Monday Madness

I've finally finished my painting of the Radium Beer Hall (can you spot where I got the title for this post?) that I was about to embark on in a previous post last year - although I keep seeing things I want to fiddle with... I spent hours on that guy's face on the right and it still looks like a fuzzy jellybaby, and in two minds about the ghostly figure standing on the bar counter (Mary Fitzgerald, a trade union activist who actually did rally her troops from the very same counter, albeit in another establishment).

Tim Quirke, our excellent teacher, has taken us step by step through a process of planning, drawing, leading the eye, thinking of this aspect and that artist, painting 'up' areas and leaving others understated. I kept taking pictures as I progressed - a little dangerous as sometimes you want to go back to a stage you've irretrievably wrecked - but a record for future reference. It has been painstaking at times, and thoroughly engrossing and free-flowing at others, but I've certainly learnt a lot and hope to put it all into practice in my own painting, or at least keep some of it in mind. Why didn't I find all these teachers when I started painting in oils 22 years ago? It would have saved a lot of trash-able canvases, maybe...though most artists have those no matter how much education they've had, from what I hear.

Finishing things

Over the last few months, on and off, I've been spending time in the studio determined to finish a whole bunch of half-done paintings - for better or for worse!  

These you may (or well may not) recognise from a previous post on Greg Kerr's Objets Trouvé workshop in 2014. Below are some of the stages these 60 x 60 cm paintings have gone through, some rather tortuously, via a series of processes. Splashing, rolling and printing paint onto the canvases with an underlying prepared motif  - mine our birdbath - which had to consist of organic and geometric forms. Interventions followed of adding textures, patterns and elements - some prescribed by Greg (each painting had an element taken from someone else in the class's paintings, to explain some strange additions... the crystal, the water tower, the child swimming, the sardine tin) as we worked through the course, some added tentatively or recklessly by me as I eventually took the plunge and tried to leave dependency on the teacher behind me.

Often I wished I could backtrack to a previous stage of simplicity or clarity, and in the one with the child swimming (I changed my classmate's child into my daughter) I was at the point of scrapping the whole thing but decided that more might be more and carried on adding flowers and fishes and glazes... it may still be scrapped...or cropped down to just the little girl swimming...or I could add the kitchen sink...

With changes and a move from Joburg sometime in the not too distant future, I have to finish and clear out so much stuff I don't know where to start. Painting is the relatively easy bit, I have to get them out of here!

End of the Dinner Party

 I've just come to the end of this year's Greg Kerr (website currently under construction) painting course, "The Dinner Party", which once again has been a fascinating, informative and unpredictable ride through the world of painting, art and artists, as well as really fun, sociable interludes throughout the year.

It started with researching and making Valentine cards for 5 artists, plus yourself, as preparation for the course. During the first week we painted place settings for each one in acrylic, glazed and embellished later if needed in oils. As prep for the following session we had to make and photograph clay models of the artists at a dinner table, in a setting, which we drew up carefully and painted in class onto one canvas and freely painted onto a second, using oil glazing methods.

In September, we were introduced to a process called Decalcomania, where we covered our place-setting paintings with plastic, repainted the images thickly in primary and secondary colours in acrylic, and then quickly transferred to a new canvas of the same size, repeated as many times as was necessary for a rich textured surface. This process produced unexpected and random results; blobs, blotches, textures, misregisterings, all of which were part of the grand plan.

On these printed images we were to cool down and warm up chosen areas (Mavis and Fred in Greg's unique terminology!) to make them recede or come forward, and then go through a list of possible interventions to challenge us, develop a dialogue with the work, and create an interesting patina and history - including more decalcomania, patterning, glazing, shadows, wet-in-wet and dry brush painting.

The entire project has upended my 'normal' way of doing things - which I welcome wholeheartedly, bored as I often get with my faithful renderings of things and people - but challenging and perplexing it certainly is...and am still busy with, so no final results to show you as yet, but here are some pictures of the process so far.

Dinner Party Work-in-Progress

After an intense four days of painting on two 1200x800mm canvases last week, there is still a way to go on both of them. Here's what's happened since the clay figures I made... the six figures were arranged around a table and put in a setting. I put plain cardboard walls around them after failing to make a convincing stage set and afraid the whole thing would crash down and further destroy my crumbling people, then lit the scene in various ways to take as many interesting photos as possible (the possibilities were endless!) I digitally cut some of my figure arrangements out and pasted them onto photo backgrounds, finally settling on one of a ruined cathedral in Lisbon that my husband took when I was busy with the Urban Sketchers Symposium last year, and he and our son were sight-seeing. We were to draw up this design onto one canvas and leave the other blank.

