Painting at Ray's - September sunshine

This year's painting week with Ray Atkins was during a sunny week in early September. I managed 4 paintings, not all of them finished.....

Firstly, our brief was to find something colourful and start with that colour on the canvas, then completing  the painting with the surrounding colours. This is my work, which took a good couple of days to finish:

Then the sun was too strong to be anywhere other than in the shade....so I looked out passed the rose arbour to the hillside beyond, but kept struggling with the placement of the different objects in view....so first of all I went back over the ground and covered it in a mid greenish grey and tried again.....but again things seemed to jump around, so I gave up painting and scratched the position of the main components. The following morning, this is how the painting appeared, and I really liked the combination of slightly misty colours with the roughly drawn lines...I couldn't bear to touch it, because I knew I'd lose that air of mystery, so here it is:

Next came the hydrangeas - in the deepest shade, so their pale flowers seemed to glow. I liked the pattern of the leaves - large, green leaves that overlapped each other in pairs, with pale green stalks, and the tiny flowers that flopped over the edge of the flower centre.

And lastly, a quick study of just two Hydrangea flowerheads

More baskets

Every week I'm learning more. Here are photos of the latest project- a real basket made completely of hazel. I love the fact that you use all the branch, the bark for weaving and the inside for the ribs. But it does take hours and hours and is quite physical.

 

 

 

 

Sculpting in soapstone

A friend organised for a group of us to try out sculpture at a local centre for marble sculpting. Luckily for us, Francois Xavier suggested we start with soapstone, since it is much softer to work, and therefore easier for beginners.

We each had a few tools and a lump of soapstone, and were encouraged to make whatever shape we wanted with it. I couldn't immediately identify the final shape, but I knew I wanted to contrast the rough stone, and some areas of polished stone, so I just started at the top and moulded parts of the block, using chisels, files and lastly sandpaper. Here is the result....more of a study than a finished artwork, but I really enjoyed the process - responding to the structure of the stone, working with my hands, creating different textures, discovering the marks you can make on the stone too.

Patchwork attempts

I think the last time I attempted to sew anything as patchwork was when I was about 12 years old, so this was a big experiment. I wanted to cover the oven gloves, and fancied the log cabin motif because it seemed easier than most. Here's the result:

It's inspired me to do more...next come cushions, I think. But I don't want them to seem too neat and ordered, so I'll need to add a bit of madness somehow.....

Winter views

I've just finished this painting, which I made as a present for a friend.

There's something weird going on with this photo - it's come out all wide!

I needed to work fast, and indoors, so I used acrylics, which I haven't touched for some time. It's great that they dry so fast, and infuriating that they do so, because there are colours on the palette which I want to come back to and they're no longer viable! I found I wanted to use the paint almost like watercolour - lots of layers building up the relative tones.

It took a while to finish, and I had  to keep stopping because the tones and hues changed so much over the course of the weeks, the mountain went backwards and forwards from all over very pale to strikingly black and white, to barely there palest grey, to pink at sunset. And the fields were at times so bright green I couldn't get the paint bright enough to match! Here's an earlier photo of work in progress.

 

That's more like the format of the actual canvas....I took it with a camera, and not with my iPod...maybe that's why the two photos are such different shapes??

Lino prints - the final versions

Last month I eventually finished the final layer of ink on the lino prints of my courgette design, and here they are:

The result has something of the look of the Arts and Crafts movement.  Not exactly my intention, but interesting to find how particular colour combinations can have such strong resonances.

I eventually chose a brick red as the final colour, to contrast with the turquoise/ green of the previous ink. Here's a print of the red on its own, on white tissue paper:

 I've found that tissue paper is a good for lino prints, especially as I don't have a press. The image transfers well, and I like the translucency of the ground. And if I dampen it before I print on it, the surface gets wrinkled, and so does the print - great texture!

 

Just to finish on a different note, I tried a bluer lilac mix, which makes for a colder image overall, but I don't dislike it.

Baskets

I've been learning how to make baskets. Here is my latest effort, which started out as half a gourd, with small holes evenly pierced around the top (cut) edge, then twisting bundles of rushes and securing with raffia threaded through a large needle, I ended up with this:

The shape more or less created itself. It reminds me of making coil pots from clay, and also of some of the pots we'd seen in Australia, created by the Aborigines. I'm sure it's a technique that stretches back into the mists of time. It's so flexible, and self supporting, I wanted to continue coiling and coiling, but ran out of rushes!

Christmas trees

I've been very slow at updating my blog.... not helped by a new PC to replace the old one which has all my photos on it, and then behaves in strange new ways which leave me baffled. So here are some attempts to get back up to date!


For Christmas cards, I'd been thinking about a simplified Christmas tree motif for a while, and couldn't find anything that satisfied me....until I cut off the corner of an old lino block I found on the shelf and voila! It's perfect!
(sorry - having real problems with new PC Windows 8 - can't find where to rotate photos!)

 

I've set up a mini production line on different shades of tissue paper. I like the quality of print I get on tissue paper, and the imperfections and wrinkles that naturally occur from using such fine paper.  And I knew I wanted to vary the ink across the surface, so no two prints are identical. I like that!

And then when I mount them on card, they look quite jolly!

 

Then I used the offcuts to make more trees (same non- rotational issue!)

 

 

So that was my bit of pre-Christmas creativity......