Laurelines

Remembering Theodore

Readers of this blog will know that my family suffered a heartbreaking loss last November. Then, as now, I will let my daughter's words speak for all of us:

As you all know, Biff and I lost our full term son Theodore in November.  The heartbreak is indescribable and will remain with us throughout our lives. In trying to move forward, we wanted to do something to honor him and help other families  at the same time. We decided to do something to work towards better outcomes for mothers and babies, something that celebrates life. We chose to start a family team, called Team Theodore Mulhollan, to participate in this year's March for Babies on April 28th.  Out of all the options we looked into, March of Dimes has the broad-scope public health efforts and individual care for families that no other organization has. They have historically supported immunization campaigns, folic acid supplementation in grains to prevent birth defects and continue to focus on healthy pregnancy and newborn care. We heard personal stories from families about support teams in NICUs about how to care for the special needs of premature babies that brought us to tears. 

 Today is 45 days before the walk, so it's time to start fundraising. If you feel like you could make a donation, we would be grateful. If you are able donate $50 or more, we will send you a little package of thanks. If you would like to join our team for the short 3 mile walk in Raleigh on the 28th, please sign up.  If all you do is forward this email to one person who might be able to help out, that is something too. The link to our team's page is here:http://www.marchforbabies.org/team/t1762546 

Thanks to everyone for your support and kindness-we feel loved in our sorrow. We carry Theodore in our hearts.  

Love,
Kate and Biff

 

My dear friends and readers, if you can help us honor Theodore in this way, I would be most grateful. Even the smallest step in his memory will be a great gift to our family and to other babies in need.

Thank you, with love,

Laura

Painting paroxysms

Volcanic paroxysms, that is.  A paroxysm is, as you know, a sudden, violent outburst of energy. I have them, you have them. Even educated fleas have them. Ours pale in comparison to volcanic ones. At least, mine do and I hope yours do, too.

So now, after my recent illustration for The Morning News, I can't stop painting volcanoes!  

This subject has grabbed hold of my very being and it won't let go. It's no surprise, really. I was born on a dormant volcano, one of the Aleutian arc volcanoes, in the Bering Sea. A lifelong wanderer, I have felt most at home on this planet in Iceland, a country that absolutely oozes volcanic and other forms of primal energy.

I have long been drawn to exploding, expansive gestures. 

 

 

My love of fountains is another example of my attraction to expulsive energy.

I'm working right now on 7 volcano paintings, the first in what I believe/hope will be a longer series. These are smallish, 11" x 14", a great size for beginning exploration of the subject. Medium is acrylic on board, though I have some water soluble oils I can't wait to try with this series!

 

So, onward, volcanically. I'm learning as I go what works and what doesn't with these paintings and I'm really enjoying the process. I'll have more to say and show soon.

*Postcards from the volcano

I got a commission last week to make an illustration for the website The Morning News. I'd done an illustration for them last summer and both they and I enjoyed the experience a lot. The current article is on natural disasters. Kate Ortega, the editor I've worked with, suggested volcanoes as a theme. I latched onto the subject with glee and ended up submitting three images. This is the one Kate chose:

Here are the two others:

*And here is the poem I've filched my blog post title from:

A Postcard from the Volcano

by Wallace Stevens

 

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on the hill;

 

And that in autumn, when the grapes

Made sharp air sharper by their smell

These had a being, breathing frost;

 

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

 

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

 

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion's look

And what we said of it became

 

A part of what it is . . . Children,

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

 

Will say of the mansion that it seems

As if he that lived there left behind

A spirit storming in blank walls,

 

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

 

This has been a favorite poem of mine since I first read it in my late teens, then still practically one of the children Stevens refers to in the first and sixteenth lines. Now, a lifetime later, I'm closer to the 'We' of the poem, hoping that I, too, will have left, when that time comes and in my own modest way, something of 'what I felt/at what I saw.'

Rome again, Rome again

For this trip, I limited my art supplies to:

3 waterbrush pens filled with Payne's Gray, sepia, and cerulean ink

1 Pigma brush pen in burnt sienna

My blue Portuguese laundry pencil

2 Cretacolor oil pencils in sepia and soft black

a  lightweight plastic travel palette with manganese blue, burnt sienna, transparent pyrole orange

1 travel watercolor brush

A big Pitt Artist pen in warm gray

Then I bought a box of cheap colored pencils for children at Poggi's. I used the orange one a lot!

