Summer Dance

I do like me a low-humidity, blue-skied, sun-and-light-breezes summer day—bare feet, a simple sundress, no fuss, no muss.

I snip a second 4x6" piece from my first Lake Champlain work-in-progress. Lose myself in the adventure of following the lead of one mark and then the next, while summer dances on my skin, and vacation memories play background music.

It's Best to Tell the Truth Full Stop
4x6"; collage, acrylic, latex, oil pastel, and ink
abstract
2018
[gift]

A Gift of Daily Painting

I didn't have much heart to bring to painting today, but my feet made their way to my studio anyway.

I took my first 18x24" Lake Champlain work-in-progress and snipped a 4x6" piece from it to explore.

One thing led to another and, even though I didn't bring much heart to painting, painting brought me to my heart.

Pitted with Rust on the Outside
4x6"; collage, acrylic, latex, oil pastel, and ink
abstract
2018

Lake Champlain, Day 8

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/15/18]

Sweet sweet summer day, slipping now into evening's hush as I write from the porch of our vacation cottage with our car mostly packed for our return home tomorrow.

3rd Lake Champlain work-in-progress,
18x24"; mixed media
fifth layer,
paint marker shapes, stencils, ink doodles

final layer for now,
ink and paint-marker doodles, oil pastels, veiling, print collage

detail

detail

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 7

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/14/18]

The days of our vacation layer one on top of the other, each day distinct in its textures, shapes, nuances, saturations, and hues, and all of them together more than any one.

I start a third painting in my vacation series, laying down one idea at a time—before breakfast, after a hike beside a bog where we talk with wildlife management folks installing a beaver baffle, between a trip to the St. Albans Historical Museum and a lakeside walk, after indulging in the guilty pleasure of Island Ice Cream.

first layer,
India ink applied with new calligraphy pen and then a calligraphy brush

first layer,
India ink,
detail

second layer,
oil pastels
detail

second layer,
oil pastels
detail

third layer,
latex paint dripped and manipulated with the handle end of a paintbrush,
detail

third layer,
latex paint dripped and manipulated with the handle end of a paintbrush,
detail

third layer,
latex paint dripped and manipulated with the handle end of a paintbrush,
detail

fourth layer,
gelli plate monoprints,
detail

Lake Champlain, Day 6

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/13/18]

Huh. 

This painting has surprised me more than once as I've worked on it at our little vacation cottage on this little island at the north end of not-so-little Lake Champlain.

Today, still a work in progress but 'finished' for now, it surprises me again when I step back to photograph it: I’ve painted a little self-contained island!

work in progress
18x24"; mixed media on drawing paper

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 5

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/12/18]

We sleep all night with the French doors in the bedroom open to the attached screened porch overlooking Lake Champlain. A Mary-Poppins-like wind blasts the day in with vigor.

I let the fresh-off-the-lake bluster gust through me all day. Love its cleansing, invigorating energy, the intense feeling of charged weather.

collage and neutrals added to work in progress

more shapes, more neutrals

detail

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 4

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/11/18]

I pull out a new sheet of 18x14" Canson 90 pound classic cream drawing paper this morning and begin playing, playing, playing.

an amalgam of art viewed earlier in the week and an imagined super-magnification of Bryozoa
(the phylum of aquatic invertebrate animals referenced in yesterday's post)

spiral-shaped gastropod fossils

a few delicate fern-like leaf patterns (detail)

Lake Champlain, Day 3

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/10/18]

We visit Fisk Quarry and Goodsell Ridge on Isle la Motte, a few miles from our vacation cottage, where we see 480 million-year-old fossils. I still can't quite wrap my mind around the following information from a Lake Champlain Committee article (boldface mine):

Imagine sitting in a lounge chair with your feet in the water looking out over a tropical sea. The sun blazes away and the reefs around you teem with life. There was a time, nearly half a billion years ago, when the area we now call Lake Champlain hosted such an environment. This was before life existed on land, before the bedrock of the region had even formed.

At the time, the continental plate upon which Lake Champlain sits today was located in the lower latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. Carbon dioxide levels exceeded today’s levels by 14 to 16 percent, and the earth was so warm that practically no ice existed.  As a result, sea levels were much higher and the continental shelf was covered by a shallow arm of the Iapetus Ocean. In this arm, some of the world’s earliest reefs developed.  

Today, most biotic reefs are formed by coral, but at the time of the original reefs, corals had not yet evolved. The first reef builders were instead small branching organisms called bryozoans. Later in time, large cabbage-like stromatoporoids (related to present-day sea sponges) dominated. Over time, other organisms came to occupy the reefs along with the stromatoporoids including the first corals, though corals never dominated these early reefs.  “These structures represent a pivotal moment in the evolution of life on earth, because they are the oldest known, multi-organism constructions on the planet.”

For three days I have been playing with collage, paint markers, acrylics, stencils, pencils, and more, enjoying what I think of as mark-making—until now when I realize I have been layering small branching bryozoans and large cabbage-like stromatoporoids, building an older-than-time reef right here on a piece of drawing paper on a picnic table in front of a cottage in Vermont near the border of Canada.

work in progress
18x24"; mixed media on drawing paper

detail

detail

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 2

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/9/18]

Improv.

