Summer Painting

I did a lot of painting this summer - mostly watercolours - which is a first for me. I started doing some acrylics last year, but always found watercolours to be frustrating because you can't really fix mistakes. When we went to Newfoundland in July, my mother and I packed our little paint boxes and a pad of watercolour paper and we painted most evenings. In the process of filling up my watercolour book and creating a fun memento, I learned to love doing watercolours. 

The little paint box with a collapsible brush is so portable that I didn't mind taking it with me and it gave me a way to capture the beautiful scenes we were seeing every day. One of things I love the most about painting is how it makes you focus on details you wouldn't notice otherwise - how the shadows fall, all the colours in the rocks, the different greens and browns in the vegetation ... Every evening I would look through the photos I had taken that day and paint one or two of them. I have posted a few favourites below. 

 

 

 

Recently a friend and I went to the cottage to spend some time practicing painting sky and water because boy is it difficult. We were very fortunate to have a fantastic display of different types of clouds and water textures.  I took photos on my iPad so we could paint from the pictures and ended up with a wonderful collection in just two days. I uploaded them to the computer so the quality is not as crisp as with my camera, but that just means they have a painterly quality to them already. 

We had dark and looming clouds

and light and fluffy clouds

  
and wispy clouds

  

and a blue sky with just a few little cotton puff balls 

and even for a short period of time early on one of the mornings a pure blue sky.

The water ranged from ruffled

that was insanely sparkly at times

to soft undulations

to a smooth glassy surface which allowed for great reflections of trees and clouds

   

  

 to an absolutely smooth mirror-like surface.

I can't say my paintings were out of this world, but I learned a lot.  Namely, that clouds and water are hard to paint. Ha!

Mary Pratt - Celebrating the Mundane

Miriam King via Timmins Press

It's March Break which means I'm off school for the week. Yay!  The weather continues on its relentless quest to mark this winter as the coldest, snowiest, baddest EVER!  Besides relaxing this holiday, I had a few things I wanted to do and one of them was to see the Mary Pratt art exhibit at the McMichael Art Gallery in Kleinberg, Ontario. 

Mary Pratt is a Canadian realist painter from the east coast.  She was born in New Brunswick, but has lived most of her life in Newfoundland.  In the early years she had to work her painting time around the demands of running a household and raising four children.  As a result she usually painted what was at hand - fruit, cooked roasts, cracked eggs, the dinner table, an unmade bed.  These scenes of domesticity are fleeting in life, but are captured permanently in Mary's paintings.

The Homing Beacon

While it made sense to paint the things of everyday life, it also was difficult to complete the painting while life moved on.  The dining table that Mary wanted to capture with the remains of a meal was needed the next day before the painting could be completed.  It wasn't until Mary gave herself permission to paint from slides that she was able to really capture the impermanent everyday scenes and the fleeting light that was so important in her paintings. The table scene in the painting below was the first time she painted from a slide and was a turning point in her career.

Not only does Mary Pratt find beauty and meaning in the everyday, but through her paintings she also captures light.  Her paintings seem to glow.  The most obvious example of this is her famous jelly jar paintings, but you can also see the reflecting light in the glassware, metal, and even foil, saran wrap, and plastic baggies that she paints.

Mary's paintings though, are hardly a saccharine depiction of the everyday with pretty lighting. She often has flaws in the objects - charred pieces on the meat or chips in the glass (like in the painting below) to show that life is not perfect and you take the beautiful with the broken.

I listened to an interesting interview with Mary Pratt on the McMichael website, filmed earlier this year (click here to listen to it). It is long, but well worth listening to as she talks about her life and art and influences. I picked out a couple of my favourite quotations as they really capture what her paintings are about:

I knew what I thought was beautiful and it was within the four walls of my mother's house.  The sort of jelly quivering within a dish as it was brought to the table. The roast - you can smell a roast - it means something good is going to happen.  