On Monday morning our painting group gathered excitedly, nervously, or both - we knew we were in for a week of hard work and plenty of surprises. Greg informed us that we would be painting two large paintings in the four days, immediately creating a sense of urgency/disbelief/panic. The drawn up canvas was to be glazed with primary colours, randomly in sections, then glazed again with the primaries to create secondary colours. While that was drying, the other canvas was covered with a glaze in a colour of our choice, lifting out areas freehand where we wanted lighter or back to a previous colour, using our photos. Both methods similiar to what we did last year in the Dark Cloud workshops. The glazing and lifting  on both paintings continued, building tones and secondary, tertiary and strangely indescribable other colours.

They're not finished yet - mine are extremely weird, not your average portrait group but so interesting to me in subject, process and unexpected results - I will forge on with them and see where we end up. I wish I could show you all the paintings that were produced, each so different and with their own unique qualities, a real credit to the teaching to produce such a range of individual responses to the project.

A Slow Start and Slow Painting

 I'm having very frustrating computer problems at the moment - technology stuck in the last decade - so can't scan or web browse. It's gone for an overhaul and I hope will be back in action soon. I'm using an even older slower machine, which I'm likely to throw out of the window if I try to do anything too complicated, so I've found some images in the hard drive that I haven't shown here before.

This is a painting I've been working on, or should I say agonising over, for 15 years or so. It started out as a completely blue painting of five figures, which was cold and boring - so eventually, after years of pondering, I superimposed another version of the figures over that with some colour (below).
After learning about glazing last year, I sketched in different poses of the figures with a red oilstick, and glazed layers over, trying to abstract it a bit more. In the version above, I added some digital lighter shapes which aren't in the actual painting... yet... who knows how it might go over the next fifteen years. I can't see it objectively any more. If it weren't such a big canvas - 122cm x 76cm - I'd scrap it and call it a day.

I haven't made any ambitious resolutions, but I do wish you all a wonderful, productive, creatively fulfilling 2012, heavens, there are only 11 and a half months left. At least I get to spend more time in my studio when computering is so painful - if I had made resolutions, that would be one!

Glazed over

I've been painting more, sketching less lately (as well as painting the backdrop for our local primary school's annual concert again, many years after my children left there and grew up) so another long absence here - I attended the final session of Greg Kerr's course I posted about here, last week after missing the third one while on my travels. This was about learning how to glaze with oil paints - the images gleaned from our original source material - mine being on 12"x12" canvases, my ladies with umbrella, black and white cow, wooden fence and seed pod, which I changed from a honey-locust to a jacaranda - an attempt at iconography, but too hard and complicated to explain!

One panel started with a bolus, or red oxide ground, the layers of warm and cool colours built up slowly and patiently, drying well between each one (hard for somebody used to instant results with pen and watercolour)

One on a white ground, where the layers produced much more brilliantly coloured results, and took a lot longer to get to neutral shades and depth of tone.

 And on a green ground, which produced different results again of the layers of transparent colour - we were to lift out areas from each glaze to preserve colours we wanted to keep. The white crayon outline of the original drawing ended up as the 'radioactive' glow around the cow.

We finished the paintings off by adding veils of pure colour, and lastly, very sparingly, white. They are very dark, shiny (because of the Liquin used as medium) little paintings, hard to photograph, and I don't know if I would paint like this as a rule, but I'm very happy to know how to do it.
We worked on our three acrylic paintings too with oil glazes, tying them together as a triptych, lifting and knocking back, and I learnt another blending technique with the fan brush, which I've never quite known what to do with, to get a highly polished looking finish - still thinking about those. I feel, at last, as though I'm getting to know exactly what to do with the wonderful 40th birthday present my husband gave me mphwmph years ago of a bunch of oil paints, canvases and brushes!

Shells

Back to oil paints, I'm really switching around mediums in my eternal quest to find my forté and my style. This was admittedly also a practical choice - I painted it for everyONEcounts, an iniative for artists to raise funds for the care of abandoned babies in South Africa by donating artworks to be exhibited and sold - and oil on a gallery wrap canvas doesn't need framing and is, I hope, sturdier to be sent to Kwazulu Natal where the exhibition is to be held. All paintings are 12"x12" or 30x30cm. I spent ages thinking about how to interpret the theme 'every one counts', and scrummaging around my shelves for inspiration came upon a bag of seashells collected over beach holidays over the years. They seemed to speak to me, of multitudes and aloneness... of fragility and strength, difference and similiarity, intricacy and simplicity, abundance and preciousness, shelter and vulnerability. If you think too much about shells you can hardly bear to crush one underfoot.

