Back to School

I feel as though I am headed back to school today.  Summer is winding down, and I’m eager to end the three month hiatus from my work.  It has been a crazy busy summer for my family . . . a pivot point in time when everything that was is no longer.  We are in flux, as they say.  So many balls in the air I have ceased to count them.  But change is a very good thing and reminds us that we are living beings in a dynamic world.  And for that reminder I am grateful.

Although I don't have much art to show for my summer, I do want to share an experience I had, the feast for the eyes that is South America.  Peter and I traveled there for a month at the beginning of the summer.  I was tagging along on a fascinating journey with his graduate commerce students, who were studying the emerging markets of the region.  I had hoped to have more time to sneak off to draw the interesting things I saw.  But to tell the truth, I was so interested in the things they were doing I mostly kept to their schedule and had fun taking pictures, instead.  Here are some of my favorite images from the trip:

Really, I can't believe I was there.  It is so very different.  The ancient cultures are still there, sticking up out of the ground or staring you in the eye.  And yet the modern world has found its way there as well.  Each country seems to be rushing as fast a possible towards prosperity yet taking different routes there.  What an adventure!

And now back to the adventures awaiting me at my long neglected drawing table!  Hope you'll stick with me for the journey!

Fraser's sedge marathon

I sat down Monday morning at 9:00 to see if I could finish this drawing in one day.  Hmmm.  That was 16 hours ago.  I don't think I've ever worked so long in one stretch before!  For the most part, fun.  Am I done yet?  Well, I am pretty darn close and I'm needing to call it a day.  In fact, I can hardly string a sentence together, but I have pictures to show my progress.  I took a photo roughly every hour or two.  In my next post I will give a better account of where things stand.  For now, enjoy the show!

Mother's Day Bliss

I am here.  I am working.  I have not given up on this monstrous project.  I admit it... this one has nearly stumped me to the point of losing sleep.  My deadline is 72 hours away and I am entering panic mode -- almost.  How can one paint or draw a whiter than white flower on white paper, when there is no possibility of darkening the whites (since the flower is just a puff of filaments, like a sparkler)???  I thought of painting it.  I thought of drawing it in graphite.  I finally decided to work it in colored pencil.  On drafting film.  Here's the theory: colored pencil is prettier than graphite but not as time consuming as watercolor.  And the film takes the colored pencil strokes so easily, with the added benefit that it is erasable, where paper is not.  Turns out this is a key feature of the project, since I seem to be erasing more than I am drawing!

Thus far, I have worked on 8 leaves of the clump.  But I have redrawn three of them at least twice.  I could be done by now!  The tricky thing with drawing on film is that it can only hold just so much pigment, and then it becomes saturated.  No matter how much you scribble away on it, nothing more will go down and you start to get an unfortunate sheen sitting on top of the picture.  So you have to be very judicious applying the pencil layers.  It takes about four passes and that's it.  First I've drawn each leaf with an undertone of Tuscan red.  This establishes the basic form of the leaf.  On top, I'm adding an olive green, a chartreuse and a dark green.  Period.  Here's a close up of the first layer of the next leaf I'm working on:

I have a few leaves to tuck in the back of the clump.  Then I will tackle the flower stalks.  I have a brilliant (or maybe idiotic) idea of a way to offset the flowers.  Stay tuned!

Before I sign off, I just have to give a shout out to my kids, who gathered last night to prepare me an early Mother's Day feast.  This was the first time in six years that we've all been together for a Mother's Day celebration.  And I have to say, there has been considerable improvement in the last six years in culinary skills.  They could open a restaurant; I'm not kidding.  Happy cooks.  Happy kids.  Happy mom and dad.  Thank you!!

Pausing for a moment

Ah, too much to do and too little time.  Not enough drawing this week!  So I was walking by my forlorn, sadly neglected fraser's sedge specimen today and stopped dead in my tracks when I noticed this:

Do you see it??  A baby flower stalk!!!!

There it is, just peeping up above the unfurling leaf.  It is bright white like a grain of sushi rice.  And looks a little sticky, too.  I am so surprised because I thought this young plant wouldn't be able to swing a flower stalk this early in its life.  Someone had reported online that their plant took three years to bloom.  Lucky me!   I will get to watch it grow, which will make it SO much easier to draw!  In this photo you can also see the slightly serrated edge of the leaf.  This is too tiny of a detail for the drawing, I think, but interesting to notice, just the same.  OK and while we are at it, staring up close and personal like this, notice the veins of the leaf -- all shooting straight up in parallel formation.  This is typical of all grasses, and I'll be sure to feature it in the drawing.  Stay tuned!

