The Yellow Bird Paintings

The Yellow Bird Paintings

I just finished a small series of paintings that all feature a yellow bird in some way. They are all hanging together at Victoria International Airport until Mid Jan 2019. Close up pictures are posted in the Gallery 🙂

We Should Come Here More Often

We Should Come Here More Often

Imagine a garden soaked in light drizzle, the trees and shrubs radiate green as they bask in the moisture but the colour is muted by the mist that hangs in the air. Every leaf and blade of grass is spattered with tiny droplets of water. There is a soft hush all around from white noise of the light rain and the sound dampening fog. The grey is comfortable on your eyes and ears. You breathe it in and remind yourself to come here more often.

Thriving with Fellow Artists

Thriving with Fellow Artists

Back in May I became part of Thrive Mastermind. Thrive is a group that provides community, accountability and support to female artists. We meet monthly in Victoria and talk about what we are working on, what we have learnt, our achievements and share any useful resources we may have discovered over the month. There are also online discussion forums, podcasts and tutorials to help with every aspect of being an artist. Studio work can be lonely, it has been so good to meet and talk with other women artists about the highs and lows of a creative life. It has encouraged me to set goals for myself and think about all aspects of my art making practise. I would recommend the Podcast – you can listen to them here: Thrive Podcast

Pink Power

Pink Power

Using YouTube tutorials, I have been teaching myself to bind my own sketchbooks. I signed up again to the Sketchbook Project; you can re-bind or alter your sketchbook any way you want so long as it stays within set dimensions. I knew this time I wanted to use watercolour paper to open up more possibilities in the type of media. I tried my hand at binding one hard cover book with glued spine and one method without spine or glue using Coptic stitching. The stitching was a little tricky at first but now I have the hang of it, it is definitely something I will be doing again. Shop bought bound watercolour sketch books are so expensive and this way I can be as creative as I want with the covers because who doesn’t love neon.

The Sketchbook Project – Update

The Sketchbook Project

The sketchbook project is over : ( it is winging its way over to the Brooklyn Sketchbook Library. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed participating in this project. Originally I decided that I would use the lyrics from a Jack Johnson guitar tab book to inspire the project but this turned out to be just the launch pad. Once I got more into the project I realised that there were things I wanted to try out so I went with it. I played with collage, gouache, abstract drawing and watercolour. There is even a pop up page. I had so much fun doing this; it has made me approach my sketch book in a whole new way. A little book of ideas and experimentation just for me. I have decided to keep this going and signed up to the 2018/2019 project!

The Animals in my Head

The Animals in my Head

Acrylic on Canvas, 36″ x 40″ 2018

“Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats, and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow! Our blood is as salty as the sea we used to live in! When we’re frightened, the hair on our skin stands up, just like it did when we had fur. We are history! Everything we’ve ever been on the way to becoming us, we still are.” (Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky)

The Saboteur is a painting from series I am working on called ‘The Animals in my Head”. I have been recording my dreams over recent years and I found that animals often make an appearance. The animal dreams stand out from the others, they are the ones that leave a lasting impression upon waking. In some instances I have dreamt about animals that I have only ever seen in books or on TV. It made me curious as to where this imagery could be coming from. I started to research dream imagery and quickly found Jung’s work on dreams and archetypal symbols.

Jung believes that we have in part inherited this symbolic language through our evolution. Archaic elements can occur in a dream, “mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind” (Carl G. Jung, P57, Man and His Symbols 1964).

It is these archaic remnants of imagery from my uncivilized monkey mind that is the focus of this Series.

The Sketchbook Project

The Sketchbook Project

I have recently signed up to the Sketchbook Project. The goal is to fill a small sketchbook and submit it to the Brooklyn Art Library where it can be viewed by visitors or online. When I signed up to the project I really had no idea what theme I would use to fill the pages. I was browsing in Value Village and found a book of Jack Johnson sheet music for his album Bushfire Fairytales. Although I didn’t know his music I bought it, thinking that the pages of sheet music might be good for collage. I discovered the beautiful imagery in the lyrics and decided to make them the inspiration to fill my sketchbook. I am really enjoying thinking about and making the pages, it just feels like unadulterated play.

