Friday painting

I was supposed to be assisting at the discus event at my children's inter-school athletics day but it was cancelled due to the weather. Kidlets were devastated. Me, not so much. All day athletics, measuring how far a discus is thrown and avoiding the actual throw (the big ones sometimes aim for you, I swear) in the hot sun, no chair,ugh…..but I do it because it is what needs to be done. You can see how I took the cancellation as a sign to go painting.! I opened the car boot to load the gear (I had already spotted cows lying down in a paddock round the corner) and discovered it was full of biking gear that I have to deliver to Tauranga later today. Stink. So I dragged the easel across the road and painted this.

Towards the city

My version, with greyscale reminding me to keep an eye on values!

What a week~!!!

Oh My Gardenias!!!! What a week!

I have been selected to submit works for The Original Art Sale in Auckland 17-19 May and I have been offered gallery space for my first, solo exhibition 19-21 April! Yikes! Doubly whammy!

I am so excited I am bouncing around!!!

I did a mad dash to my framers to get the ball rolling on the framing front and am going through other works, selecting and popping aside to be in the final cut for selection and still trying to paint and keep the kids alive whilst my husband is riding motorbikes in South Island for a week........breathe.......it's just all go, go, go!!!!

I am also bottling tomato sauce (autumn heralds the time of pickling and bottling the glut of fruit and veg that seems too good to waste), trying to pull the garden back from the brink of disaster (we have a drought) and house train the puppy.

Clearly, slowing down is not an option at the moment.

36 x 34 cm
oil on canvas

The drought and harvesting of maize is turning the countryside into a dust bowl. Rainclouds loom large each afternoon then disappear without depositing their promise on the parched land. The animals stand around in quiet groups in the shade of trees, the cracks in the earth are widening with each passing day.

I feel very much like I am in a transition: Summer to Autumn, drought to rain, unknown to known. I am ready.

New toys

I love the art shop! It's an Aladdin's cave of fantastic and inspiring tools. Just standing in front of the various paint charts, the tubes all chromatically lined up, the colour swatches hanging off to the side, the names(Cerulean blu, French Ultramarine, Pthalo, Prussian, Cobalt.....rrrrrRRRRRRrrrr!sexy!) makes me hum with delight.There are brushes and mediums, papers, canvases, boards, pastels. conte, pencil, dipper, palettes, easels, books, nibs,pens..........the list is endless.
Want to make me happy? Let me shop in the Art shop!

So, in need of a little retail therapy and aware that shoplifting is illegal, I went and bought myself some rubber paint-shapers. I limited myself to a pack of three wedges, but the other available shapes are groovy and I intend to revisit that corner and find out what the other interesting shapes do and how I can convince my wallet to disgorge some money to fund the newest acquisition.

Now, the reason I wanted the shapers is to loosen my style of painting a bit and add some different marks to the paint surface. As much as I love loose painting, I sometimes find myself standing an inch from the canvas, nose almost touching, with the paintbrush gripped vice like in my claw,just short of it's ferrule. Not loose at all. If loose is an orang-utan, then I am a tortoise. So, I have to have some props to remind me to loosen up. I can't paint drunk( tried ,and it did not work) , so this is part of my arsenal to help me. Funnily enough, I have enjoyed painting en plein air because the need for speed makes me loosen up a lot. No dawdling in the rain/wind/sun/heat (please add whatever weather conditions are unpleasant in here..............) and I am not overly keen on being without a cup of tea for more than an hour or two at any time.

So, these are the paintings done with the aid of the paint-shapers, but using brushes too. Let me know what you think.

15 x 21 cm
oil on paper

21 x 30
oil on paper

Auckland Anniversary day Plein air

I stayed close to home,  painting down the road this morning. I bumped into friends taking their children for a leisurely horse ride, some stopped cars and had a chat and I finished off by popping in for a coffee,cake and chat with my writer friend at the end of said road.

The morning is perfect and will be hot and sunny for the next few days. New Zealand has a Maori name, Aotearoa, which means "Land of the long white cloud". As an island, there are always clouds around but today we have nothing but blue skies from horizon to horizon. So of course, I painted almost no sky whatsoever! What I wanted to catch was how the morning light infused everything with a glow.

I painted on a canvas toned with a mix of permanent rose and Indian yellow. Vivid orange,really.

I like it.

20 x 30 cm
oil on canvas board

Using me Coulter plein air system easel setup and Best Brella umbrella.....and the boot of my car for all the other junk!

What an absolutely wonderful morning.

unfinished business

I have yet to complete this painting. I know that sounds a bit odd ( why did she post it unfinished?...nutter), but I am not sure who needs to be in this painting: the cyclist or the hitch-hiker. Both know the meaning of the lonely road and both have been on my mind recently . I have a soft spot for cyclists....some of my best friends are roadies and I love how fantastically scary hitch-hiking can be ( I swear, of all the things my mother made me promise not to do, not hitch-hiking was the one I kept.) . The good weather has seen an increase in cyclists on the country roads and hitch-hikers have been waiting on the side of the roads at the major state highway intersections. I think they herald summer.

But that aside, this painting is not about the figure in it, it's about the lonely road, the sky and the stillness that is so rare these days. The right figure will present itself.

oil on canvas panel
25 x 35 cm

I am a week out from travelling up North to Ruakaka to spend the day painting and learning from a great talent, Richard Robinson. I have been slightly freaked out by this and managed to paint like a complete twit for a while until I reigned the self- doubt in, told it to pull up a chair and watch quietly whilst I pulled myself together, and then continued to paint as normal. I have not heard a word from it since!

I am very excited and I hope you have a look at his work....he is amazing and self taught to boot.He recently traveled to Hawaii and has a free downloadable book...well worth the read.

Whangamata beach walk

Back into painting. Back into the oils and some landscape.....or  I should say, beachscapes.
25 x 35 cm
oil on Canvas Panel

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