works of wanderlust

Category: realism

  • of scenes of a run.

    So, I call it a “sketch” sure, but it’s really a proper attempt at a watercolour landscape, tho, isn’t it?

    In the nearly two months since I’ve posted any notes here I’ve drawn and painted so much that I haven’t hardly had a moment to stop and reflect on any of it. And fair enough, I’ve been taking it really productive and engaging class at the local rec centre and from that been spawning at least two solid paintings every week for the last four.

    Two per week!? Well, so it goes that on Thursday evenings we meet for about three hours and step-by-step work through a mix of technique and practice towards building the art of the week. The result is usually an ok, but rushed, edition of the scene featuring some form of Canadian landscape. An east coast beach, a sunlit forest, a rocky mountain scape, and a prairie grain elevator.

    To wit…

    But those images are not really mine. I mean, I painted them, each on my own as the second edition on the Friday or Saturday following the class as part of the weekly “homework” assignment, a polished up, time-taken, second-go at the image or scene from the class-of-the-week.

    But not really mine.

    drafts and seconds

    The obvious reflection on anything is that practice makes perfect, but until I took my watercolour class that obvious reflection hadn't caught my attention around the very specific notion of painting the same scene again, and again, and again, and again. Why paint something I already painted when I already painted it and can paint something new instead. Novelty is not necessarily and enemy of learning, but it does distract from the refinement of technique and better learning. Learning from mistakes means trying a second, third, fourth or more times, and trying not to repeat that mistake on one or more of those repeats. To that end, and as much as I can will myself to spend supplies on second, third, fourth and more editions of my works, I feel like I should be adding more drafts into my learning plans. And you should too.

    On the other hand, the feature image, the scene of the muddy creek flowing through an urban nature scape contrived from a photo I snapped while out on a long Sunday morning run through the local ravine, that one is all mine.

    The class has forced me to buy some good supplies, including proper brushes, paper, paint and other tools of the watercolourist trade, so having these things on hand and not supposing either the gear or the lessons should go to waste, I just started painting last night. Aforementioned reference photo at the ready, I propped it up on my tablet screen and settled into an evening of art.

    And so it goes.

    Maybe not a great work, but technically one of the first of my very own creation.

  • of vegetable matters.

    As much as I have a minor pre-occupation with so-called “urban” sketching, my situation, life, and local environment often steer me towards subject matter that is decidedly more suburban, rural, or parkland.

    In other words, leafing through my growing stack of sketchbooks, the common theme seems to trend towards nature, trees, insects, and outdoors… in the wilderness sense.

    In the winter this has meant snow and brown, leafless trees.

    In the autumn I specifically went to the art store to buy and build an autumn foliage paint collection.

    And as spring approaches once again for what will be my third warm-season of outdoor painting adventures, I’m anticipating not just building a new “spring” foliage paint collection as a seasonal counterpoint, but finding lots of blossoms and insects and fresh growing things to sketch and paint through April and May.

    Leaves Aren’t (Just) Green

    Nature is tricky and like so many objects that we find emerging from the tips of our paintbrushes, has a subtle colour palette that bears explanation through a glimmer of science.  Leaves seem green because leaves tend to be stuffed full of chlorophylls, a family of plant-chemical that absorbs all the blue, yellow, violet and orange light in an effort to make energy.  But biology is tricky and chlorophyll can fill leaves in varying patterns, be missing entirely from one part of a leaf or another, degrade due to plant health or through the season, and more. And all this means is that the reflected green light is often mixed with a variety of other colours, sometimes yellow and sometimes oranges and sometimes reds, pinks, violets or blues, all merging into a green that is rarely just green, but some other collection of hues that define the very nature of the plant we are painting.

    I was longing to be outside painting plants today, partly because it’s been a long winter, partly because the weather has started to warm and people are talking about the near future state of the streets and parks free from snow, and partly because it’s almost exactly one week until the spring equinox and we can run out into the front yard shouting that “spring has arrived!”

    So I painted a houseplant in my window instead, and I used just three colours, payne’s grey, sap green, and indian yellow to blend and blur and mix the various shades and depths of colour that defined that particular spider plant sitting on the ledge looking at the longer, sunnier days outside.

    Soon that window will be full of life, but most of it will be on the other side of the glass. For now, I’ll use what I can to inspire me.

  • from a cold winter walk.

    It’s been a few weeks since I posted a sketch.

    In fact, it’s been a few weeks since I painted or sketched anything of any worth.

    That’s what happens when a beloved family member, even one who is a hundred and one years old, falls into a three week decline leading to their passing. Grief can be creative muse, but it was not mine.

    I went for a lot of walks in January, often taking nothing with me besides the dog and my phone.

    My phone has a camera, of course, so I took lots of photos. Photos of the snow. Photos of the dog. Photos of the dog in the snow.

    snow is not white

    Winter around here is nearly six months long, so any hope of avoiding painting the snow or snow-filled scenes goes out the window with my choice of residence. that said, snow is not white. Or rather, snow is rarely white. Fresh snow in the sunlight is blue. Snow along a path is speckled brown. Snow in the shadows is grey or purple or deep shades of blue. Snow reflects the light. Snow mottles with shadow and shape and prints and tracks. Snow glints and shines. Snow shapes itself to the ground or to objects, it clings in random shapes to branches, hanging, drooping, piling, mounding, or globbing. Snow melts into puddles, smooths into ice, and does a thousand other unexpected things, each that makes it a challenge to paint.

