing. Or rather, I like drawing mostly as an end to painting, rather than as an accomplishment in and of itself. I can do it; but because it's not something to which I aspire to improve except as it supports my watercolor, I neglect it, so I do it fairly badly. And like most people, what I fear I avoid. But really, the better your drawing skills, the more your painting benefits. So I'm going to do it more.

Here's one I did today. I want to do a series of paintings to go with a book I enjoy, and today I went looking around the internet for somebody who looks like the somebody I want to paint. This guy might do--we'll see.

You can see that I hung in there for the interesting parts and then got scritchy-scratchy with the outlying bits. Also, now that I look at it in scan form I see that one of his eyes is waaaay higher than the other. Oh well…practice. Practice, practice, practice. Until it becomes a practice.