Getting Pastelliferous

I like oil pastels. I like the richness of their colour and the way you can blend them. I particularly like the way they look on brown paper.

The first ones I did were on paper bags. 

Then I started carrying a roll of wrapping paper around with me. The outlines are done with either a brush pen or a good sized chunky marker. I like the thick dark lines you can get with them.

The latest oil pastel drawing is quite big. It's the little kumquat tree outside my living room window.
It's drawn on the opened out surface of a sturdy brown carry bag. (you can tell by the handles). It covered my coffee table, and I used a big brush and indian ink to draw the outlines.

My box of pastels is getting quite well used up now and filling in a large area with small pieces of oil pastel takes some time,  especially when putting down more than one layer of colour. Also, I have yet to find a way to buy replacement pastels individually. I can just imagine a house full of all the colours I hardly ever use, because each time I use up my white, blues and yellows, I have to buy a whole new box!

Tasmania: the East Coast

This almost qualifies as a throwback, since a couple of months have gone by since I took a slow drive from Launceston, through the Fingal Valley, to St. Helens, then to Hobart, with two nights at Swansea on the way.

The things I love most about  holidays like this:

1. They are full of unstructured time. No schedule. Anything can happen! Having a few days of unstructured time is what, for me, best promotes creative thinking and new perspectives. Minimal routine, maximum productivity. Strange, perhaps, but true.

2. I'm alone. Bliss.

3. There is no plan. If the beach where I eat breakfast just begs to be walked along, I can spend the rest of the morning walking. If I meet someone on the beach, I can stay and talk as long as I like. No "sorry, gotta go, gotta be in blah place by blah o'clock". And without a fixed plan, it's as though my vision expands from something narrow and driven, to something wide and open, ready to involve and be involved in all the world:  newly flowering wattles,  the mutter of fishermen on the rocks,  the changing colours of the sea from shore to horizon, thinking about how aboriginal people would have lived in a place like this, the unusual number of motorbikes on the road, erosion, cloud formations, unemployment, rural lifestyles, family history, coffee, languages, shoreline geology.... .

4. Beauty. It is good, now and then, to be in a place where, at every turn there is gut-punching, heart-stopping, soul-soaring beauty. To participate in it, to resonate with it. To exercise that heart muscle that recognises and identifies with it. To be overwhelmed and swept away.

5. Remembering, These are places that are familiar to me from long ago. They are rich with memory and experience. I love travelling through unfamiliar places too, but this is a different kind of love.

6. Time to reflect, time to imagine, time to draw and write.

Here are some of the drawings from that drive:

The Ben Lomond Massif seen from the Fingal Valley. There were so many stunning views on this clear, cold day, but very few places where the road had sufficient shoulder space to pull over. 

Binalong Bay, just north of St. Helens. 

Granite rocks at Binalong Bay.

Swansea: the view from my window on a quiet, misty morning.

Some broken shells I picked up, walking along Beer Barrel Beach, a little south of St. Helens.

More broken shells, these I collected above the high tide mark in Swansea, some drawn there, others finished when I got to Hobart.






A short stop on the way south, for some breakfast and a bit of conversation.

At my sister's house, looking out of the window from my bed, first thing in the morning.

These are the drawings in my sketchbook from those few days. I'm glad you could join me!

The Point Walter Project

I have always loved scientific drawings. Botanical, zoological, mechanical, astronomical. Especially those drawings in which the passion to see, to understand, to compare and unravel exceeds the desire to produce a pretty product. Drawings where curiosity rules, where awe is evident and where the majesty of the seemingly mundane shines forth.

I also have a strange urge to document things. Travels, dreams, everyday life, the progress of gardens, sightings of birds, lizards, flowering eucalypts, shells, feathers,  artefacts. Mostly, though, my efforts at documentation have been unsustained and/or unsystematic. More like random jottings in search of a notebook, first pages of journals abandoned in the fluster of life or great ideas that were never executed.

My most recent documentary project is to draw the sandbar at Point Walter.

The brief I have given myself is quite simple. Whenever I go to Point Walter and walk out along the sandbar, I draw something that catches my eye. If it's a small thing, I bring it home with me. If it is big, I draw it in situ. I try to record the things I notice: what birds are here today? What's the weather like? A lot more jellyfish than usual...

So here are a few pages:

Fragments of shells and pottery washed up on the sandbar.

Looking south from the sandbar.

Swans out on the sandbar, in the shallow water. They are not at all afraid, turning themselves into all kinds of pretzel as they sleep or preen.

One day, I found numerous crab body parts washed up. When I tried to find an online field guide to make an identification, 99% of the information listed under the heading 'Crabs of the Swan River Estuary' was about how to cook them. What has happened to natural history?

Another day I found this fan folded up and stuck vertically into the mud in shallow water. 

          The Uchiha Sasuke figurine was 100 metres further on.

Jellyfish. I had to draw them on the run as they floated in the water. On the surface,  leaves of one of the common river plants are also floating along.

