March 2009 – Africantapestry

Posted on March 23, 2009March 24, 2009 by Myfrenchkitchen · 28 Comments

Cartoon illustrations

Invigorated by spring and salads and fruit and spring vegetables and all the great art I see everywhere, I feel myself bursting with ideas and inspiration. Apart from loving painting, I also love writing and I’m getting more and more a feel for illustration. Writing and illustration make a good combo, so; for my writing which I’ve started with a while back, I’m considering doing some illustrations for as well. I have tried my hand at one or tow before which can be seen here:

Absent

Egg in a pocket

Singin in the rain

Something that needs fixin

…shut the gate!…

illustration done in rotring pen and watercolour on Fabriano artistico HP.

We have a friend who’s a farmer. His pride is his huge selection of animals, and especially his bulls. But he also has vineyards. And his biggest struggle is to get the farmhands to remember to close the farm gates behind them, so the cows and bulls don’t roam about in the vineyards. After stripping his temper once too often, he promptly planted a post on the gate on which, in no uncertain terms, he forcefully sergeant-majors them to keep the gates shut. The punchline on the illustration is written in my mother tongue, but it roughly comes down to: “Keep the @&*#@.. gates shut… the cows are in the vineyard!!”

Posted on March 20, 2009March 20, 2009 by Myfrenchkitchen · 16 Comments

Sketching faces

With everybody crawling out of their hibernation holes, sketching faces has become easy again…. in availability, I mean, not in the sketching itself.

…Spring faces…

Pencil sketches in moleskine with watercolour dabs.

This past week we had le soleil à volonté! Meaning as much sun as you want. I made sure I had plentiful of helpings of unlimited sunshine, literally drinking in the sunshine and blue skies, turning my face to the sun. And I could see everybody else doing the same. The winter grim is thown off the faces, mouths are turned upward in smiles, little friendly jokes are being cracked with the stranger opposite you and cars stop to give you an opening into traffic. We are all united by the appearance of the sun. If I could capture the effect of sunlight on people and sell it in a bottle, I would be a billionaire overnight!

So. Like all these other cheerful Francais, I also took to the streets, sat myself down outside a café and sketched the faces around me.

I used pencil, which is always hard for me. Maybe I’m influenced by the fact that I know pencil can be erased, but I DON’T want to erase, so I’m hyper careful not to make a mistake! In using a pen, I care less, I JUST DO IT. I added some watercolour, because it looked too sad without colour and after all, today is 20 March, which means it is…PRINTEMPS!(spring!)…

Question of the day: Did you hold a pen in your hand today and what did you do with it….doodle/draw/sketch/scratch your ear/ clean your toenails…?

Posted on March 18, 2009March 20, 2009 by Myfrenchkitchen · 13 Comments

Crocus painting

I’m still frantically struggling artwise. It may not seem so, but I am.

I’ve spent some ample time sketching and drawing, doing contour work, splashing paint and it still feels as if I’m slopping through mud. I suppose I am in the low part of the creative cycle and will need patience and perseverance to rise again. Patience doesn’t come easy for me, especially when I have a new book of artists in hand and see what amazing talent and excitement and original creativity are happening in the art world! Then I “intensely dislike” the slushing here in my mud pool!

…a little colour in mud…

Watercolour on Fabriano artistico paper HP, 30x23cm (11,8″x9″)

A while back Lindsay posted some of her comments which I found a great idea; sometimes there is such valuable info and support in the comments which we miss out on. I’m going to follow her lead and post some comments of my previous post. From these comments it is clear how many/all artists relate to these feelings of frustration, understand the creative struggle and recognize their own share of lows with personal experience and bits of advice here and there. These are the things I learn from on my daily creative journey…

…..”the nice thing about things forgotten is that they come back again quickly, and one has the chance to change a thing or two about them”… said Gesah.