Fraser's sedge - 1

I've been trying to get a composition going for my Fraser's sedge.  When I start ripping apart various disappointing quick sketches I know it is time to call it a day!  Here's what I've got so far:

I'm not entirely happy with it but I think I am finally on the right track.  Here's the difficulty: this plant grows low and wide, except for the small, thin flower stalks that shoot up seemingly out of nowhere.  The image needs to be vertical, to show the most accurate botanical information, so my perspective needs to be looking at the plant as if I were almost at eye level, kneeling in the forest.  (Not looking down at it from a towering height.) Unfortunately, most folks who have ever taken a picture of this plant in bloom, and then kindly shared it on the internet, have not gotten down on the ground but rather set their tripod up above the plant.  I can't copy anyone's photo, of course, but it would sure be nice to see different angles!  So what do I do?  Well I have pretty much got the idea of how this plant grows.  I know the dimensions of the young and mature leaves.  I know how tall and wide the plant can get.  I know how big the flowers are.  I can extrapolate from my baby plant, which is just now coming out of dormancy.  I put all this information together and come up with ideas of how to present the plant in an interesting way on a two-dimensional sheet of paper.  The composition challenge!  This is where the creativity comes in, as I've said before.  In my view, the composition has to have movement because it is of a living thing.  I want your eye to travel all around the plant and see all the interesting parts.  Since the leaves are like bending, twisting ribbons, and the flower stalks are quite graceful, I can use them to this effect. That's the hope anyway!

Another aspect of creating the composition is making some very basic decisions of how I'm going to make the finished piece.  Remember I mentioned the other day that the flowers are small white pompoms?  To paint them, I would need to place leaves behind them so that the viewer could see the white flowers against a green background.  But it turns out in nature, the leaves don't grow vertically as tall as the flower and one would never see a leaf sticking straight up behind a Fraser's sedge flower.  And I've already decided not to work from a high angle (which would put leaves behind the flowers, but would eliminate the ability to show the full stalk and would make the composition too horizontal.) The parts of the flower are so teeny I can't imagine using shades of gray paint to outline each filament.  The better course of action is to make this a graphite drawing and make use of a very sharp pencil point!

I have also decided not to dig up the roots of my baby plant.  It is trying so hard to survive, I hate the thought of stressing it in such a way.  It is a rare specimen, after all!  Instead, I might do a close up sketch of one blossom to the side of the plant.  It really is quite pretty and - naturally - is another example of the Fibonacci sequence.  More on that later.......

Stay tuned!

Something new and different

I am questioning my sanity.  I mean really.  What possessed me to agree to paint - against a hard deadline -  a plant that is rare, difficult to find, and worst of all (dare I say it?) boring!?!  When spring is bursting at the seams around here

and luscious Crayola colors are popping out of the earth,

I foolishly said I would paint the elusive and exceedingly humble Cymophyllus fraseri, or Fraser's sedge.

Seriously??  I must be really devoted to my craft to choose this over all other more spectacular specimens shouting at me from every corner of the garden.  This little clump of grass; a singular shade of green . . . what is the attraction?

Well, for starters, it is endangered.  And so it deserves to be noted.  The BAEE would like to include it in their upcoming book project (artwork submissions due June 1) and so I agreed to have a go.  I received this specimen a few days ago from the Lazy S'S Farm Nursery and I've been staring at it trying to uncover its redeeming qualities.  After relishing painting the undulations and variegations of my beautiful swiss chard leaf, I have had to adjust to a more stark, austere presentation of line and form.

This is an example of the fact that if you stare at anything long enough, and you keep your mind in a state of grace, you will see beauty.  For this little plant, it has to be about the leaves.  Look how gracefully they bend and twist, like ribbons.  And the photo doesn't show it, but the way the leaves emerge from the stalk, unfurling one inside another from opposite sides, is quite interesting.  Finally, and this I gather from photos on the internet, the plant sends up very attractive flower stalks in May and June... like white pom poms at the end of long, thin stems.  Also, I think I'll dig up the roots and see what they look like. (Roots are almost always gorgeous, in my opinion.)

And of course, I love a challenge.  A boring green leaf shade, teeny white flowers painted on a white background, and a looming deadline . . . Perfect!  Worth temporarily setting aside my swiss chard painting.  So now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the drawing table....

Swiss chard greens

More work today on the next leaf of the composition.  Whew there's an awful lot of green!  I'm using a mix of cobalt blue, lemon yellow and a touch of Indian red.  Too many pigments will turn it to mud, as we've discussed many times before.  I'll be going back with a darker, redder shadow color in the valleys, and a yellower green surrounding the highlights.  It is interesting to me to realize that the only place you will really see pure green in the finished painting is in the middle tone areas.  This is because the shadow areas will be a dark complementary color, and the highlight areas will be washed out, to the point of no color at all in some cases.  So I tell myself not to get too worried at this point that the painting is just a big, boring blob of green.  If I flag a little in the days ahead, mixing up endless puddles of green paint, please remind me to hang in there!
Onward!