Crested terns, with rainclouds. Some raindrops on the page, too.

The view north on a cloudy day, and some pied oyster catchers.


The project continues. Lately the tides have been too high to walk out far. There is also a sign up, and a fence, barring entry to the little tufted island at the end of the sandbar so that birds can safely do their nesting. I want to go there.  I want to draw every species of plant on that little bump at the end of the spit.

Rubbish: Renaissance

Picking up discarded things

and looking at them,

tracing them with my eyes and pen,

is a kind of renaissance,

in which a piece of pipe becomes monumental, bottle tops are reborn as a gem collection or a troupe of dancers holding out their skirts, and a flattened can lies on my page like a classical reclining nude. 

Three Bags Full

What an unadulterated pleasure it is to put white colour on a brown bag. I can't explain it, it is illogical that this should be such a thorough thrill when any colour on any surface involves the same actions and similar outcomes. But white - pencil, pastel, crayon, paint - on brown paper - paper bag, wrapping paper - it's the ultimate. Of course, there's art supply shop kraft paper which is admirably sturdy and hardworking ( the corduroy of papers) and any number of sweetly tinted sketch pads. Trust me, nothing comes close to the humble bag.

Potato bags are quite tough and a little glossy on the outside. Here are a couple of potato bag pictures:

Both of these are drawn with oil pastels. I love the rich colour and the luscious way they stroke the paper as though the two of them were just made for each other!

The last one is drawn on a mushroom bag; much less sturdy than its potato cousin, altogether frailer and more delicate; wistful, even. Oil pastels just felt much too robust for this tender stuff, so I worked with watercolour pencils, gently and tenderly as if I were ministering to an aged aunt. Indeed, there is a similarity in the matter of wrinkliness....Even so, adding water almost resulted in a total collapse. Happily, however, structural integrity was restored after a good long rest in a warm spot.

This is the pot of Earl Grey tea I had at Point Walter this afternoon, looking out over the Swan River.

A wonderful slice of time, pleasantly interrupted at one point when a very cheery, blustery man came over to have a look and told me stories about his mother's plans to take painting classes after her retirement, his exploits with a new border collie pup named Kip, and his own disinclination to draw.

I'm thinking of making a collection of bag drawings. I get all tingley now when I buy potatoes....

Using Up and Re-Using

Fun and more fun this week, finding different surfaces to draw on now that my sketchbook is full and I have my self-imposed rule of no new art stuff till all other available materials are used up.

 So, lets have a look:



That same morning I stopped at Hyde Park to sut for a while under a tree. There were clumps of Strelitzias there, so I drew them on the back of a cardboard box that had contained ginger sweets. This is a detail:



At South Beach, having breakfast on Friday I had my Moleskine blank exercise book with me. I'm getting used to the semi-bleed-through, and don't mind it any more. 



Then yesterday I went with Colleen and Ingrid to a spot along the river at North Fremantle. So quiet and secluded, only a couple of friendly dog-walkers came by. The sun shone, boats bobbed gently on the water, altogether a glorious afternoon. The white boat is drawn on a system card with pen and watercolour. The red one is on a piece of card from some packaging. It is drawn in pen and watercolour pencils.






Finally, this evening, after a day of sorting out and reorganising and filing things away, I sat down with an opened out mushroom bag and a brush pen and oil pastels and drew a fast selfie. I look quite manic - which is not usual for me!

So that's it for my week of drawing on different surfaces. I hope your week was also exciting and filled with delight! Till next time,

Evelyn

Madness？Maybe

I can't take credit for this idea. I read it somewhere. Someone suggested it and for some reason it stuck. Partly, perhaps, because I'm keen to declutter and simplify my life. Also because it is full of potential excitement, innovation and craziness. It's this:

Before I buy any new art materials, I'm going to use up all the stuff I have.

A few days ago I filled the last page of my sketchbook. Here it is: three water containers all made of glass. I was house sitting for a friend and these were on her kitchen bench. 

But I digress.

So, end of sketchbook. I don't keep a stash of sketchbooks. I like the choosing part - the 'what kind of book will I get this time?' thrill. So at the end of this book, I looked around at my options. 

Aha! A nice little blank Moleskine cahier. Creamy paper, but thin, designed more for writing than drawing  Still, it works ok and it is thin enough to live unobtrusively in my everyday bag. It even quite graciously, accepts some watercolour, 

Something else I found was a box of system cards. Large ones. Mostly blank. I don't have a system that they can be useful in - indeed I really only bought them because they were such tidy and inviting white surfaces... so I've started drawing on them. My plan is to get a box that they can all be put in.

I have some other ideas for sketchbook alternatives - I'll keep you posted. So far I still have watercolours, though I'm running out of Naples Yellow and my lovely orange is all used up. 
I'm weirdly excited to see what will come of this. Will I end up drawing in my least favourite colours until they have all been used? Or will I mix media - watercolour plus crayons?
Stay tuned!!!