…”Sometimes when work shows a little struggle in the birthing it only makes it more pleasurable to see. I learned that from a painting I did that when I looked at it I could only see the struggle. A viewer told me they loved it BECAUSE they could see the struggle which gave it much more drama and excitement than the ordinary pretty picture it might have been without the struggle”…said Jana.

…”sometimes those ‘tough love’ approaches do us the most favours…” said Cathy

…”like anything else you have to warm up first. If I’ve not been on my bike for 2 months, I am shaky and breathless just going down the road – but after a couple of rides, I’m back in the saddle. The same with drawing for me – if I’ve not drawn for a while, I do the most clumsy, embarassing drawings until I get my eye back in again”… said Carole

…”sometimes our brains get in the way of our making”…said Maureen

…”I really learn when an artist shares the process she has gone through. We can all sympathize with those times when the creative juices seem frozen”…said Annie

…”I have a tutor who echoes in my head in the same way :>) when going through a bad patch on the degree and being very nervous of him (he was very acid and didn’t suffer fools gladly) I was was overworking the paint. Each time he walked by he said ‘put it down (the paint) and leave it ALONE’, ’round the class …. back to me …. and he’d say it again and again! It worked”…said Vivien

…As far as I can tell, for a certain type of artist (of which I am one and I think you are, too), it’s always a process of learning, losing the way for a time, relearning, picking up new materials, re- finding old ones, circling back to old themes and concerns, recalibrating, rethinking, refocusing. It’s a lifetime thing. Or so I think. I try to be accepting of the process, as dispiriting as it sometimes seems”…said Laura

…Art doesn’t come out in an even stream, but we go backward and forward and through all kinds of loops and spins”…said Bill Fulton

…I guess those things work like when you have a bad hair day – YOU see it very well in the mirror, but everybody else thinks you just look like you always do”…said Nina.

…”Sometimes what seem to be harsh words sink deeper and do good even if they can feel soul destroying when they are spoken”…said Jeanette

…”I can empathize with what you said. I know when I have not painted or drawn for an extended period of time, there’s a little reluctant anticipation….kind of like the sensation of jumping into cold water…but once in…. it feels good”…said D Prizzi.

…”But painting, like riding a bike, will again come naturally”…said Desirée.

(a recent comment)…”these things definitely do come and go in cycles, don’t they? One of the things that is always hard for me to remember is that the cycle moves more quickly if I still show up and work every day. (There’s a good book about this that I should probably re-read — “The War of Art” by Stephen Pressfield.)”…said Turningturning

Posted on March 11, 2009March 11, 2009 by Myfrenchkitchen · 25 Comments

Back to basics

Painting this “fennel salad” yesterday made me realize how easy it is to lose some skills when they are not constantly excercised. Like our bodies, they become soft and flabby, sluggish and lazy and it takes work and discipline to get them back into shape. Such is the state of my current painting skills.

Painting done in watercolour on Fabriano artistico HP extra white, 30x23cm (11.8″x9″)

…fennel, pear and onions…

Not actively painting or drawing for more of two months had a paralyzing impact on my creativity, self confience and hand-eye coordination. I could clearly feel en see it in this little painting above. My wrist feels stiff and my hand feels disconnected from my brain. Or maybe it is the opposite; my hand being too connected to my brain, restricted by reason and not able to take its free course. I clutch my paintbrush in an iron grip and lock my jaw in frowned concentration. I zoom in on details and am afraid of taking risks. I hesitate on choice of colour and paint hesitantly with the tip instead of the stroking the whole brush.

Trying to do a waterscene painting, resulted in a complete catastrophe. It made me think of my professor years ago, who told me in first year graphichs, I couldn’t draw. So, remembering his “cruel-to-be-kind” teaching, I took some cheap pilot black ink and drawing paper and my chair and took off to the river this morning. It was time to once again, heed the professor’s words of years ago and get back to basics. Here is one of the drawings I did by the river this morning.

If interested, the rest can be read and seen over at Watermarks.

…with sticks and stones…