the cassandra pages

Direct Watercolor: Report on Week Three

A thicket with fence and steel planters. The city must have put these planters at the entrance to the railroad bike path -- I really like the rusty surfaces -- but they immediately became blank canvases for graffiti. Still, I like this little wild area with its vines and varied textures. 

This week I did four more sketches/paintings of the area around the tracks. I really think I'm done, unless something else calls out loudly to me to be painted -- the lack of interest I felt in the final painting told me everything I needed to know. I've learned quite a bit doing these. The greatest lesson is that while these could be illustrations for a project about life near the tracks, I need to be working on subjects that truly inspire me, sketching in a sketchbook, but painting on sheets of paper where I've got more room, more freedom, and no dividing line for the spread! On the technical side, I've discovered dagger brushes, which are extremely versatile and useful, doing the work of several other brushes of conventional shape. For me, they don't replace a pointed sable brush completely, but almost. And I've been satisfied with the palette of colors (currently 17) I'm using. I may add a lighter, brighter yellow, perhaps Lemon Yellow, and possibly a couple of additional earth tones such as Raw Sienna/Venetian Yellow Earth, and Transparent Red Oxide/Italian Burnt Sienna, and delete Indanthrone Blue. The foundational grey tones, both warm and cool, created by mixing Burnt Sienna or Quinacridone Burnt Orange with French Ultramarine Blue have made things a whole lot easier, and improved both the speed of sketching, and the color on the paper.

So here are the rest of this week's pages. 

An alley near the studio. Residential buildings from two parallel streets back up onto the same alley. Some have limited or no vehicle access; children play here, and sometimes the neighbors create collective gardens that lead to a city designation of a "ruelle vert" or "green alley."

Vetch, picked along the tracks. Part of the challenge of these direct watercolors, in addition to drawing with the brush only, is to paint fast and avoid fussing over any sections. 

And a detail.

How my sketchbook pages start. This is pretty much the same as the way I'd start an oil painting, except with oil I'd build up the values next, and in watercolor I use a series of washes, usually working light-to-dark. The brush drawing was done with one of my new Rosemary & Co. dagger brushes -- they're excellent! But painting didn't go too well today. I'm tired from singing all day yesterday, plus running a meeting, and my heart wasn't really in it. That's a recipe for lackluster work. I don't know if I can rescue it tomorrow or not. Should have left it like this! 

The tracks, looking east, in a photo that's too dark but shows the lack of unification of the two sides of the work: this is the less-than-stellar finish of the previous day's sketch. My studio is in the brick building at right. The blue bird cutout is art someone put on the fence. 

I like some of the other pages from this week, but I think they lead me toward other subjects. We'll see! It has been well worth the effort to do these.

Direct Watercolor: Report on Week Two

This week I got more deeply into the underside of life along the tracks. The old warehouses, formerly used for manufacturing, have been turned into artist's spaces and light manufacturing. They're also canvases for graffiti on the sides that face the bike path and railroad, rather than the street above the tracks. It's not very artistic graffiti, either - mostly tagging and layers on top of layers, at that. When I walk or bike on the path, I find I'm kind of grateful for the sudden bursts of color, but it's also rather grim and decayed when you get up close and really look. Within the buildings, beyond the grilled windows, I can sometimes hear music and machinery; people are working and making things. But from the "back side", this is what you see.

The week's sketches actually began with this one. There's a contentious chain link fence all along the railroad. People continually cut human-size holes so they can cross the rails on foot or bring their bikes across; the railroad patches these holes, the next night they're re-cut. Neighborhood lobbying for a grade crossing has never borne fruit. I often cross the tracks via these cuts to get to the bike path on the far side from my studio building, and they're a big part of the reality of this zone for many of us, so I thought I should paint one. 

Trees and grapevines on the edge of the tracks: a much more classic watercolor, ore typical for me -- and frankly, a relief to paint.

