Change of Plans

Clearly, my inner artist has been growing more confident with my time spent in studio this summer and she was not to be denied LOL. I have a lot of available space in my bedroom and so with a little shift in layout, the winter studio has been set up!

Took down the california shutters on the big window, plunked my table right in front, bought some flexible floor lamps with daylight bulbs in them, rearranged the furniture and we're good to go. Touille, my calico longhair aka the boss, was a little unsure with all of this activity but has given her stamp of approval now that the dust has settled. And she's behaving herself as far as painting etiquette goes, though anyone familiar with cats knows that could change at a moment's notice. For now she gets to come and go freely when I'm painting. 

With the change in location and season I'm already noticing some differences in my practice. Winter is just around the corner and with ever diminishing light a reality, I'm finding late morning or early afternoon is usually when I'm drawn to create. But every now and then I find myself called back in the evening, to play around some more. And I like that!

New Season

Fall is definitely upon us! Cooler temperatures for the past few weeks have forced induced me to alter my studio time. No longer can I head out there first thing in the morning - well I can but I'm not a happy camper being out there LOL. 

I do have a space heater but that necessitates me closing the garage doors in order to be effective, and I'm loathe to give up the light just yet. So I am starting to make a plan for when I finally have to close my little haven down and relocate inside. A list, because I love lists, of things such as what art supplies need to be stored indoors (mostly just paint and mediums) and what kind of art do I want to make until I can get back into my studio. I know in my head it makes perfect sense to spend the winter working on my ancestry, and I'm sure I'll embrace that once again when it's time but the painter in me isn't ready to give up the reins just yet to my more pragmatic side!

In the meantime, here's a sampling of some of the pieces I've worked on since my last posting. Oddly enough, I've gotten back to my watercolour roots in recent weeks. Wasn't expecting that but I'm delighted that it happened. It's also got me dreaming of working on full sheets of paper which is huge, both physically and philosophically for me. Scary and exciting all at the same time!

Siddall Road (c) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart
acrylic on 12 x 12 in canvas panel

Cosmic Duet (c) Kate and Susan Langdon
mixed media on 12 x 16 in paper

Southwest (c) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart
watercolour on 12 x 16 in CP paper

My Second Process Post

I do love how something can be nothing until all of a sudden it isn't anymore. The following piece started off with no specific intention other than waiting for it to tell me what it wanted to be - and apparently that was some post apocalyptic hell hole! Definitely not on my mind at the beginning LOL. 

So it started with some mark making with charcoal on paper.

Then I added some paint in an analogous scheme of predominantly yellow with some blue and green added.

Wasn't really excited about that so I threw in some white spotches for some relief and smeared some of them around.

Not sure where to go from here so I put it aside for a day or two to 'ponder'. Of course, that led me to the other day when I decided it was the day to make a bold move and transparent orange was on my palette LOL. So first I turned it upside down, decided on a high horizon line and glazed the top half. All of a sudden there was excitement! 

I loved that you could so clearly see the previous layers but in a whole new way. So I wanted to glaze the lower half with blue. I chose prussian blue rather than the previously used phthalo blue which gave it the much darker look. This immediately made me think of the wildfires we have been seeing in the news with sadly increasing regularity. Hellhole was the first name that came to mind but I'm not sure if that will stay its name, yet.

Hellhole - mixed media 11 x 15 inches on paper
(c) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart

Thoughts from the Studio

Still relishing my new studio space - it's a rare day indeed when I'm not out there for at least the better part of the morning. What I like best is that I seem to have successfully granted myself permission to play and learn while I create. Gone is the entirely self imposed expectation that everything I do must be 'good' - something, that if I chose to show other people, would not be embarrassing to me. It's been a long battle, that one, but so freeing to have achieved!

To set the stage, I usually have 3 or 4 pieces on the go at once, in varying stages of 'doneness'. This allows me to keep the creative flow going while I'm waiting for a layer to dry - yes, patience is a struggle and this really helps LOL.  I had already decided that yesterday was the right time for making 'the bold move' a la Tara Leaver's wise words. Then I decided to work with a colour that I don't normally use - a confident, bold orange created by mixing primary magenta with hansa yellow medium. 

I painted a ground of bright aqua green mixed with a smidge of phthalo blue. On this I outlined several circles of varying sizes that would then be painted orange. Of course, the orange over the aqua background dulled the colour down considerably so I needed to paint the circles white before they could be orange. Here the large circle is orange on top of aqua whereas the two smaller ones were painted white first, then orange. Not sure yet where this will end up!

