Body and Mine

Acrylic and acrylic media on canvas 36" x 24". This is the fourth painting in what I call the mine series, based on the landscape around the opencast gold mine in Waihi, Coromandel. A year ago I had in mind a landscape with a figure somehow based around the mine but it seemed all too complicated. This pose was in some recent life drawing I'd done in charcoal and it reminded me of that idea. The underpainting has been done for some time (there's a photo in an earlier post). I used a palette knife to apply modelling paste over the top of that and finally have got around to painting. There used to be a hill in Waihi, Pukewa, (hill/mountain? I never saw it...), and it was excavated away for the gold mine and in an obscure way this is what my painting is about. In much of my work I have this horizon line which drives my main critic crazy, but it's significant to me - I'm surrounded by hills - and looking out of a window is like looking at a painting, framed, with the horizon line like this. It's only just occurred to me that it's not just standing on the edge of the mine where I see it. It's all around me.

Playing with pastels

The powdery feeling on my fingers is something I don't like at all, almost abhorrent! But I am trying. These are a couple of exercises a group of us tried out when we got together recently at one of the artist's studios. Drawing without looking (covering the paper with another sheet), then crisscrossing over with black lines and then I suppose you could call it colouring in! There were vast differences in outcomes - abstract, realist, cubist. We drew each other but don't think I was with a group of aliens - remember, I said we weren't looking...

Time flies

I've been playing around with ideas after starting a word art project. The ideas I started out with were very literal (the people falling into the book in a previous post ...). So I've tried to leave the words out and just create images. These are two acrylic and mixed media works on canvas (20cm x 40cm). The green one is called "Time Flies in through the Window" and the other one "Time Flies".

Time Flies in through the Window is sold.

Collaborative Journals

are very interesting and a real pleasure to work in. It's exciting to receive one in the mail and see what's been happening in it over the previous weeks. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours working in one. The owner of this journal had a hip replacement a while ago and her pages were about that with pieces from paperwork about what she may and may not do with her new hip collaged with imagery including a wonderful drawing of a woman stretching her body and hips in joyful freedom. I have a hip that was damaged in a car accident which is pretty good at the moment but has an unknown use by date, so I appreciated being able to see this work of Michele's. It reminded me of a Sam Hunt poem called Sara - he released a CD single "Your Body has no Flaw" where he recites the poem with funky music playing (click on the link and there is a 45 second soundbite from the CD there) - I love it. It's a good mantra. I have a lot of his poetry books - on our second date my husband and I went to a bar where The Warratahs were playing, and Sam was also there, reciting his poetry - including a favourite, Wavesong. There you go, quite a lot of personal information ... I don't usually impart that here!

I've collaged in some gestural drawings from a visual diary of mine, (these are 20-30 second life drawings), and then painted the page, and written the words of the poem around the figures. The figures look a bit like boiled lobsters! Couldn't stop myself adding my metallic paint, of course. There are seven artists in this group. Each artist completes a double page spread. There are several of these working their way around New Zealand and it's something of a long term project - it'll be a while before we each have a completely filled journal.

Sara

poem by Sam Hunt

Your body has no flaw.

That must be a lie!

Maude Gonne had sad hands,

Angela's temper never opened doors.

Your body has no flaw.

I look for one daily,

the darkness of the valley,

the climb to your jaw.

Your body has no flaw,

I part the earth and sky,

I witness birth,

I pray at a bleeding door.

Your body has no flaw,

buttocks breast and thigh

curved ankles where I lie

your calves...another shore.

Your body has no flaw.

The black shag neither,

nor the blue heron at prayer,

you live outside the law.

Your body has no flaw.

I've also photographed the other two contributions I made in the journal. The first entry was a compilation of ideas from the books I was reading at the time. There are many layers and pieces that fold back to reveal other images. The third image (music and houses) was an idea taken from the work of another artist, ("Union Road", by John Brack) and to be honest, I can't remember why. The wonderful thing about these journals is that they are a place to experiment!

Ten days without posting...

I have been out of town quite a lot and am now teaching (last week and this). I was in the Coromandel again last week, and took many pictures. The tractors are on the beach at Hahei, and the birds were at the marina in Whitianga. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take shots early or late in the day so the bright light meant not a lot of my photographs turned out very well, particularly the beach and water.

At school we did some printmaking. The students did prints using a thin board instead of lino. It worked very well. The students planned their design on paper first, then drew it onto board before cutting. A couple of them spent a lot of time carefully cutting lots of detail and their's worked very well. Most of the children (Years 5 and 6) were so keen to get to the printing bit that they rushed - we had butterflies, a boy with fishing rod and bucket of fish, a couple of landscapes, a hand, and animals. The first print was in one colour and for the second (the boards dried quickly in the sun) they chose two colours (they'd done colour mixing recently with their regular teacher). Some rolled the ink until it totally blended and others tried with some success to have two colours blending into each other. They're mounted on coloured paper and up on the wall and look great.

and more visual diary stuff ...

Playing in the visual diary

Little Fish

Taken with my Canon digital SLR at Port Charles near the top of the Coromandel. I might have this one printed. I have adjusted the levels and contrast a little.

Drawing

Some figure drawing in black ink in my journal - did a few in charcoal on large paper but haven't photographed them. These are 15 second and 30 second gesture and I think 1 and 2 minute drawings, certainly no longer. I'm a bit phobic about pencil at the moment but I also think drawing pen is good because there's no going back! It could be good to get some marker pens for drawing in permanent ink on large paper.

I am painting

this week. This is a photograph of a quick painting I did after the Cornish Pumphouse in Waihi was moved and there was a local celebration with fireworks. It's acrylic on canvas, 20 x 30 cm.

