Category Archives: paints and pens

Darwin, Australia, paints and pens

My first life drawing session!

life drawing session 1

My first time at a life drawing class. The model was a petite German lady called Bianka, an experienced artist’s model and a sunny, well-travelled, intelligent pixie. Of course it doesn’t matter how petite and trim a model is, when I draw a woman, she puts on 15 kilos just because, well, that’s how I feel about the pose. I am drawing on what I know, and the drawing is not Bianka, nor is it me, but a hybrid third of all those involved. Heh.

Worked with soft and hard chalks. Some pencil for the last drawings, because I was getting tired and knew that my “zone” moment had passed (but I was thrilled that, at some point, I found myself ‘in the zone’, if only for a brief 20 minutes or so) There are some tiny areas in these drawings that I’m happy with…I’m talking about a few inches here or there. On the whole, though, these are learning drawings, and of no value in themselves.

life drawing session 1

I threw most of the drawings away when I got home (and one of the better ones was picked up by the wind and whisked into the water…can’t even remember what it looked like, really, I never got a good look at it.) Only kept a few for these photographs, but will probably end up throwing all (but one) away, after I post this. It’s a tactic to keep me attending the drawing sessions: don’t get precious, don’t ‘collect’, don’t get smug, don’t keep anything…it’s the doing that has value, the finished drawings are nothing.

life drawing session 1

I am so happy I worked up the nerve to go. It was absolutely worth it. The thing I loved the most? The connection, immediate and visceral, that I felt because mind and cleverness were not involved. None of that “start by drawing an egg shape for the head” bullshit. Bianka=eye=heart=hand=drawing. Simple and powerful. There is sooo much work to be done. I hope I can keep the sessions up…to get good at anything, you have to be ready to commit to years of practice.

The Darwin Life Drawing sessions are presented by Shilo McNamee, with the support of the Darwin Visual Arts Association (DVAA). They are held Sunday mornings (check the website or their facebook page to be sure, though, and to tell Shilo you’re coming) at the Winnellie Art Space, 96-a Winnellie Road (next to the large Darwin Bakery/factory)

life drawing session 1

life drawing session 1
life drawing session 1

life drawing session 1

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Exhibits, paints and pens, stuff i've made

Dresden Doll : : Don Whyte’s Off-Cuts Show

odi et amo detail

Details of a painting I’m throwing together for Don Whyte’s Off Cuts Show.

“Dresden Doll” (acrylic and retarder on canvas). She’s named after Dresden porcelain, by the way, not the band. Dresden porcelain often featured oriental designs painted in cobalt; one distinguishing feature for collectors these days is that “the cobalt blue mark is always underneath the glaze”. Her entire body was blocked in cobalt blue, covered over in skin tones, and then scratched through to reveal the designs…it’s called s’graffito and I wrote a post about doing it in acrylics, here.

odi et amo detail

Her tats are rather pale, but it’s too late to fix that now without overworking the thing. She’s already pretty heavily worked as it is, which is not a good feeling…so important to try and finish the piece while there is still a connection between yourself and the subject, while it’s all still interesting and challenging. I’m so over this figure by now (even though I only started it yesterday) that I just want to get the damn background—which is a mess—sorted out so I can leave it. I’ve got another two canvases to do for the show, deadline’s the 9th of April.

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Don Whyte’s Off-Cuts Show is up in less than three weeks. Don Whyte is Darwin’s prime framing business, and every year he uses up the small off-cut pieces of canvas stretcher bars from his trade to make a couple hundred small square stretched canvases (average size is one foot, 30 cm., square). Local folks are invited to drop in and grab as many canvases as they think they can finish, turn them in before the deadline, and they all get exhibited and sold on the night of Don’s Off-Cuts Show.

Amazingly, for a venue that isn’t even a gallery, this gathering has become Darwin’s most widely-attended, most dynamic, and most thoroughly-cleaned-out art exhibition. The large room is jam-packed with people on opening night—everyone brings something lovely to eat, the bar is run on donations (because Don hasn’t got a license to sell alcohol)—and there isn’t a single painting left unsold by the end of the evening. Prices range from $40 to $250, the artist can choose to donate the entire painting’s sell price to Don, or split the take according to some sort of percentage. All the money Don gets from the show goes to charity.

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embroidery and textiles, paints and pens, philosophy, stuff i've made

A few more…

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Whatever is happening is the path to enlightenment. —Pema Chödrön

More feathers, because it’s what I happen to be doing at the moment. A path lined with feathers is not a bad path to be on!

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Getting a bit bolder with the color combinations…orange thread over yellow green paint, complementaries, that sort of thing.

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May have over done it with the red-violet feather on emerald green…that one looks a bit muddy. Too many different kinds of thread. Too many colors.

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When the work starts to get slick, polished, ornate, precise, or needlessly intricate, it’s time to step back and empty the mind of what it knows, again: time to dig up the real feather that started all this, and really look at it.

Starting from zero, studying the feather as if for the first time, and proceeding with attention and praise for it as an individual and miraculous thing. Which, of course, it is.

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embroidery and textiles, paints and pens, stuff i've made

The thing with feathers

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops – at all -

—excerpt from “Hope” is the thing with feathers - by Emily Dickinson

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It started with single strokes of ink on small squares of watercolor paper…trying different brushes out to see which ones made good feathers in one swoop. Got some nice shapes…lovely puddles of gathering color.

Then: what if I stitch the barbs (using feather stitch, naturally) with thread to form the vane?