While I was waiting for layers to dry I started eyeing some of the other pieces I had on the go and decided to spread the orange to them as well. Because this mixture is quite transparent, it acts more like a glaze enhancing the underlying work. It certainly breathed new life into one piece and showed potential for a whole new direction in another. I think I'll save that for another post though as this one has gone on long enough and it's time to head to the studio!

Update: threw some more paint at it and have left it here for now.

Major Change - New Studio Space

I've long held to the nagging suspicion that I was getting in my own way creatively - that the art within me was constrained by the space I had restricted myself to work in. So I decided to put myself to the test this spring. 

After researching as many viable options as I could think of I decided to move my art space from my desk in the front room out to the unused half of our garage. Bought an inexpensive rug to protect the concrete from spilled paint, had my favourite carpenter hang a sheet of painted plywood (with an added on ledge) on the wall, bought a portable 6 ft table and started moving my art supplies out there. A small investment in time and money to see whether or not I had been fooling myself.

 Best decision, Sue! I'm now 6 weeks into my new studio and have learned and played and created more over that time than I have in the previous 2 years. I love the physical 'stepping out' into my work space. I've already added some additional mobile storage and will plan on investing in a small portable heater when the time comes so that I can extend my studio time as late into the fall as possible. Also a rolling desk chair so the upholstered Queen Anne can be retired to the basement once again!

Between the side window and open doors, I'm happy with the amount of light. With the surrounding trees the studio stayed comfortable even through this most recent heat wave. 

The Pitfalls of Green Tape

I remember taking a watercolour workshop a number of years ago, in which the instructor made an adamant stipulation that we not bring coloured painter's tape to class - the standard masking tape or white tape was fine, but there was no tolerance for blue or green or any other colour of tape. At the time I hadn't been painting all that long so this struck me as a rather odd, individual quirk of this particular artist but hey, one that was easy enough to follow. As my painting experience has grown over the years, I have come to see the wisdom of his words but that lesson really hit home for me this week. 

I had been working on another free form piece that started out with purple as the dominant colour. White tape had been added to my list of needed supplies - primarily hoping for better adhesion and hence masking, than the green painter's tape I had been using up from my stash - but in setting this piece up I had used the green.

Once again my plan was to let the art dictate to me what to do, admittedly influenced by my purchase of the new-to-me phthalo turquoise. After working over several days, it just wasn't coming together and I finally decided to write off the loss and abandon it to my orphan drawer. 

But first, I had to strip the tape off. And wow, I was not prepared for just how much of a difference that made to the look. It's not the best thing I've ever done but neither is it the hot, unsalvageable mess I thought it was LOL. So, hats off to Joe F. and no more coloured tape for me!

Purple Koolaid (C) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart
mixed media and collage on 11 x 15 watercolour paper

My scanner cannot accommodate the width of this piece so there's a portion of the two smaller pieces missing from the right edge. I set this up with the intention of it being an all in one tryptych ie one frame for three complementary paintings, however I don't have the technical capability/tools to make that happen for posting here. Hell, I'm just happy when I can get the image to sit where I want it to LOL. 

Threadbare - a process post

This will be my first process post - providing I can get the blog to cooperate when I post the images, and that's a big IF. Well, I'm sure it has more to do with my abilities than the workings of the blog template LOL.

I have been challenging myself in recent days to just start a piece and let it dictate where it goes until the voice inside finally says 'it's done'. The only idea I have in the beginning is usually the colour palette I start out with. Over the past couple of weeks that has been complimentary colours - predominantly red with accents of green/blue etc. The piece here was to use an analagous scheme of blues, greens and greys. (My apologies for the poor lighting and the neon green painter's tape - it was what I had on hand.)

So I began with some scribbling of several shades of blue and green watercolour crayons and then added a scribble of charcoal to connect these areas. It was at this point that potential names for the piece came to me - you can see it there in the upper right hand on the tape - threadbare I or tapestry I. 

When I added water and pushed the colour around the page it faded much more than I expected it to. Up until now I had been using my Inktense blocks and this was my first run with watercolour crayons, so while it surprised me I was not unhappy with it and I learned something, always a bonus!

The next day, I decided to do something bold and declarative to see where my muse would take me. I drew in the bold black square with my extra wide Sharpie marker. Well, that was certainly an in your face bit of mark making LOL. I left a sliver of open space underneath which comes into play in the next stage. The square was coloured with cobalt green crayon and then wet and brushed into place. At this point some spattering of that same colour happened intentionally.

By this point, the green tape was a distraction and I was pretty sure I was done with my outside edges so I removed it. The piece needed something else to give it life so in comes pyrrole red to play with the teal. It joined the spattering crowd as well as the blob and the sliver under the square. My brain just laughs at all the technical jargon here. 