I've been working on this idea of the photo imagery in paintings, and on Monday I spent a long time on another one where I use the actual image on paper, glued to the canvas, beneath the work. This time I was working too quickly, I think, and had some problems so I've picked off some of the areas and have to work out what to do now.

I've also been working on a larger, 60 x 90 cm, canvas and this time quickly painted in the shapes and lines I want, then have layered over (and boy, do I mean layer after layer) glazes. I now have an underpainting (which was already underpainted) for a fourth mine painting, similar composition as the other three but more abstract. I'll look at it tomorrow, decide which dark lines need to come out and how I'm going to apply paint over the top. It looks a ghastly intense orange but it has a lot of colours in it, really! It also has the dreaded metallic paint in it - copper. Some of the glazes were rubbed on with cloth. Others painted with brush. I put the picture up to create pressure on myself to do something with it now.

Using my own resources

I was again looking through the photos I took in Auckland and have tinkered with a couple and thought they could be useful for drawing practice, looking at perspective and so on. These two I've uploaded on one document. I used the Photosuite programme to change them into images I will draw from.

The other image is some watercolour paper that I used to scrape off brushes used for another work. I have four pieces and kept them thinking I might "do" something with them eventually. Again, I've just superimposed one image on top of the other. I was reminded that I had these lying around after Cath http://cathrs.blogspot.com/ mentioned Martha Marshall on http://artistsjournal.blogspot.com noticed the potential of some newspaper she'd wiped paint onto.

Breaking Rocks

Mixed media, again using my own photocollage as a starting point, with modelling paste and acrylic paint, on canvas, 20 cm x 40 cm.

Another photograph

I've been looking through the photographs I took from the car while driving through Auckland recently and found this one.

Looking around the room ...

is the provisional title of these mixed media 10cm x 30cm x 3.6cm canvases. I started with the photocollages I made, printed from the computer on ordinary paper then copied with the fax machine onto the same paper (just wanted a less defined copy), applied to canvas with binder medium, applied some modelling paste in places with a palette knife, and then applied layers of acrylic paints, some as thin glazes and others straight out of the tube, sometimes wiping with a rag, and drawn on them in some places with black ink. I've put one thin layer of acrylic glaze medium over it and will hang them on the wall now before deciding whether to do anything more to them.

No painting happening but have been using camera

We've just been away for a few days in the north of the Coromandel and this is the view from the deck where we stayed. It was interesting using the digital SLR - a shorter exposure gave more beautiful and dramatic images, a longer exposure gave more texture, ie in the cliff and rocks, but too much light meant little colour.

We also had a regular visitor any time there was food in the vicinity.

Photocollage

Just trying out the process, so didn't give a lot of thought to what I was photographing before tinkering with the images and putting it together. In this is a guitar, a temple shaped candle holder, a hair dryer, a pepper grinder and a broken vase. Extremely random, and very quickly done, but you get the idea...

Pastel practice

This is on a dark blue card/heavy paper - something I had on hand and not as toothy as I'd like. I sanded it and the marks show, decided I liked that. Sanding didn't make a lot of difference to the surface and the pastel didn't adhere very well. Must have washed my hands half a dozen times during the drawing! Now that I see it in a photograph, I can see some things I should change, but as the card is probably holding as much pastel as it can, I'll leave it as it is.

I've just finished editing a novel for a friend and my sleep pattern went totally awry during that time. I'd go to bed and lie there thinking about the story - got totally into it! I sure learned a lot during the process, and found out that I knew a lot about the craft that I'd learned/been taught in the past but thought I'd forgotten. It's been a kickstart for me and already I've started planning a story already. Need to do that anyway, seeing as how I've lost almost a year's worth of writing with the computer crash. I'd joined "Book-in-a-Week", an online yahoo group several months ago, and I found the process worked well. Once week a month we state a goal of x number of pages and post 3 times during that week our progress, and a grand total at the end of the week. It sure kicked up the word count.

Apart from that, I've started a daily drawing journal and made some photos of objects to use as a drawing resource. I'm tinkering with them on the computer, making them black and white and using filters before cropping. Next step is to print them and see if I can put together a useful composition.

Playing in my visual diary

Not achieving much, maybe after concentrating on completing the collage project I need some time off.

Firstly there's a quick paint sketch, one of a few in my visual diary, again on the mining theme. I've rotated this and it's the 'wrong way around" (there is a 'poppet head in it which is not the right way up), but I thought it looked better that way, or any other way in fact except the right way up.

I tried pastels - still don't really like the way they feel in my fingers but I've bought a whole roll of black building paper so I'll persevere and maybe I'll actually create something worthwhile ...eventually! This was a warm up exercise.

The face is collage papers that I've painted on then cut and put together, touching up roughly with paint...in fact the whole thing was very quick and rough - I've been thinking of using this kind of thing for a base for painting.

Old will make way for the new

This is another photograph I took from the motorway. I didn't know what I was getting because we were driving fast, and I just kept clicking. I found this one with the crane in the background and the old house behind the fence (though it looks like a road at first) and trees.

Negative space

I was interested to see what shots I could get from the car when we were driving along the Auckland motorways recently. It was quite late in the day, not long before dusk. At 100km/hr I was using 1600 ISO (no I was not driving). When I reviewed the photos later, I thought the writing on the wall was one of the semitic languages, and it took me a while to see the black paint was the negative space. What was I thinking? Now I just glance at it and I can see the large, fat, white letters. I have quite a collection of photos, some interesting, some mediocre, some blurry, and now have to decide whether I can use any of them. Maybe photocollage, or painting or collage. At least I'm starting to build up my photo resources again after losing almost everything I've taken since getting the digital SLR.