A little painting composed from several common images at my house. Namely, black angus calves, shy but curious; peeking at us from the fence through the late summer flowers. That explains the title, Peekamoo… Peekamoo, I see you!
Cat in the Covers
8×10 in., oil paint on gesso panel
Cats have routines don’t they? Morning can find them acting like alarm clocks as they call out for the household to wake up. Once our cat has done his job for the morning, by rousing us out of a sound sleep, he settles in to occupy the warm spots vacated by the humans. He has us so well trained. I managed to catch him just as he snuggled in and had to record the rhythm and harmony of the repeated shapes and curves of cat and covers. They seemed to be especially designed for cat naps. Straightening out the sheets and smoothing the covers can wait for now. Ssshhh…
Squirrel, Boy and Dog
There is a bit of glare on the canvas. It’s still wet and I am not sure it’s finished yet. I just wanted to talk more about the workshop that made it possible to paint it. This past week saw me taking the opportunity to participate in a workshop with Andrea Mossop. Besides being a wonderful artist and teacher, she has received some of her training from Hugh Mackenzie. He, in turn, was a student of Alex Colville. The intensive 3 day workshop was rich with the a rare insight into and understanding of Colville the artist and person, as well as the tools of composition and design that he used so masterfully.
In summary, Colville filled his prepatory drawings with lines, circles and key markers that did not, as many have supposed, give a rigid structure on which to place the characters of his ‘stories'( For the curious, examples of this can be seen in Google Images). Rather, he was discovering the relationships that already exist in the scenes which we store in our minds’eye. He simply developed the few, which, in his words, ‘drop down the funnel’ of our life experiences and accompanying perceptions, emotions, etc…
Andrea, therefore, made us draw, without reference to the photos we had selected. With strict obedience to these resulting sketches, we then went looking for relationships–the things that exist between things and make us want to represent them in the first place….a squirrel, a boy, a dog. A simple moment in my life and in theirs.
It was humbling to see how simple and pure the resulting images are–to me anyway. Thank you Alex. Thank you Andrea.
Sentry at the post
If you’ve ever been to Granville Island or any waterfront anywhere, you will have been seen gulls. They are usually very active; either swooping over the heads of visitors or at the feet of the same visitors in a swarm of webbed toes, feathers and beaks, gobbling and running randomly. This one stood out in the crowd, sitting motionless and a little detached in front of the warehouse door. The marks on the post suggested to me that this bird was showing up to its’ regular spot to keep watch, at least for a few minutes!