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EDM art 3: – Curtains.

Urgh, curtains. Those lovely, but awful things we hang in our homes to dress our windows. Beautiful to look at, awful to maintain. They gather dust, their hooks and ties break, they get stuck after after many openings and closings, they fade like I do with age, they have to be taken down to be cleaned, they knock over every thing in a home like mine where a closed window doesn’t exist…need I go on? But nonetheless, me too, I have some curtains. While we live in the barn , restoring our home here at Coin Perdu, I have curtains serving as little closets under the wash basin, hiding those pipes and other uglies.  Old kitchen towels bought at the brocantes serve as little curtains everywhere. They can be washed and rehung in a jiff, they are pretty, cost next to nothing and serve as playground for the cats. They suit me just fine, these miniature versions of a curtain. I’ll probably just move them over to the house later….along with the make-do bathroom sink which is concocted from an old wooden ladder lying around when we moved in. Our lives get simpler and simpler.

..curtain..

watercolor and dip pen with nib in Daler Rowney sketchbook, 21X29.7 cm

curtain-001

until tomorrow

Ronelle

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Colors and foliage of November 1

I’ve been neglecting my sketching and I can feel it clearly in my wrist. Stiff and uncomfortable. Unsure. Hesitant.

…colors and foliage of November – yellow greens…

..watercolor and pen in watercolor sketchbook, 15,5x25cm..

I’m back at Coin Perdu for a painting sabbatical. Only me, my art and my soul. I’m staying in the barn, made many changes and it is now more of an atelier than anything else. We surely won’t receive any visitors during winter, so I’m set with my easels and paints around a huge fireplace which burns day and night to provide me with heat. It is actually good to be a little on the cold side. It keeps my brain from being too comfortable and become lazy and my body needs to move and work constantly to keep my metabolism up. It helps with my neglected sketching, because my doodles are starting to turn into sketches. I will bounce back. I always do.

There is no better way to get back into sketching than using what is in abundance around us. Nature. and if it is too cold outside, we can even bring nature inside. Which is what I’ve done with the following three sketches. Going for walks and picking up.

…foliage and colors of November – burgundies…

..watercolor and pen in watercolor sketchbook, 15,5x25cm..

…colors and foliage of November – umbers…

..watercolor and pen in watercolor sketchbook, 15,5x25cm..

This will be my excercise for some time…trying to capture nature in its colors of Autumn and winter..with additions of whatever is moving and living during these months around Coin Perdu.

Until next time…keep warm in the Northern hemisphere and enjoy the summers seasons elsewhere!

Ronelle

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Plein air paintings 1.

We arrived back from a six week stay at Coin perdu, Puy d’Arnac, where we worked a lot, hiked a lot, painted a lot, had friends visiting, so we wined and dined a lot and we experienced a lot.

…la frontiére, oil on board, 30x40cm…

la frontiére

…detail…

la frontiere detail

With no Internet available or rather, we do sort of have Internet, but we are only provided with 56 kb/s by France Telecom which means that we have almost more ancient connection than the old modem system. So forget Internet, we don’t even try. Mobile phones only work on extremely bad mood days. We didn’t experience those. Fixed lines don’t exist, not yet anyway.  No room for television in our barn where we are living for the next few months. Civilized? I don’t know. What does civilized mean after all?  Any way, the only means of communication that exists at Coin perdu are the echoes of our voices across the valleys and woods. Echoes would thus be my means of “phoning” Hartman at the homestead where he’s ripping out walls and floors, to come help me carry my painting stuff from where I’m splashing and splattering  in the woods, or in the hills or by the rivers. He has a fancy manner of whistling that is very distinct in its echo, I can only shout which breaks up towards the end in some sort of falsetto shriek, but it has its echo anyway. Or at least, it has Hartman showing up soon and that’s what counts. May I never have to show off my shriek. We had a friend visiting us who entertained us on his famous Tarzan cry. The echo had all the animals in the forest answering.  And fleeing. A Welsh Tarzan.  How about that. He still has to work a bit on his Tarzan outfit though…

I reveled in plein air painting and sketching, sometimes even completed three a day and I loved every single minute. My wardrobe can testify to that. I have to invest in a completely new wardrobe, but at least I can now stand in front of the mirror and choose my oil stained outfit for the day. Even our steering wheel is a colourful caleidoscope, an original abstract creation of expressionistic finger painting.

More on plein air painting and my personal views on it later. For now, two of my pieces. It took me about two hours each and I had the company of a free spirited dog who we named Scruffy, who goes in search of a willing promeneur on Sundays to walk him, a distinguished monsieur who was walking Scruffy, un pêcheur, who gave up on fishing after a short while and a toad, who looked as if he had just woken up from hibernation.

…l’arbre solitaire, oil on canvas, 20.5x35cm…

collines lointaines

…detail…

ccollines- detail