Eat your veggies...

A series of everyday things, small and familiar, related or not. That was the brief. All day at work, at every break from writing code, the words "paint food" popped into my head. Perhaps this was my unconscious screaming at me for more broccoli or perhaps I am a nascent cookbook author? I'm not sure but I did know that food on a plate was going to have to be the subject.

So here they are (and they are pretty much life-size!). I love painting small things; I love my 00 brush. Maybe I should try small scenes - say 2" x 2" - maybe then the landscapes would work for me.

This was our last class. But fortunately for Debbie and I, Jan is teaching pastels in July so we are signing up. I'll have to research miniatures in pastels, see what the precedent is...

See you soon.

Gerbera revisited

(the scanner failed me this time, it lost the many variations of orange)

Did you know that the Gerbera daisy is the fifth most used cut flower in the world (after rose, carnation, chrysanthemum, and tulip)? It is also used as a model organism in studying flower formation. And I had to paint it.

I tried, really I did. I didn't draw any outlines on my paper frst - I just plonked down some orange paint (carefully matched to the actual living organism) and used my brush to "draw" all the petals. It was a lovely loose collection of orange-y splotches arranged concentrically, but it was missing something. As much as I tried to leave it sitting there without definition I couldn't do it. I just happened to have a black triplus fineliner in my purse (a girl never knows when she'll need one) and I was much happier once I got to draw all the little petal edges in.

I know, I can hear you saying "but things don't have black lines around them in the real world" and you're right. But I can't escape my comfort zone it seems, at least as far as Gerbera daisies are concerned. I did banish the "stay inside the line" demon however and that is enough of a victory for a Tuesday night.

Out of the comfort zone...

...and on to the Nullarbor Plain.




I finally had to do the thing I dreaded most - paint a picture. You know, a "Ooh, look, I think those are trees" kind of picture. Fortunately, because this was Jan, this wasn't a purely representational exercise. I think she called it "broken colour" when she described what she wanted us to do. The mission was to take a photo of a landscape and build up the image using paint-brush marks. It was our own form of Impressionism, if you will - to see what we could create by working with Gouache's ability to be both layered like oil and washed like watercolour.

I love looking around the room to see what everyone chooses: a barn in a Duncan field becomes an almost Provencal-like scene with gorgeous golds, oranges and blues; a Victoria garden becomes a large, bold field of thickly lovely colour points; an aerial view of the dusty Nullarbor plain becomes...

I can still barely look at my own work - it takes the cushioning of time before I gain any perspective and before the shoulder-critics give up and go away. It is a slow layering of confidence and a concurrent erosion of the expectation of perfection that lets me look back at earlier posts and say "that was pretty good, I like what I did" or "hmmm, what was that". It will be a while before the Nullarbor becomes mine.

Abstracting Matisse

Last night our class involved more abstraction from an existing painting. Again we got to choose a painting we liked, in my case more Matisse - his colours are sublime. Jan then gave us a small 1.5" by 1.5" window that we could place anywhere on the painting that we found pleasing. The exercise was to paint what was in the window, blowing it up, matching colours and attempting to re-create the effects of oil paint with the gouache.

It is not easy to re-create the apparent slap-dashery with which Henri applied paint. When you start to look at these deceptively simple paintings, at the messy brush strokes, the white left unpainted, the filling-in of areas rather than the layering of colours, you begin to wonder what makes a great painitng. Are they "great" because they are by Matisse? Have we just been educated to appreciation? Are they simplistic and sophisticated? Is it the colour that makes us resonate?

We know the man could paint a classically representational painting so this loose technique was by choice. It makes us wonder about the feelings we have for art, and I have to believe that the enduring Matisse was well aware of what he did. The old sniff of disparagement - "looks like a kid painted it" - may actually have pleased Matisse who wanted to create art that delighted and decorated.

A little gouache...

Art classes have started up again for me, this time with the scary added dimension of paint. Jan is teaching a 6 week course introducing gouache - an opaque, water based paint used by artists like Dufy and Matisse, by Indian miniaturists, by the great poster painters of the 20s and 30s. It dries with a lovely matte finish and can be layered like oils or washed on like water colours.


As usual, Jan had a terrific project to break the ice and get us putting paint to paper. We had to pick a painting that appealed to us and create a tartan using those colours. This meant that we got to examine a painting, really think about the artisit's colours, figure out how to mix them, and then cover a sheet of paper with them without worrying about our painting skills. It was a lot of fun seeing what everyone picked and how they went about creating their plaids. It has also made me start thinking about fabric and graphic design. And it has opened up another crack in my way of seeing the world. A good night's work I think.