And, finally, the appearance of a human. This path is used all year-round, by walkers, runners, cyclists, parents with various child-conveyances, and, in the winter, cross-country skiers. It's great because it's a long, unpaved, hard dirt path, and there's no car traffic whatsoever, not even any intersections with streets. That's because it's on the level of the railroad, and all the streets run below through overpasses such as the one I sketched last week. At certain times of the day it's quiet, but usually there are quite a lot of people using the path, especially in good weather. A few of the warehouses have makeshift picnic areas in back, beyond the chain-link fence, so sometimes I'll see groups of people sitting out there for lunch or taking a break. The city has also grouped some large flat rocks in several areas along the path itself, and I'll often pass people who are seated there, talking or eating, or just sitting alone. I also see photographers quite frequently, but I've never run across anyone with a sketchbook. 

So -- how's it going? I admit to a waning of interest, mainly because the environment is just not very beautiful, no matter how hard one searches, and in the present depressing world I don't think it's healthy for me to spend too much time focused on a grim subject for my art. 

I've also found it difficult to work in my sketchbook, since these are not really sketches but paintings that require a lot of water. I can't get it as wet as I'd like, and that's a problem. The paper is good, but it does buckle with even a small amount of wet pigment, and I've had to iron the pages to flatten them again -- so, all in all, I feel like I'm hampered by the sketchbook, not helped. It would be better to be working on a watercolor block or single sheets of a heavier weight.

On the positive side, the constraint of working directly to watercolor, without pen or pencil drawing first, has not been a problem at all. Drawing with the side and tip of the dagger brush works just fine, and saves a great deal of time -- so that's been a good discovery. For a more finished painting, I would use a pencil sketch, but I'm glad to have had this chance to experiment and find out that for a lot of the work, a brush drawing is sufficient.

That's even true for perspective and architecture! (Thanks, Liz Steel!) Having overcome my reluctance to draw buildings, I'm looking forward to doing some loose sketches of Montreal architecture, which is varied and interesting, with lots of detail in roofs, cornices, and steeples, as well as those iconic spiral staircases. I like the informality and liveliness that result when  perspective is loosely, but not slavishly, conveyed. This was a problem for me before, and one of the happiest results of recent experiments in Lisbon, and now here, has been the knowledge that this is a good direction for me to take.

I feel like I've done enough with the railroad subject to be free to let it go, at this point. Perhaps I'll return to it or do a few more of these, but I think I want to turn to some other nearby places for the remainder of the pages in this book. Next week I'll be going somewhere very different, and will take another sketchbook with me.

Do let me know what you think! Your comments have been illuminating and helpful -- thank you!

A New Direction, or a Short-lived Experiment?

This was the first week of June, and the first week of my new sketchbook project. As I'd figured, I only managed to do four paintings out of seven. My idea had been to paint scenes close to my studio, which is in a sort of no-man's-land near the Canadian-Pacific railroad tracks at the top of Plateau Mont-Royal. The subjects nearby are way out of my comfort zone: industrial buildings, the railroad, the bike path past warehouses covered with graffiti, scrubby vegetation. It's not at all pretty, and yet there's something more challenging about finding something to paint here. I'm not sure I can keep it up for a whole month. Maybe I'll add some flowering trees in the ruelles to increase my enthusiasm, or maybe I'll jump ship completely. 

One thing I've found about being older is that if I've made a wrong move, I'm no longer determined to stay on that path or else. With the Lisbon sketchbook, I really wanted to finish it as I had originally planned. Here, I'm not so sure. But still, I'm pleased with the work I did this week, and glad that I no longer shy away from urban scenes because of discomfort with perspective.

Doing direct watercolor --without an underlying pen or pencil drawing -- is a good exercise, too, I'm finding. By using a dagger brush, I'm able to draw the basic shapes with the edge or tip of the brush in a light color, and thus sketch in the basic scene before committing to large areas of color. Simplification happens naturally when drawing with a brush, and that's good. This week I ordered two new, high quality dagger brushes from Rosemary & Co, in England. Working rapidly also forces me to make swift color choices. I've been glad for a pre-mixed grey I added to my palette (a combination of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue), and overall I'm happy with my new, extended range of 18 colors, though I seldom use any of them without modification.