Our house was a happy house and the images that appeal to me come from that house that was full of pleasure and full of life ... Where everything wonderful seemed to happen and I couldn't think of a better way to paint than to try to paint the kind of discussion that went on in our house.

Everything is beautiful, but there are problems to be solved ... You couldn't have something wonderful unless there was difficulty involved. You couldn't make red currant jelly unless you worked at it for three days.

If you live in Southern Ontario, the Mary Pratt exhibit is well worth a visit and is on until April 27th so you can still catch it.  For the rest of the world, you will have to be satisfied with reading about her and seeing her paintings online and in books.  This website has a good collection of her work.

Seeing Mary Pratt's paintings has re-inspired me to find beauty in the everyday and to try and capture the fleeting beauty in the mundane items of life in my photographs and paintings.  And finally, you can read an interesting comparison between Mary Pratt's art and blogging and how both are about observing closely, curating our lives, and preserving the everyday (click here to read the post).

Painting Leaves

  
I've been painting leaves this past week.  The inspiration was from a post by Vickie Henderson on the blog Sketching in Nature.  You really should check out the post as her leaves are gorgeous and far more detailed than mine.  

I loved painting the leaves as it was a satisfying, yet fairly simple process. I thought I would share with you how I painted the leaves in case this gorgeous time of year has you ready to channel your inner artist and you want to give it a try.

First, you need to collect some leaves - the best ones are leaves that have a variety of colours on them or have little holes or imperfections so there is something interesting to paint.  

Then trace them on to your paper.

And then begin painting the leaves starting at the tips.  It works best if you do a combination of painting as well as wetting an area of the leaf and then dropping paint into the water to let the colour flow along the wet area and blend with colours that have already been painted.  

Remember to leave little holes (white areas) even if there aren't any on your actual leaf as it makes the leaves seem more realistic.  You might also want to use tiny amounts of blue to blend with your yellow, orange, and red as it gives a good effect for the edges and the dried up damaged parts of leaves, like in the edges of the yellow maple in the photo below.

How are the colours where you live?  Ours are past their prime, but there are still some trees with leaves which makes me happy. 

I came across this photo I took of some red maple leaves from last year at the cottage and just had to re-post it.  Aren't they magnificent?

Linked to Fall into Fall Party at DIY by Design

Fall DIY Table Runner

  

The other day I showed you the fall runner I made in art class.  It was so much fun to make that I wanted to show you how we did it. Our runners were a group project and now I have a memento of all the pretty leaves made by my friends.

I went to art class a little early this week so I could take some pictures of the materials we used to make the runners.  The process was very simple and didn't involve too many specialized tools.

You need the following:
1. A high-density rubber block in the size you want to make your design
2. Carving tools
3. A glass picture frame (the type without a frame) that we used to roll our paint on
4. Roller (although technically you could apply the paint to the glass with a paintbrush

We looked up leaf shapes in some tree and shrub books (well I did anyway because I'm a bit of a botany nut and wanted to make a real leaf shape).  First we sketched the leaf on some waxed paper and then transferred that to the rubber block.  Then we carved the leaf.  The only tricky part is that you have to consider that the ink will only be on the raised portions and you cut away the part that won't have any ink showing.  

Once our leaves were carved we rolled acrylic paint onto the glass - sometimes using more than one colour - and pressed our rubber leaf stamp into the paint.  It was so exciting to see the stamp with ink on it for the first time.  Then we stamped everyone's leaves on each other's runners so we had a complete forest of leaves.  You have to make sure to apply enough ink, but not too much, so that all the details show up.  You also need to press evenly across the stamp when you apply it to the fabric.  We didn't mind if they weren't perfect though, as real fall leaves aren't perfect.

(I made the maple leaf at the top and the oak leaf at the bottom) 

Before stamping on the runner fabric I practiced on a piece of paper which I proudly hung on our fridge (like I'm in kindergarten all over again).

We're going to make another runner soon in a Christmas design because we all enjoyed making them so much. They really aren't difficult and would make great gifts for friends and family.