I notice the surface pattern on a duvet in our vacation cottage, play with elements of it on my big piece of drawing paper.

Lines seen in stained glass window art at a local gallery travel through a paint marker onto my drawing paper.

A wildflower leaf pattern transplants itself into the lush tangle of mark-making growing in front of me.

As the day unfolds, I ad lib in short little snippets of three minutes here, ten minutes there, creating without preparation from whatever I have available: I press a few pieces of collage into place, spread some paint with my finger and spritz it with a spray bottle to trigger drips, draw angular lines with a China marker against a metal straight-edge tool, use a brayer to veil.

work in progress
18x24"; mixed media on drawing paper

detail

Lake Champlain, Day 1

[entry drafted at Lake Champlain 6/8/18]

I paint today in a sweet little vacation cottage, with windows and screened porches in abundance, all of them wide open to magically warm June daytime air and the perfection of cool deep-sleep nights. A bit of the huge expanse of Lake Champlain laps the edge of our front lawn, and Vermont mountains trace the horizon.

I grab the pad of Canson classic cream 18x24" 90 pound drawing paper I have with me and begin playing.

Blacks, whites, China marker, print collage, latex paint, architect tracing paper, matte medium.

Messing about.

work in progress
18x24"; mixed media on drawing paper

Lakeside

By the time this message reaches you, I'll be far from home in a lakeside setting, on vacation until mid-June. I plan to paint but will step away not only from my home and usual routines and responsibilities but also from all things computer.

Enjoy these early days of June!

gone fishin'

PIP

You know that PIP feature on your television or computer, the Picture in Picture program that allows footage to open in a smaller floating window that remains in front of whatever else is open on the screen?

newest patch: PIP!

newest patch, zoomed in

new patch: PIPIP!
work in progress
working title: Core Values

___

a little history:

taped a space; painted over previous occupant 

established some colors

kept working the patch

 didn't like it

reworked (i.e. overworked) it

went back to ground zero,
foraged in my collection of handpainted papers
and past painting studies,
totally recreated the patch

One Thing, Another

Jon Katz, in his memoir about a rescue donkey who comes into his life in upstate New York, asserts, If my life on a farm is characterized by any one idea, it would be this: one thing leads to another.

Jen Walls writes about Katz's Saving Simon at her blog.

I am pulled in by her musings.

I request the book from interlibrary loan.

I read it.

Katz's explorations of compassion, self-compassion, and suspending judgment touch me.

Many of his ideas shine light on my experience of painting.

---

Oh.

Wait.

That's not the story I set out to tell.

---

Today, I post on Instagram.

@ronda_kernodle likes my photo. Wonder who she is.

Follow her link, poke around her page, discover that she quilts.

A patch of fabric catches my eye.

Bingo! Just the take-off point for which I didn't know I was looking!

---

That's life on my little farm.

---

Starting point for today's patch:

another residual-paint catch-all patch,
undeveloped

A palette knife leads to mixing paint, mixing paint leads to covering the patch, covering the patch leads to a dime-store brush, the dime-store brush leads to making swirly white orbs on the page, making swirly white orbs on the page leads to oil pastels, oil pastels lead to india ink, india ink leads to collage, collage leads to matte medium, matte medium leads to:

newest patch

new patch in the bigger picture
work in progress
working title: Core Values

Thank you, Jen.

Thank you, Ronda.

Simply and Fully

All that’s asked, to bring about potent receptivity to what wants to be seen, is to be nowhere but now. No urging forward to the next moment, no mental processing of the current one. No agenda, no vigilance, no avoidance. You’re simply and fully attuned to the outer reality and to the interior one. In this mode of utter receptivity, there’s not the slightest effort exerted. No searching, no expectation or wishing: simply a resting in whatever is here, now.  (Jan Frazier)

Gobsmacked by the Green of a Fine Day in June
1.5x6"; acrylic, ink, oil pastel, and collage
abstract bookmark
[gift]

KISS*

Keep It Simple, Sweet girl.

Following a conversation with lonnnnnng time friend and now fellow artist, Sylvia, after she did a couple of color studies, I took her lead, grabbed all the yellows I could find in my studio, and … KEPT IT SIMPLE, for a change.

Painted me a little color study to cover yet another patch in my Core Values project.

Before:

repository for last dregs of paint clinging to a brush

After:

newest patch

---

* KISS is an acronym for "Keep it simple, stupid" as a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

Never knew the origin of the acronym till I looked it up just now.

Simple and Magical

Lewis Noble's approach to painting captivates me.

I head to my studio today eager to tear up the postcard on which I made a quick paint sketch yesterday, in order to collage bits of it to the quick paint sketch I made on the Core Values patch I'm revising.

Looks so simple and magical when Lewis Noble tears up one sketch and collages it to another sketch, all to visually compelling and delightful effect.

Ha ha ha!

I just have to laugh when I feel nervous before I even make the first tear!

I hesitate.

I hem and haw.

What am I so afraid of?

Eventually, I commit one piece of collage paper to my Core Values patch with glue.

And then freeze.

Again.

I spend forever moving pieces of collage this way and that, hugely indecisive, not seeing placements that sing to me.

Simple and magical???

Not so much.

But, such a fascinating puzzle to work out.

newest patch

new patch in bigger picture
work in progress
working title: Core Values