Fitting It In

The Tower of the Winds, Athens, the Roman Agora. Watercolor and fountain pen, 9" x 4".

We've been super-busy lately, with a large professional design job that came to us unexpectedly, an upcoming book for Phoenicia, taxes, and various other personal and volunteer responsibilities. I've also had some more dental surgery, oh joy. I've felt like I haven't had any sustained time to do artwork, but in spite of that, I've managed to fit in a few drawings or other projects. It's important to my sanity to keep a creative practice going, so I'm glad to see the evidence when I look back through my photos from the past couple of weeks.

The drawing above was a test of a landscape-format Arches watercolor block, done one evening from photographs I took in Athens. We're going to be taking another trip soon, and I've been trying to get my art supplies together. I still don't have the ideal travel sketchbook; my hardcover Stillman&Birns is just too heavy to carry around in a purse all day, and the smaller sketchbook is a bit too small for serious sketching. So that's a dilemma to solve in the future.

Paints are easier. Here's a sketchbook sketch of my current palette, with some ideas for changes. In the end, I couldn't buy a small tube of perylene maroon locally, but was happy with the mixtures I was able to achieve from my basic palette of colors. All I'm doing is swapping out the Cadmium red for Quinacridone Burnt Orange -- a very beautiful intense burnt sienna that is full of light on its own but different from Quinacridone Gold, and forms lovely darks when mixed with deep blues. (Thanks to Liz Steel, who's always tinkering with her watercolor palette on her thoughtful and well-annotated urban sketching blog, and Jane Blundell, an online expert in watercolor pigments and mixing.)

And there have been a few drawings. Here's one of my father-in-law's small Nefertiti-head with the houseplants we're coaxing through the winter, and a still-life of two pears wrapped in paper and the orchid pot that seems to keep reappearing in many of my drawings this winter, because of it's pride-of-place on the table where we eat.

But the most fun I've had making things lately happened on the day before Ash Wednesday, called variously "Shrove Tuesday", "Fat Tuesday" or "Mardi Gras", when the cathedral traditionally holds a pancake and sausage supper. I don't think many Anglicans fast during Lent, so this won't be the last time they see fat or meat for a while, but it's a nice tradition to observe anyway. This year, the dean suggested that we wear masks to make it more fun. I spent an afternoon making these two for J. and me to wear, and they came out in a sort of Viennese style, with the gold beaks. I've never been big on dressing-up, but this event was a lot of fun and I loved making these masks!

I hope that you can see signs of spring wherever you live (unless you're in the southern hemisphere) and are able to do whatever keeps your spirits up!

Comments

[Faith]

Hey you two!

[Natalie]

Fabulous marvellous masks! You should do theatrical design! And I love the top Athens watercolour. Are you going back to Greece? Any stop-overs in London on the agenda?

So sorry you're having more dental torture - I totally empathise.
Much love to you and J.

[Dale]

How wonderful!

[Roderick Robinson]

These behind-the-scenes explanations about painting go straight to my heart. So lively yet so professional. I feel churlish not taking advantage of them but, as you know, I have other fish to fry. Tomorrow (Monday) will be my singing lesson. It's perhaps fanciful - even blasphemous - to suggest I feel an imminent sense of grace. Oh well, its secular equivalent. An hour of concentration on tiny details that only we, as singers, would notice. Then bursts of audible creativity which, in a very minor way, echo the sentiments of Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech:

"to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before."

Hubris is only spitting distance away. But you know all about this elevated state for you, like V my teacher, belong to that privileged elite, working sopranos. And, no doubt about it, sopranos get to sing the best tunes despite what tenors say. I know whereof I speak. Rehearsing Purcell's duet "My dearest, my fairest" alone at home is difficult as you can imagine. Not least because I find myself wanting to sing some of the soprano lines as well. Notably:

"O why are love's hours so short and so sweet?"

Heart-wrenching.

Perhaps you could do for singing what you have done for painting. And I could overload your comments column with what the hymn describes as "sounding praise".

[Sharyn Ekbergh]

These are so lovely! The colors are so clear and pure. I'm cleaning out my jewelry tools and redoing my bench with my art stuff. Could you post a list of your favorite pallet with the exact names of the paints? I took some lessons years ago but this time I am just going to experiment.