So, I'm learning some things, and not being too hard on myself. The point of painting, after all, is to enjoy it.

 

A June Watercolor Sketchbook

Studio still life with a painting of Thingvellir by Kjarval. A recent fairly loose watercolor; I want to do more painting like this.

About a month ago, I read about an online watercolor challenge happening in the month of June. The idea is to paint 30 "direct" watercolors in 30 days -- that means painting without preliminary ink drawing, just plunging in and painting or drawing rapidly with your brush. his is the second year for this challenge, the brainchild of Marc Taro Holmes, a well-known "urban sketcher" who used to work in the video game industry, and now happens to live in Montreal, and Liz Steel, an urban-sketcher and watercolor teacher  known for her watercolors of architecture. The point of the month-long challenge is to encourage lots of painting practice and less thinking and worrying about picky details or great results; like life drawing, this is to get people loosened up and moving from one painting to the next without judging themselves. I'm totally in support of that, because what I see in so many people who tell me they'd love to paint is fear of beginning, and then a whole lot of self-criticism which boils down to "I'm no good at this." There's no way someone isn't going to learn and improve if they paint 30 sheets of paper in a month, while just one a week, or one a month, leaves a lot of room for those self-defeating thoughts.

I kept thinking about the challenge, and finally decided I wanted to participate. The experience of doing my Lisbon sketchbook has taught me a lot. I've still got two pages left to go in that book, but by eliminating the ink lines about halfway through I've ended up with sketches I liked much more. And I really liked the fact that it's a complete book.

As for the "rules" of this challenge, I'm probably going to bend them. I'm in a different position from a beginning painter; learning to draw with a brush isn't my personal challenge; it's to pursue the work on a daily basis, sometimes painting very freely, at other times with more detail. At this point what I'm interested in doing is painting better (and more) watercolors, toward a particular style. Sometimes that means I need a quick preliminary pencil under-drawing -- so while I may sometimes go directly to watercolor, I'm not going to force myself to eliminate pencil drawing on every page. However, speed is going to dictate a certain amount of looseness, and that's always good for me.

Because I wasn't satisfied with the paper in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook, I decided to make myself a new sketchbook for June. I used a single sheet of 22" x 30" Arches cold-pressed paper given to me recently by a friend. It's the lightest watercolor weight, 90 pounds, but still substantial. I cut it into smaller sheets that were 10" x 7 1/4", which folded down into 5" x 7 1/4" pages. The one sheet of Arches yielded three signatures of 12 pages each, for a book of 36 single pages, or 18 spreads. I made a traditional sewn binding on linen tapes, with cover boards made of acid-free matboard, covered with Italian marbled paper from my paper stash, added black Canson endpapers, and a spine covered with black leather. 

I wasn't sure how it would work, because I'd never made a book with such heavy paper. The only technical problem was that I didn't sew the signatures quite tightly enough, so even after gluing there is a small gap between them when you open the book to those pages.  But otherwise, it came out well.

The big challenge, I knew, would be to actually USE it. My own inner voice was already saying, "You're going to ruin that beautiful little book!" But I told myself I could make others, and on June 1, the same day I finished the binding, I painted the opening page. 

My goal isn't to do 30 watercolors, necessarily, since I don't have a 60-page book; what I hope to do is to completely fill this sketchbook with sketches and paintings from the area around my studio, which is near the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks. (We'll see what happens -- already it's June 3 and I've only done one painting!) I was shocked when I first put my brush on the Arches paper -- even though I've used hundreds of sheets of it in the past, I had become so used to using the Moleskine paper that the extra "tooth" and receptive surface felt like a wall of resistance, when really the high-quality paper was just begging for more water and paint. I'm not sure what will happen to the book itself when I get this paper really wet -- unlike a block of watercolor paper, the pages will ripple and buckle. But as a teacher once said, "Sometimes you just have to fight with it." At the end of June, I hope I'll have an interesting book full of paintings, and that I will have learned some more things. And you know what? If it's the end of July, that's OK too.