I was done for the day, but not sure the piece was done so I did what has always worked well for me and walked away. I just love how refreshing and helpful that approach is to really clarify what is missing. When I looked at it first thing the next morning I knew the weight of the black marker lines was waaaaay too heavy, so that needed to be fixed. I painted over most of the square with gesso, thinning the border lines to about half their previous width, then added the cobalt green back in. Much happier!

Threadbare (C) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart
Mixed media on 12 x 16 watercolour paper

By this point I'd decided to name it Threadbare and that led me to the final decision to paint a line of stitching down the right hand edge of the big square. Seeing it here, it really needs the white border around it but my scanner isn't big enough to capture that

******************

If this post were a dvd it would have a blooper reel LOL. Because I had used charcoal to draw the initial, thread like lines, I needed to 'fix' it in place so I decided to cover the entire piece with matte medium. I knew it would give a bit of fuzziness to the charcoal itself and I liked that idea. What I hadn't counted on was it smearing the ink of my signature really badly, so bad. I didn't want to abandon the piece so after letting it dry thoroughly I brought out the gesso again, covered the old signature up and redid that section again with much better results this time around. Another lesson learned on my journey as an artist LOL. 

Bold Colours for Grey Days

To say November weather this year was dull at best and outright gloomy at worst is being much too kind! It has definitely had an effect on my work though. I mean if I can't have colour in real life I can create my own. And I did.

Both started with a random charcoal scribble with only the dominant colour predetermined ahead of time. It was free wheeling from there LOL. My muse has taken to waking me in the middle of the night, much to my chagrin, with ideas for what to do next. It's better than not hearing from her at all though

Red- mixed media 8x8 on watercolour paper
(C) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart

Blue - mixed media 8x8 on watercolour paper
(C) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart

From this to That

Almost a month ago, I started an experiment. 

I wanted to do a painting starting from a given reference but then only use it as a jumping off point with no expectation of where the journey would end. Each day I would sit down with it and just go with whatever struck my fancy. 

To begin, I was inspired by an image that is part of Windows 10 library of images that appear rotationally on my lockscreen. It is of an iconic tree, in a lake near the mountains in New Zealand. I wasn't wedded to my rendering of it and that was tremendously freeing for me.

I started with charcoal and added colour with Inktense blocks on 12 x 16 Arches HP paper. The second day involved throwing a lot of gesso around as a veil, then adding back some random marks with charcoal. Some days I would work on it for only 15 minutes or so, other days there would be a lot more contemplation involved. I worked on it daily for about a week and then life intervened and my creative voice went quiet for a spell. 

When I took it up again, I still had no idea where it would end up but distance told me it needed some life put into it and so I glazed the whole thing with green gold and that really seemed to bring things into focus. It still took a few more days but then suddenly and very quietly I knew it was finished. I've never felt more like an artist than I did in that exact moment. 

I won't bore you with the in between and quite frankly ugly bits but here is the beginning and the end. I will definitely be doing this again.

"Underneath a Tree"  mixed media on 12 x 16 HP paper
(C) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart

Autumn is Upon Us

The calendar may say Fall but the weather certainly hasn't quite gotten the message yet. We've had cold weather to the point that I've turned my fireplace on and the yearly maintenance for the furnace has been done, but the humidity right now outside is reading midsummer! Only one more day to go and then things will cool off to whatever is supposed to pass for normal now.

Okay, on to the art! Experimentation is definitely where my head is at these days. After long resisting the idea of an art journal - a physical one - I have set one up. It's not my go to place by any means but I think I can make it work for me. (I won't bore you here with the details of why I've resisted this for so long because well, it's just flat out boring)

I thought long and hard a couple months back about taking Tara Leaver's Abstractify course but the timing didn't work out as my August was filled with other things. I decided when she offered it again in the new year then I would sign up*. BUT this month I am doing her Expressive Charcoal online course. I can't say enough fantastic things about her approach to all of this - she's definitely a kindred spirit. 

Anyway, here is a sampling of some of the things I've done so far. They're from my phone so the lighting is horrible, apologies.  The bottom two are self explanatory but the top one is part of the magic! It started as an exercise: on a big sheet of cheap paper, close your eyes and draw a favourite place. That was a no brainer for me so I drew the big perennial garden on the far side of the pond and circled around to do the outline of the house. Took a lot of imagination to see it when I opened my eyes LOL.

Next step, cut the paper in two sections and tape it back together in an interesting way.Now, start adding lines, marks, shapes whatever your brain tells you to. Thick lines, thin ones, smudging wherever you feel like. Just play with it. Now cut it again and retape it. And this is what I ended up with. I see an abstract headless nude figure! What I don't see is any evidence of a pond, garden or house LOL and that is the beauty of it. It delights me so much I think I"m going to frame it!

* note to self. Don't forget!