    I didn’t paint any of this until yesterday.

    My motivation to paint was low in January. My motivation to sit in the snow and paint in January was zero.

    I have no qualms about painting from a photo, of course. Plein air sketching is of course a lovely way to spend some time during a walk, but watercolor requires water… not ice. So plein air en hiver has not turned out to be compatible with this hobby so far.

    From a photo it was then…

    And my dog, as complex as she is to get right in blobs of browns and shadow, is even trickier when she features in a thumb-sized rendering like in this small-format sketch in my 3.5×5.5 inch moleskine folio (to give you a sense of the size of the original work.)

    Lacking any other motivation for creativity, I took it though. And I’m not unhappy with the results.

  • looking across the river.

    Breaking in a new sketchbook is a daunting moment. It’s not as if they are outrageously expensive, but after investing thirty bucks into a new Moleskine watercolour folio, peeling the plastic cover off, and quietly considering how great it was going to look full of lovely urban sketches, I couldn’t help but hesitate to put a first mark on the page.

    I bought a new sketchbook because we’re going on a plane in about three weeks. We’ll be wandering around Manhattan for the better part of five days and I plan to sit and sketch for at least one picture per day. I’ve been falling into the habit with the last few sketchbooks I’ve bought to “theme” them. I have a book of little watercolours of objects. I have a notebook that is exclusively for sequential journaling. I have a sketchbook for people. I have another for pen drawings of scenes. I have yet another that is reserved for full watercolour layouts.

    I did not have a book for urban sketches.

    I figured New York would be a great place to have exactly that.

    But then the idea of taking a completely blank canvas on a big vacation and finding myself sitting in some square in the heart of the Big Apple, overthinking that first mark on that first page… it was not just a daunting moment, but a paralysing one.

    loose lines

    Filling a sketch with life and vibrancy is a collection of a million little choices, but never in my wildest imaginations did I come to realize that half of that million choices would occur not just in the seconds of my sketches but in the microseconds. The choice to do more than translate the scene onto the paper comes from feeling the very soul of a space and an object and the various subjects of your work. Life is not made up of perfect lines and regurgitating the symmetry of a world that doesn't really exist means that we are too often drawing symbols of how we want the world to be than letting the world flow into our pens at every micro-moment of ink on paper contact. There is a looseness of letting the universe jitter and jiggle through our fingers, as if the quantum uncertainty at the edges of everything and all matter is amplified to expression on the page, and the result when done right in inescapable momentum towards art and away from mere documentation.

    My solution for overcoming two kinds of new sketchbook daunting…um… ness was simple.

    First, just draw. Now. Find an on-theme picture or scene, and just mess up at least one page. I mean, now that I’ve messed up one I may as well mess up a couple more before we leave, but that fresh, newly-unwrapped watercolour folio is now good and broken in with at least one lovely painting. With at least one drawing in that book, and possibly three or four if I get my act together, when I pull that sketchbook out onto my lap in Central Park next month, THAT drawing will just be another drawing in just another notebook. Not daunting at all.

    Second, and a tip I picked up randomly from YouTube, never start on page one. I opened that new folio right to near exactly the middle and drew on that page. Sure, I labelled and dated it, but sequentially chronology is for meeting minutes from my office job, not my art… right. Page one is so significant and weighty, so why add to the pressure of not only drawing A page, but drawing THE page… the FIRST page. So, I didn’t. I drew page forty seven or something unremarkable. Page forty seven is not daunting.

    Drawing in a bound notebook, in public to boot, is supposed to be fun and relaxing. What ways do you find to reduce the stress, even just a little, so that you can focus on the moment and not the silly details that shouldn’t be filling you with extra stress?

  • in the smokey park.

    The dog wanted to sit in the grass. We’ve been riding a sine wave of temperatures through the last month or two, going from unbearably hot to jacket cool. Today the temperature swung back up to the hot again after a few days of pre-autumn chilly, and the dog, half way through our afternoon, pulled me in the shade of some big old trees in the park and plonked down in the shade in the grass.

    I relented and sat down beside her. To my back, the sun was glinting through the leaves of the trees and shimmering in a romantic sort of way as if pushed through a bit of atmospheric smoke that has decended on the city from a forest fire burning a thousand kilometers away.

    My camera didn’t do it justice, but then neither did my painting. That said, the shimmer of the light on the individual leaves made me consider that my rough squiggly-line trees with blotchy shadows may be dramatically improved by a few carefully chosen layers of a thousand individually coloured watercolour leaves.

    Points of Colour

    I can’t say if patience is truly a virtue, but there is a time to rush through the blurry colourful mess that is a huge tree and there is a time to be more patient and ask if it’s worth painting every indivual leaf.  Truly, such a task cannot be accomplished in the short ninety minutes it took me to attempt such a feat, but my light to dark layering of hundreds or thousands of individual splotches over my rough wash, each splotch an attempt to convey the sense of an individual leaf on that tree, resulted in a depth and variation in the final result that seems to me more impressive than any mussy blotch of greens and yellows and shadows that I usually attempt.

    Obviously, given more than a rushed ninety minute piece and proof of personal concept I may even improve upon the approach. I also suspect that more care and attention to put a more fulsome subject of focus in the piece would enliven the result dramatically. All that said, I am finding myself unable to steer directly into the headlights of abstraction as I so often set out to attempt before losing my way on that road and simply paint within the narrower confined of realistic colours and shapes.

    It is a fault I hope to work towards recitifying as the months press onward.