Yellow

Painting club is going well, i am ecstatic to report. I did blue on Tuesday:

(detail)

and yellow yesterday:

this is the yellow on canvas paper

detail of centre

edge of small yellow canvas

Painting Club!

To try to nurture improved productivity levels in the Turret (stop me, oh, oh, oh, stop me: stop me if you think that you've heard this one before) i have instigated Painting Club. Painting Club runs between 3 and 5pm every day during the colder months which gives me ample faffing on the internet time (also getting dressed etc) and ends in good  time to break off for Park Club and Shopping Club leading to Doggy Teatime. And mine too.

At Painting Club today, i worked on the Red painting.

In the abstract paintings department, there is a small Blue canvas and a small Yellow. Also a tissue-paper and glue, yellow work on canvas paper. I am thinking mostly in terms of the application of paint and of colour (though this is less important) and not at all about form. I am half-hoping no spheres or orbs appear though i am still easygoing with myself about this as advised to be by an art-therapist.

I'm using acrylic and oil on this, alternating paint with layers of tissue paper glued on. Multiple layers are built up creating depth much as glazing can. The paint, stroked and rubbed, catches on the wrinkles in the tissue paper to great effect.


Bobbie was keen that i kept an eye on the time.
I think this will work  out much better than spending 8 hours on a canvas every 3 weeks, having knife-under-the-shoulder-blade pain all the next day and harassing myself for all the days in between that i don't paint.

life-drawing

This week i have been using my self as a life model. The process was comical: running about the attic in the nip, between tripod and focal range, hurling my body into a frozen pose and holding my breath, all within 10 seconds and more often then not realizing i hadn't pressed the shutter button to set the timer going.

There were problems with the animals. Dogs often assume the naked human requires washing, and when lying down on the floor, must be ill and in need of help. Bobbie had to be shut out. (i've often thought that a touchingly helpful dog could cause serious damage to someone who'd just fallen and broken their neck. I must be careful...)

 I didn't eject Leo at first..

but then found i couldn't work with his misguided chaperoning.

The foreshortening was a great exercise. I will have to have a hand and foot day, though.

This was complicated but i'd like to try and work it up into a larger drawing. 

I don't doubt the importance of the practice of life-drawing - i loved it when i was a student, every Friday afternoon, and i can still hear Matt Alexander's voice (from 25 years ago!) telling me to drop a plumb line, watch this or that value, look at the model not the paper. I think the reason it is such a useful exercise is simply because we are drawing our own species, we know what we are supposed to look like so it is easy to gauge precision or mistake. I like drawing cows. If we all drew cows every Friday afternoon during our art education, we'd know them better but never as intimately and intuitively - cellularly - as we know the human form.

(..... a hands, feet and hooves day...)

On a personal note, I was pleased to find that i did not pick myself to pieces when i uploaded the photographs, was merely critical of the poses and the photography for practical and aesthetic reasons. When i went out to walk the dog afterwards, i had a sense of my body being all of a piece and not a haphazard composite of less than magazine-perfect thighs, waist, breasts: having seen myself from many angles and pencilled my own outline, i felt happily natural and ripply like an animal, like beautiful Bobbie trotting unselfconsciously in front of me.