Other Loves

I've been blog reading today instead of creating - that and designing my new house and tidying my "studio".
I'm taking Katherine's "thinking is work" to heart. I've a number of ideas going on in my mind and I'm trying to decide how to bring them to fruition.



This bamboo grows in the lower part of the compound at work. I am a keen gardener (job of my dreams would be to be a landscape gardener in the style of Diarmuid Gavin - the Brit readers of this may know him). And bamboo is one of my favourite plants, it is incredibly sculptural and can add structure while retaining an untameable quality. It grows like a weed (preferably plant it in a container sunk into the ground to contain its roots) - and comes in many shapes, colours and sizes. There are two different ones here that I have seen - one that is yellow and has green stripes on it that look like paint dribbles . And this one which grows to about 50ft high and was so fat that I could not encircle one stem with both hands!



Another love of mine is needlework. I have been sewing as long as I have been painting. I remember making dolls clothes when I was 6 using the scraps from a dress my mother made me. I also embroider and have long wanted to learn long and short embroidery. I started this iris on a scrap piece of fabric. Now of course I wish I had done it on something better! Still its good practice. You use several colours of 6 strand embroidery silk and start with 2 strands of one colour and then when you move to the next you use one strand of your first colour and one strand of your second. And then the next shade will be two strands of your second and so it goes until you have a very subtle change of colours like shading with paint.

Chiquitas Cosiendo

10" x 10", oil on canvas

I took the reference photo for this painting at Valle de Bravo in Mexico after we had been to see the Monarch butterfly migration (Unbelievable sight!). These two young girls were dressed in traditional dresses and sitting in the dappled shade of the trees, embroidering. I have to admit that I am not normally drawn to pictures with people in and this would not normally be something that I would paint under any circumstances. But yesterday in the absence of having done any sketching from life, I sketched from this. When I came home from work this evening I was totally exhausted and had to push myself to my easel. Having already produced a tonal drawing I thought I was already halfway to the painting and so I set off on yet another experiment. And here we are. I bore in mind all that I had read lately about distances being thin transparent layers and foreground being thicker opague paint.

The weekend and another promise to myself that if the sun is shining I WILL be painting plein air! I need to dig out some warm socks and jacket because it was decidedly nippy this afternoon and if I had been anywhere else I would have said there was snow in the air. The driver did tell me that there is over a foot of snow where his family lives in the Himalayan foothills.

After lunch my husband and I usually take a stroll around the compound and enjoy the lovely gardens and trees, taking a few minutes from our desks. On several past weekends he has told me about some green parrots with long tails that he has seen in eucalyptus trees near his office and as I had not seen them I began to tease him, telling him he was hallucinating. Today, on our stroll, I saw them from a distance as they flew off, a shimmering emerald green in the sunlight. We have wonderful birds here - there are always kites and hawks flying around (one that stands guard on top of the main building), hoopoes that remind me of my childhood in Kenya, and many other birds that I had not seen before. I've yet to see any wild animals, unless you can count the cows that meaner freely down the main roads!