I left my Stillman and Birn sketchbook at home (!) in my packing haste and had to buy a Daler and Rowny Ebony one, also at Poggi's. 

Here are more of what I did with these:

Here's my stepson Lee, at lunch with my daughter Cecelia and me. I put that orange pencil to work!

As a reminder, here's an earlier scene of that same cafe

I have a few more sketches from Rome. Soon!

Here & there & everywhere: two books from the Great Sketch Movement

About nine years ago, something wonderfully sketchy happened. In 2003, Danny Gregory's book 'Everyday Matters' was published and a year later, Danny founded an online group of that same name. In his original and powerful book, Danny promoted the idea of sketching your life as a way to live it more fully.

In the same period,  Enrico Casarosa started his Worldwide Sketchcrawls, where participants spend a designated day sketching and afterwards, share their work with each other, again online. Danny's and Enrico's stunningly successful groups showed us what 'going viral' meant, back when that phrase was still in its toddlerhood.

In 2007, Gabi Campanario had his own brilliant idea, creating an online group called Urban Sketchers, with correspondents he'd selected from all over the world. The goal?  "To show the world, one drawing at a time."  Talk about going global. Gabi and his website have done it.

If Danny and Enrico were the founding giants of the sketch movement, and Gabi their successor in the Big Ideas category, Cathy Johnson, with her books on sketching and illustrated journaling and her various websites, has been the movement's wise woman, teacher, and generous mentor. Her encouragement, both private and published, has drawn many, many into the sketching fold.

Several books have come out of the movement already, in addition to those by Danny and Cathy, but I want to talk about two very recent ones that are as inspiring as can be: 'The Art of Urban Sketching' by, who else, Gabi Campanario and 'Here & There,' by Miguel Herranz.

Gabi's book features the work of dozens of Urban Sketchers, including, I'm proud to say, my own. It's handsomely designed and laid out and, with the variety of styles and approaches it includes, it has a near-encyclopedic reach. It's such fun to see the kind of things sketchers can get up to! AND it's the Number One seller in books on painting at Amazon as of this writing! I won't go into great detail about it, because it's already much touted, but just in case you've been distracted lately, I wanted to bring it to your attention. You need this book.

Miguel Herranz's 'Here and There' is at the other end of the encyclopedic spectrum. It is Miguel's work we see here, and only his. Like Gabi's book, Miguel's is artfully composed. Production quality is very high, which, it must be said, is not all that typical of independently published sketchbooks. And then there are the drawings themselves. You'll want to see these not only for their vitality and charm and luscious technique, but because you can trace Miguel's evolution as a sketcher on these pages. Mind you, he IS a professional illustrator, but you can still see a significant evolution in his drawing tecnhnique as he, having taken up drawing as a daily practice, gets better and better and even better. All of the drawings in 'Here & There' are lovely, fun, and full of personality. There are some drawings that will simply take your breath away.

We like sketches better, sometimes, than paintings because they are so direct, so here and now. They're personal, they're handmade, and really, anyone can produce them. You may not be another Miguel Herranz or Cathy Johnson, but you CAN sketch, you know. (Read Danny's book, if you don't believe me.)

Or you can just look at and enjoy the work you'll find in these two books.

Oh, go ahead. Either way. And let me know what you think.

 

Cold and snowy Rome???

Yes, cold AND snowy Rome is right. That meant, except for the first day, all monuments and museums were closed the entire time I was there.  A lot of restaurants and businesses were, too, but, as you'll see, I found a few places to eat and drink. I mean, what else was there to do??

I did brave the cold with my daughter Cecelia the first day (pre-snow) and the last day (after snow) to make some outdoor sketches. I'll post them in a couple of days.

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I met dear Concetta Flore early on the day it snowed. We got some sketching done and here is one of mine from that day. More to come.

Lines, colors, shapes: January

I was only able to dip my toe into the great sea that is lithography during my two-day workshop in Austin, Texas.  I would like to find a way to continue working in this medium. I really like it.

Here are two very different first steps in lithography. One is a face roughly derived from my sketch of the adoring angel below. It sort of just appeared on the plate as I drew.