Fog Bank

Fog Bank

“For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side” Thomas Hardy – Far from the Madding Crowd

Fog Bank is a piece I have been working on over the last month. I submitted it for a call out titled “Boxed Sanctuary”. The exterior is made from reclaimed wood and the interior is a collection of miscellaneous objects and poured acrylic paint on clear sheets of plastic.

The call out asked the artist to address what sanctuary means to them. When I think of sanctuary, I think of the fog. It arrives in August and it is the antidote to the bright, bleaching, high contrast colours of summer. Colours become muted, they start to merge together; it is a soft blanket for my eyes. It dampens sound and comes with its own murmuring shush.

Fog Bank asks you to look inside, away from exterior distractions and cast yourself adrift in the shapes and colours that reside there.

Balance

I was struggling to come up with my next blog post because I have hardly been in my studio for the last two months. We went away on vacation in September and when I got back I had received a job offer for temporary work. I said yes to the work and have been working pretty well full time for the last 6 weeks. Art has been on my mind, I read ‘The Gift’ by Lewis Hyde and Carl Jung’s ‘Man and His Symbols’ – I just haven’t been able to get much down on canvas.

I know I am not alone in my quest for balance between making art and having a paying job. Since moving to Canada in 2010 I have tried various set ups – seasonal work, temp jobs, random craigslist employment. None of these situations were ideal, usually because I let the paid work take over or they meant working weekends which meant no time with my family.

I was lucky enough to spend a year being supported by my husband which I have started to think of as the gap year I missed in my 20s. Whilst we can get by on his wage it made me feel uncomfortable not to be contributing to the household income. It didn’t seem fair to put all of the wage earning pressure on him. I weighed up my options. I considered if I could make a living just from selling my art – whilst I love the idea of that it just wasn’t realistic for me. I am just beginning and I really want to allow myself time to experiment and keep moving forward with the dreamscape ideas without worrying “will it sell?”. Lewis Hyde’s book ‘The Gift’ was particularly helpful in setting out reasons for separating your art making from market forces. I know that is a whole other debate.

In any event my full time work has come to an end and I have regular part time work now for 3 days per week at a job I enjoy, leaving the rest of my time for art and life. I am really happy with this arrangement – yes it will slow me down in the studio but I think it will be a good balance for me. Studio life can also be isolated, so being out in the world amongst people who don’t respond to every conversation with a meow might also not be a bad thing.

Talented

Talented…..

So I have started a blog, I am not sure how often I will update it but I wanted to write about the subject of talent. It isn’t often for me that the ideas in my head coagulate into writing.

I have started back at a life drawing group, there is no teacher so we sometimes ask each other for tips. A member of the group told me that she liked my drawing style and that I am talented. I admit it, this went to my head. She thinks I have talent? The rosy glow of her words lasted for an afternoon. The next day I went back to my drawing and realised it wasn’t that great “the hair is flat, some of the shading is clunky and it’s an easy posture”. I let the inner beast off the leash “you don’t have talent, you’re a fraud, an artist wannabe, how could you let that person think you are talented even for a second?” I will save the subject of the dangers of comparing and the inner beast for another time. I was thoroughly down on myself.

I decided to go back and look at the drawings I made when I started life drawing. I was shocked – some of them are really bad, I honestly didn’t remember them being that terrible. But as terrible as they are there is an obvious progression, at some point I discovered proportion, eventually some shaded muscles start to bulk out the form. Hands and feet remained the shape of spades and facial features are sparse. I was so pleased because I have come such a long way from those first sketches. This leads me back to talent, looking at my first drawings I don’t think anyone who saw them would have told me I have talent. So I ask, does talent exist at all? I love life drawing, for me it is a kind of meditation, when I am figure drawing there is nothing else, no brain static and 90% of the time I walk away a more content person. My love of it makes practising it a joy. I have been working on life drawing on and off over a period of years, I am still learning, seeing a progression in my work gives me hope that I will continue to grow and learn. I will take some of my first sketches with me to the next life drawing group to show my beginnings. Forget talent, if you love what you are doing, just keep going.

Life Drawing circa 2009

Life Drawing 2015

Studio Journal