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Encouraged by this, I tried the process out on small stretched canvases, adding some shading to the original ink stroke with acrylic paints and a rigger brush. The central calamus and rachis was worked in stem stitch. The thread is a variegated DMC coton a broder.
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Nice, but the feather stitch was hard to keep neat over so wide an area, so eventually I abandoned the feather stitch altogether, and just used straight stitches to work the barbs. Alternated between long and short straight stitches, as well as between coton a broder and a synthetic iridescent thread.
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I first got the idea to embroider on top of painted, stretched canvases when I was 18 or so. Never finished the huge tree of life that I started then, but the idea of over-stitching a painting has been with me a long time. I dug the idea up again in 2009 when I added cross-stitched roses to my oil painting of a 19th century Filipina in traditional dress for my exhibit Encarnación.
I’m very fond of this stitch-and-painting mashup technique, and think I might be using it more often from now on, because it gives a dimension of texture and structure to a painting that I haven’t been able to get from using paint alone.

P.S. The feather paintings/embroideries are for a series that I’m putting into the TactileARTS (The Crafts Council of the Northern Territory) Members’ exhibiton this April. The theme is Birds.

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paints and pens, stuff i've made

small ‘exercise’ paintings

small paintings 1-9
Had a bit of a play yesterday, using small (5 x 7 inches…approximately 13 x 18 cm) canvases. I started each one as a pool of two or three colors, allowing them to bleed into each other (or smooshing them together with a brush, if they were thicker) and dry. Then I’d wait until there was a detail that I wanted to paint in…hair, or coils, or round bubble shapes…and let the shape and colors lead the way to a finished image.

These were fun. Didn’t do any planning or trying to determine things in advance. I would just get this idea that I wanted to paint a fragment of knitting…so I’d pick up one of the canvases with a dry blob of paint on it, and start fitting rows of knitting over it, just as though I were making a sweater for a jelly monster. These felt more like studies for bigger paintings.

I do think an artist should actually work in different sizes like small, medium and large. I mean, your head can occupy the small, that size….And big is your body and medium is, I think medium is the hardest to operate because it occupies only part of your body. Like either just from your neck to your knees or from your head to the top of your genitals or, I mean, it’s a weird kind of scale and size.
—Squeak Carnwath, in conversation with John Yau

It seems strange to me, and yet completely right, that the size of the canvas determines my approach to it, and the feeling of the finished work. This particular size I associate with postcards and pocket books…ephemeral things that wink in and out of existence. I don’t feel the need to paint anything sweeping or exhaustive. Don’t need to work layer upon layer, waiting for something to slowly emerge out of all that paint. The need for a narrative, or to arrange several elements together so that they inhabit a small universe within the painting, is absent. I’m happy to paint one small blobby, hilly, lumpen object, without making any references to its past or future. For me these are really about the colors, and the small gestures of mark-making that texture the surface.

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Darwin, Australia, life, paints and pens

Red sky at morning

6 a.m.

 “Like a red morn that ever yet betokened,
Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field,
Sorrow to the shepherds, woe unto the birds,
Gusts and foul flaws to herdsmen and to herds.”
—W. Shakespeare, from Venus and Adonis

 Customs planes flying over the Kimberley area thought Kris was having some trouble because he wasn’t using his two main sails, just the mizzen, and there’s a low pressure in the area. The message he gave them was to “contact the sailboat’s owner and arrange to tow the sailboat back to Darwin.” I was a bit of a basket case, of course…my imagination took over and worried the hell out of me! Yesterday a plane managed to deliver a satellite phone to Kris, and they spoke to him.

He’s fine, plenty of food and water still, but with the strong winds (blowing in the wrong direction) he’s reluctant to use the boat’s sails. These have been rotting inside the boat for several years, and might blow apart.  Also, the boat is taking on a little bit of water that, so far, the bilge pumps have been taking care of. Now that the monsoons are starting up and it will be raining more often, Kris is worried that the solar panels that charge the bilge pumps will stop charging, and then the boat will start to fill up with water. On top of this, the monsoon winds, once they are established, will be against him, anyway. It’s taken him a whole week to make 100 nautical miles…a distance that, with good winds and a good boat, you’d normally do in just over a day.

My guess is that, on the whole, Kris figures the best way to avoid this whole thing ending in tragedy (i.e. loss of White Bird) is to just tow the boat home. The sailboat, White Bird, had been sitting in Bali for years—unmaintained—after its owner died there. Our local bar manager, John, purchased the boat, and Kris was asked to sail it back to Darwin because it hasn’t got an engine.

John and some other guys will be heading out there with another sailboat tomorrow (or that was the plan last I spoke to him, though he also said he’d call me this morning and hasn’t). If they do go, it will probably take three days to get there, then they have to actually find him, and another 4 days coming back.

thunderstorm at sunset

Was up at 6, and there was a vivid red sunrise quietly bleeding its way across the sky. It was so gorgeous that I fumbled for my camera just seconds after waking up, and photographed it while still half asleep. I thought of the old weather forecasting rhymes about red skies: “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning; Red sky at night, sailors delight.”  *groan* I just want him home, safe and well. But I have no say in these matters, so I try to keep my mind on other things.

working on...

I started a painting, based on a magazine pic that I have always wanted to use. Basic lines are in, but if I keep going in this way, I will end up with just a pretty picture of two pretty girls, like the magazine photo. So today’s job is to fearlessly change what I’ve done…to kill my attachment to this pretty and conventional image, and do something brave and fun to the drawing. To make this canvas my own.

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