So, I’m still putting ‘miles on the paintbrush’ and cabin fever took me out on a rare sunny day recently to look for signs of spring. The wind was strong and bitter so I grabbed this quick photo and retreated back to the warmth of the studio to interpret and paint.
The title could be ‘The March of the Saugeen’. I don’t think ‘flow’ when I see this river but rather a relentless presence that has at times carried me, dumped me, flooded me out, fed me and always reminded me to ‘march on’.
This little piece appeared on a Christmas card I created a few seasons ago. 2016 has been a busy year with big changes and this year finds me unpacking and setting up my new studio and waiting for working lights to be put in. That is happening today. Yesss!!!
So here is a souvenir of Christmas past. It also reminds me of my former home. The congregation of small birds, depicted here in ink and wash, used to meet and eat at the bird feeder, just outside the patio doors.
This post goes up with a message for all to have a wonderful Christmas and holiday season– with food and friends of course!
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.
8×10, oil on panel
Quietly, oh so quietly, spring is coming. The trees whispered it to me when I went for a walk last week. There is a maple sugar bush next to the trail and in this small section of the woods, the operator still uses the traditional buckets for sap collecting. I stood to enjoy the scene and listen to the drip, drip, drip of sap. Music to my ears.