Dibble dabble

This is the oil painting I've been toiling over - well, sometimes toiling and sometimes not. I intended for it to be an abstract sort of landscape, using a photo of a river scene as a base, but I wanted it to not be obviously representative, but to suggest a mood, movement, events possible or pending or past... [oil on canvas 102 x 50 cm]

First I laid down colour glazes, vague shapes. Please note this is not a 'how to' lesson - This is me fumbling around in the world of oils



The second stage is closest to the original reference and it reads as hills, sky, water, reeds etc, which I wanted to subdue,



so I turned it upside down to work on further. I like the way the reeds now look more like flames



The trouble is when to stop with this - I think I could go on endlessly painting, layering, scraping and scumbling and it could metamorphose into something completely different. I'm thinking now that the colours are too close to landscape colours - and too pretty. Hmm - shall I let rip with some cadmium orange..?

Gosh. The first version I uploaded of this image was in CMYK instead of RGB colour profile and this is how it appeared... one doesn't have to let rip, one can just fiddle endlessly with colour effects on the computer!

Dabbling with Oils

I've just discovered Bill Guffey's Challenge via Liz's blog, and seeing that I've registered for an oils workshop which is coming up soon - painting urban landscapes - I thought I'd get some practice and see a bit of Lisbon at the same time. I found a street name that I recognise -Rua Bartolomeu Dias - who left little stone crosses around our southern Cape coastline 500+ years ago when he discovered the sea-route to India.
I settled on No 102 Rua Bart Dias because it had a nice bougainvillea peeping over the wall (although I didn't get much of it in my painting - I have mostly road-surface in that!) and it would make me tackle perspective - not my forté.

I love painting in oils, but feel very uncertain about what I'm meant to be doing, with fats over leans and how to stop everything squidging together when you try to finish a painting in one sitting. My good, kind, thoughtful husband gave me a set of oil paints, brushes and a stack of huge canvases for my fortieth birthday, and a few smaller canvas boards to experiment on before starting on my large 'works'. The first ones that I did on the small boards were so enjoyable, I felt free to dab away without obsessing if I was doing it correctly... and they are still the ones I prefer over all the attempts at masterpieces I've done since.
This early arum lily painting spent time leaning against a wall that had a severe water leak down it and the canvas peeled away from the warped board. I hadn't left enough space around it to stretch it over another support, so its a bit wrecked - any suggestions on how to stretch it again? That white border is all the canvas I have to work with.

My very first oil painting is this one on the right... done when I was 11 or 12 years old, on lined exercise book paper with a paint-by-numbers set of little oil pans. We were living in a flat next to the railway line in Cape Town, and I had just read a book about Vincent van Gogh, and loved his Café Terrace by Night so much that I was inspired to do a version - sort of (note the rather tipsy-looking man's bell-bottoms - it was during the 60's!)
I had forgotten all about this - I don't remember giving it another thought - until my little sister (who would have been 9 or 10 at the time) presented it to me a few years ago. She had put it away safely, kept it through four family house moves, high school, art school (me) and drama school (her) and my moving up to Johannesburg, taken it with her to live in America, and on a visit back to SA, one very surprising middle-aged birthday, tucked it into a gardening book she gave me! It's the only art from my childhood that has survived the years - thank you Gillian!!!

Gallery cakes

I'm spinning my wheels a bit and not getting anything of any substance done - one of my many distractions was this fun thing that Vivien and Joanne did on their blogs. It is a very small 24x18cm painting from a series of cake paintings I did for a particular food exhibition some years ago.

Here's another one - those gallery viewers must be feeling quite ill!

Cheerio, chooks

Well the Fair is finally over - a sigh of relief and a slight feeling of emptiness as the pressure of the last weeks is lifted. My Chicken series sold, and two of the Pavement women scenes, and one Jacaranda, with possibly two more after a night or two of sleeping on the thought, so I had a good day. Very little else was sold, sadly, as there was some excellent art on show, at I think reasonable prices. As I've said before, I think a church arts fair won't generally attract big art buyers - unless word gets around and next time (if there is one), they'll come flocking in. I think the familiarity of these scenes, plus their small size and relative prices, worked quite well at this particular show. My favourite bit about it all was

meeting and chatting to some of the other artists - somehow

or other I haven't had that opportunity at other exhibitions - I suppose because I've never 'baby-sat' my work before all through the showing. Some interesting information and contacts were swopped and I'm quite excited to be not quite as on my own in this part of the world as I have been for a long time - many of my past partners-in-art have left Johannesburg for greener pastures over the years - it's high time I found some new ones!

