my old haunt

Been busy this week cleaning and organizing my studio — and getting ready for an even bigger cleaning event — the BIG SPRING CLEAN!  So not so much painting in the last few days.

However I did go to the National Gallery of Art yesterday for a few hours and while I was there I made this drawing after a Rodin sculpture.

Spent some time looking at still lifes too in anticipation of my switch from landscape to still life which is coming, coming — soon!  Every time I am out where cut flowers are for sale I am thinking also about still life.  Soon, soon!

Here’s what I was looking at:

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piling on the obsession

Drawing and redrawing the motif to get myself revved up to continue painting — on this:

https://alethakuschan.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/crepe-myrtles-are-the-best/

at the heart of the scribbles

Here’s an even closer detail of the drawing.  There’s a sort of riot of lines.

band of roses

I am redrawing things that are in the painting, reconnecting myself with individual parts of the motif to get myself ready to continue working on it, stitching the parts more securely together — or preparing to do so — since the real discoveries will happen on the painting’s own surface.  These are just ideas.

So I redrew the roses and then added the top of the clump of hydrangeas below these roses, just to help myself think about some ways that these two parts might connect.  These are the hydrangeas that I drew in the previous post.  The drawing measures 14 x 11 inches and depicts the flowers actual size.

Here’s the whole painting in its present form:

https://alethakuschan.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/also-around-the-corner/

The roses and the hydrangeas are located in the top left hand side.

 

seeing things

It’s been a while since I bought some flowers to draw.  I need to do that again.  Drawing is a way of getting to know a thing.  The drawings that I love best have as their primary purpose the recording of a moment.  Flowers are wonderful to look at, to hold, to smell and they are wonderful to draw.

You choose an edge and let your eyes travel around that edge, and your hand records the journey — a trip through the flowers.  Drawing is freedom.

tangled blue lines untangling thoughts

It’s another blue ball point pen drawing which I’ve made to help me figure out the big shapes of a new landscape painting that’s in the works.  I love drawing this way. It totally suits me.  It’s wonderful when you have a form that fits your thoughts and emotions to a tee.  With the pen, I figure out how to think about the scene.  With a pen I can walk around in my own imagination.

drawing for landscape

Thoughts from the pen for a little landscape picture.

crepe myrtles in Neopastels

I read through the forms using a ball point pen in the previous post, and here I’ve rehearsed the forms in color using Caran d’Ache Neopastels (oil pastel).  The drawing measures 18 x 11 inches.  Didn’t color everything.  It’s just a dress rehearsal, still thinking out loud.

crepe myrtles in pen lines

Chaotic looking here, but this was my first practice for a painting.  Describing the shapes to myself using the pen helps me find a thought path into the painting.

working drawing

The drawing I’m using for the lay-in is a very broad working drawing.  I draw then paint, draw some more, paint some more.  These are first thoughts.