The second image comes from a recent sketch done in my studio here and is a way of seeing how my normal gestures and lines behave under lithograph conditions. The plates were small, 7"x9", so it was hard to get real momentum going.

Here is the mixed media sketch of the protea mentioned above:

And finally, a little loosening-up sketch from this morning: This loosening up is necessary because I'm going to Rome next Tuesday to see my daughter Cecelia (she who never stands still) and hope to get some sketches of Rome (think fountains) done while I'm there. She, as you may remember, is an avid sketcher now, so we can enjoy this together. I'm also meeting up with Concetta Flore, lovely artist and very nice person. She lives in Rome and wants to sketch with me...I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to prepare some loose sheets for sketching by applying acrylic washes like the one I used for the Greek/Roman head below. Then I'll use ink and crayon on site. Playing with mixed media outside of the painting studio keeps me open to new ways of doing things inside it.  I'm taking a travel sketchbook, too. Ciao, Roma!

Museum sketches, North Carolina Museum of Art

The newly-renovated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh is a real stunner. The permanent collections are displayed in the best possible way in exquisitely designed, ethereal spaces, with lots of natural light. 

I had time on my last visit to make two brief sketches. Color added later, as per the museum's rules.. no wet media allowed, of course.

This is a heartbreakingly beautiful angel, Bavarian, 18th century, in polychrome and gilt.

And here is an antique head, Greek or Roman... I didn't note at the time, unfortunately. It looks very pristine, I'll say that.

Off to Austin, Texas tomorrow for a lithography workshop, cold-addled head and all.

Achoo!

Woman at work

Yes, in the studio, making what I call 'gateway' paintings. These will lead to other paintings and who knows where we'll end up?

In this process, I move back and forth between more and less abstracted images. When I get stuck or feel too loosey-goosey, I put something down in front of me (here, the amaryllis) and paint it. This direct painting from life, from objects, is a way to ground myself, a means and not an end. Last year, I did this for an extended period, just to get back to wielding a brush. I spent only three hours on each of those paintings and set them aside, unfinished, before moving on to the next one. It was a great exercise for me.

These are unfinished, too,  but I will work most of them to completion. And then put them aside. After a couple of months, I'll see where I am.  

These paintings are speaking to me, though I don't know yet what they are saying. For now, it doesn't matter. The imagery here comes from emotion and intuition.

I'm supported in this slow, intuitive working method by the ideas I found in the book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton.

Here are some excerpts: 

The mind, too, works at different speeds. Some of its functions are performed at lightening speed; others take... days or even years to complete their course.

...there is another mental register that proceeds more slowly still. It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely, or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating... .being contemplative or meditative. These leisurely, apparently aimless ways of knowing  and experiencing are just as 'intelligent' as the other, faster ones.

We need the tortoise mind as much as we need the hare brain.

 

Yes, indeed.

 

 

 

 

I'm going to Austin, Texas next week for a lithography workshop and a few days later to Rome, to visit one of my daughters. I'll share here the work, sketches and prints, from those two experiences; they'll be much more hare-brained than my studio work.

What I know

I know well now that I can't control my world and I know that I can't predict what will happen to me, my loved ones, or anyone else. In light of this realization, I won't make detailed plans, as I have done here in years past.  There are, though, some things I know:

In 2012, I will paint. There are six paintings in my studio, begun in October and November, that beg to be finished. I'm eager to get back to them and see where they will take me next.

In 2012, I will write in my journals. I start a new one tomorrow, having filled four hardbound 8 1/2" x 11" Stillman & Birn books this year. What a lifeline that journal writing is.

In 2012, I will sketch and I will travel some, too. I go to Rome the first week in February to visit my roving daughter Cecelia. I go to Italy again in midsummer for the wedding of a dear family friend. There will, I hope, be a trip back to the cold parts of the world next winter. This I don't know, but I hope for it.

In January, I go to Austin, Texas to take a lithography workshop at Flatbread Press. I realized last fall that there are some ideas and images I have that would lend themselves better to printmaking processes than painting ones. I'm very excited about this. I took an etching course at university but have never done lithography.

2012 will be what it will be. Following my courageous daughter Kate's example, I am able to look to the new year. I hope, though I do not know, that it will be a good year, a productive year, a year of blessings.

I know, too, that I'll be here, sharing what 2012 brings. Happy new year to you.