works of wanderlust

Category: watercolour

  • 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.

  • in the garden and by the lake.

    Almost a year ago to the day I found myself standing in the aisles of a local art supply story browsing the watercolour painting supplies.

    This is a site about that journey. From then to now, and then on and on, forward and beyond.

    I’ve painted almost a hundred pictures since that day, dabbling in colour and form and shape and style. And to be honest, most of it was mediocre.

    Then suddenly, things started to click. It wasn’t revolutionary nor was it magical. It was just a year’s worth of thoughtful, deliberate learning and practice culminating in work that I wasn’t entirely embarrassed to show around. Hardly works of fine art, but definitely leaning towards competency.

    And something inside me realized that to continue growing I was going to need to be a lot less scattershot in my approach. Learning and becoming better is part practice, of course, but it is also part adapting and correcting to when things go wrong and remarking upon when things go right. For example:

    Wash & Layers

    I bought an online course led by a sketcher and artist whose work I admire. His name is Felix Scheinberger and among other things, his explanation of the application of watercolour was the explanation that finally seemed to click in my brain about layering paints. What I took away, and what I applied in this painting was to treat the first layer of paint as a rough, diluted wash, meant to colour much (if not all) of the intended painting area with colour. Following the wash drying on the page, additional finer layers of watercolour are sparingly added to enrich the wash and enhance the details.

    As I keep these notes for my sketches, posting thoughts and insights as often (or as rarely) as I create a work that I feel was a personal success and something I can learn from, ideally this becomes a collection of anecdotes and insights into my own personal learnings, helping myself grow and maybe some other random reader of these words to take some inspiration and understanding as well.

    My New Friend Purple

    Over the last year I've been shy about colours. By shy, I mean I've been reluctant and cautious about using colours that my brain doesn't necessarily (or literally) see in the scene. This has been to the detriment of my art, and as I befriend a new colour that is (a) very rarely, literally in nature, and yet (b) is apparently abstractly everywhere in nature, I'm finding a dramatic increase in the splendour of what I'm creating with the brush just by using it more. That colour is purple. Purple is shadows. Purple is depth. Purple is richness in the leafiness of a tree, texture in a rock, and curls of hair atop a head. In my early painting days I never used purple at all. Now, I look at the painting I've put down in the last month and I struggle to find something without it.

    I took the day off a little over a week ago and, packing up my art supply bag and slinging my easel over my shoulder, I drove to a local botanical garden. I spent four hours wandering around, sitting in interesting spots, and plein air sketching-slash-watercolour painting whatever struck my fancy.

    One of the gardens is a Japanese-style garden, built in consultation with cultural representatives, and stuffed with little (faux?) temples, bonsai-style trees, fish ponds and stepped stones. I planted myself on the shore of the pond a little after lunchtime and painted a scene.