The Creative Process
Found a subject. Image on paper. PANIC! Too much information! How do I get out of this mess? Keep going but take it slow and be careful. Calm now and I see possibilities. Working nicely. This is awful! Quit! Stop wasting time! Throw it out! Keep going. I can always take it to an art show and let people see what a disaster looks like. I'm going to SHARE my frustration with my two Facebook art groups: Ink and Self-taught. Gee, it feels good to talk about it.
Okay. Pastel is down now. I really like the tomatoes. Not sure about the leaves yet. What the heck! I was going to throw it out earlier so I'm going to add black ink and see what happens. RISK! Drop the photo reference and go it alone. I think I'm falling in love with this piece. Back to photo to double-check some leaf parts that I can't figure out. DONE! Not sure if I like it anymore or not. Maybe I'm kidding myself about this one. This is a whole new style. I'm going to post it on Facebook and see if I get any FEEDBACK. |
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Snakes and Acupuncture
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Moving into Pastels
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The handmade paper used here was given to me by a friend; his wife had been an artist. When she died suddenly a few years ago, he wanted her personal possessions to go to people who would really appreciate them. I was fortunate enough to inherit a number of tubes of acrylic paint and a large bundle of this enigmatic paper.
I can soak the paper and it stays wet for hours (even overnight in the winter) which is great but, at the same time, because it absorbs so fast paint sinks into the paper before I can move any colour across the paper. A different medium was in order so I looked around the studio and my eyes landed on two boxes of pastels that had been sitting around for a few months. As an aside: I don't work with pastels but when two different people (within one day of each other) both asked me if i wanted a box of pastels that they weren't using, I said "Sure. Thanks." This piece was the first pastel and 4 months later .... The image is from a photograph that I took of the agricultural land around the Spanish village, Argés, that I used to live in. I had fallen in love with the colours and the sweeping landforms. The problem was, and continues to be, that as much as the memory and the photography inspire me, I cannot capture the feeling of the place so I wait for the image to tell me what to do next. I thought that maybe all that was needed was a break, a pause, some letting go of trying to reproduce a photo, so I decided to play with another sheet of paper. I must have had a photograph for this image as well (I can't remember anymore) but in any event, I do remember that it was fun to do and that I wasn't trying to achieve anything. From what I see now, it seems as if I just let myself get into the movement and the general swirl of colours. That was, as I said earlier, months ago. But I never did put the pastel sticks that I had selected to make the Spanish landscape with away. The story doesn't end quite there because there is a third image. Remember the trees drawn with ink that you saw when you first came to this website? The ones in the slideshow on the landing page? Well, I've decided to do another series; this one of mushrooms combining Indian ink with watercolour. The paper. The Indian ink was fine on a sheet pulled from a 25 Sheet Watercolor Pad of Artist's Loft fundamentals (a cold press finish, acid-free, 9 x 12 in/22.86 x 30.48 cm, 90 lb/185 gsm paper) but the watercolour wasn't working to my liking at all so a week ago, while I was trying to decide on what else i could use to do the mushrooms, I spotted those sticks of pastels. The paper loves pastel but It took way too many hours to finish this piece, given that I want at least half a dozen mushrooms done for an August commitment. So, I need to come up with something that I can complete a little faster and this piece will have to stand alone. It will go up, for the month of June with a name and price tag, onto a small wall above the coffee maker in the bakery that I work at two days a week. I learned a lot doing the third pastel and some new ideas are turning around in my mind - different things that I could expand on. I'm back to thinking of doing the mushrooms in inks only but using calligraphy, water-based inks like Waterman and Parker which bleed so lovely but of course, I'll need to experiment first. I had also planned to do the mushroom pieces on smaller sheets of paper but made the mistake of using a larger size.; I carried the size mistake over to two more mushroom drawings and I am not going to redraw because when I look at them now the larger size feels right. And that is as far as the pastel story goes... for now. |