painting like crazy

This last week my focus shifted from sketching and blogging when I realised I had three weeks to get stuff ready for the charity art sale our studio is holding. Here's how I spent my Saturday.

Travel Album: Art museums

When I visit any city in the northern part of the world I usually head straight to the art museums. There's always an aha moment with something. Works that I've overlooked in books suddenly leap off the wall and come alive.  In Barcelona and Paris I took in a lot of Picasso, but my real wow experience was at the Fundació Joan Miró. His work suddenly all made complete sense, and the building itself enhances it. It was the most spiritual experience I had on the trip - despite all the cathedrals I visited.

Got to be in the mood

It doesn't happen often, but every now and then I see a plant I feel inspired to draw. After admiring this amaryllis slowly opening over a few days, I just had to grab my pencil. And, I felt it had to have colour too! To prove how rarely I feel in the mood to draw flowers, I dug around in my sketch books. The last time was a good number of years ago with this orchid.

Favourite pencil found

A while ago I was moaning that I'd lost my favourite pencil. I really had lost all hope of it turning up somewhere. But I shouldn't have been so pessimistic. Yesterday, I found it in one of those dreaded bowls that always mysteriously collect paper clips, coins, elastic bands and... my pencil!

 I like it because it is nice and thick, easy to hold, and the tip wears down more slowly than other pencils. Those of you who went to a white school in the bad old apartheid days may recognise it, every art classroom had masses of them. The days of government-issue school art supplies are over, so I don't have much hope of replacing it when it's finally reduced to a milimetre-long stub. Though I am sure there are boxes of them lurking in the back of some dusty artroom cupboard somewhere out there - not enough incentive to get me back to school though!

Three Favourites

I have been asked to bring my three favourite paintings that I've done this year to class tomorrow. This got me thinking. because I wasn't quite sure what to choose.  Here is my final choice.

Basically I like the way they turned out. 

Those of you who have been following my blog from the start, may recognise these from sketches I've posted. I'll leave you to go back and find them if you want to.

 

Travel Album: Cathedrals

The other day I finally got our photos developed from a trip we took to France and Spain in 2005. Shocking - clearly I'm not a scrap-booker at heart. Anyway, while going through the pics I started thinking about how I photograph places, things, experiences compared to how I sketch them. I'm doing a similar thing with each in that I'm working directly from reality and attempting to capture it in some way. So, a new project for me is to do some visual comparisons, just to see.  Here's my first attempt. (By the way, some of the photos are my husband's as we share a camera, but it's impossible to tell who took what. We both always claim to have taken the best pics.)