Another Ice-cream man

Another small oil painting I did on one of the panels (25x25cm) I was using for the Jacaranda paintings - primed with Indian Red Oxide acrylic paint. I tried to keep the brushstrokes loose and not get hung up on details, but, yoh!, small faces are hard to render with oil paint, let alone tiny writing and bicycle tyres... (Those who know him may recognise one of the icecream buyers in this painting :o)

These icecream men are a part of South African town and city life - flocking in numbers to any outdoor event or gathering and at school gates (though many schools are trying to discourage it so the kids don't overdose on sugar and tartrazine) and the ting-a-ling of their bells are a summer background sound. Do other cities have mobile icecream men - or women for that matter? I glimpsed one on TV on a documentary about Tokyo, but don't recall seeing any in other places that I've mostly fleetingly visited. I've painted them a few times - Vivienne has the one pictured on the right, and this one I did for someone who was emigrating.

Jacaranda Series

This concludes - for this year anyway - the jacaranda series of 4 little (25 x 25cm) oil paintings, that will be going onto the Arts & Crafts Fair at the end of this month, and with the weather we're having, had better be the last of new oil paintings for then - they will just never get dry in time! The flowers are falling like rain, too, and new green leaves sprouting. Soon the pods will fall, and then the tiny stalks, then the leaves and then the long stalks... it never ends with jacarandas - as we know too well, because some clever built our house's swimming pool right underneath one - a constant slog to keep it clean!

This is the opposite side of the koppie from which I painted the view of little Melville houses - this looks over the suburb of Emmarentia. Someone had considerately blasted a hole in the rock to begin work on their driveway, so that I could get a glimpse of the North-facing side - these houses have a wonderful view, which on a clear day must go all the way to the Magaliesburg.
Coming in on a wing and a prayer,

Look below there's our field over there.

Though there's one motor gone

We will still carry on,

Coming in on a wing and a prayer.

Jacarandas in oil

I hope you aren't very tired of these blossoms - I've been trying them in oils on small 25x25cm masonite panels, primed with gesso. I was thinking that they might go down well with the locals (at the Art & Craft Fair) who would be familiar with these scenes, as well as giving me some much needed practise in landscape painting. That bright pink bit is a bougainvillea.

I once had lessons with a teacher who thought that too much jacaranda colour in a painting would be a bit sickening - she may have been right! At least it's a small painting...

Four Chickens and Out

That's it for now, with chickens - I can see how I could go further with them - but I would want to have them around to do so. If I did carry on with this series, I would try and use more expressive, freer marks, perhaps moving towards the abstract, and compose them better on the canvas - I continue to fill up the space available right to the edges...sigh!So that's that mini-series - for the next exciting production... um, not sure - I think I will go on a recce over the next couple of days and gather ideas and material. While I was photographing Chickens IV, I dropped my little hp camera that has been my constant companion since I got it, so I'll have to sketch references instead of clicking them - eek - might be good for me I guess, but I'm so mad I broke my precioussss >:o( Please Father Christmas....

Chickens I, II and III

I've managed to paint one chicken-pic a day (haven't posted over the weekend - too busy painting), going back to fiddle here and there - this one I've fiddled too much and made the apricoty coloured chook a bit smooth and bland. I'm struggling with painting from photo references only...
These three look slightly cartoonish - also from not having live models to observe, I've rather exaggerated their colours and features I think. They look out of focus, but I did blend the edges to try and get a bit of movement and fluff going. I think they're getting better here - I enjoyed the dappled light and trying to get that effect on the white chickens and the dark tyre and ground. I referred to my copy of 'Painting What you Want to See' by Charles Reid. His advice to keep the local values true - 'the lighted side of a black object is aways darker than the shadowed side of a white object' - helped.
A comment on my last post from prairieknitter01 mentioned she liked the #1 step white (ghost!) hens on the red ground, and I must agree that I'm sorry to have lost the fluency of those first brushstrokes. I will finish the fourth lot of chickens, then choose something I can work from directly for my next mini-series.