Shades of Autumn

Benefits of being stalled in Washington is getting to experience autumn for the first time in several years. Amazing colours everywhere (enhanced by great sunglasses!) - dark reds, dusky pinks, brilliant oranges, acid yellows, purples and many shades of green from lime to darkest evergreens.

York II

I love reflections in still water, slight ripples disturbing the reflections so they just shimmer.

Crazy Mix

Nothing like painting ice-cream to make you paint fast!! I think someone on the outside looking in would have been rather amused by my running up and down stairs with a choc-ice. I painted a bit then took it back down to the freezer while I worked a bit more on building up the painting, then running back downstairs to pick up my model and work for another few minutes before having to return it to the freezer. I gave up after the third time and just ate the it!

A quick pastel - its hard to do anything outside because of the security situation here. But the golden light on the changing leaves just wouldn't be ignored. I'm really not at ease doing anything like this so it took a concentrated effort to try and pull this together.

I've been looking at the Fauvist group of artists in my research on use of colour and have found a lot of what Michael Newberry had talked to me about - using cool colours for distant objects to push them back. So for example - a red object in the distance to use magentas and more blue reds. Matisse is a master of colour and uses its hue to move objects in space as does Derain. I was delighted to find that Dufy, who is a favourite of mine (such happy, cheerful paintings!, was also a fauvist. What a great art movement.

Deborah Ross kindly commented on my blog and so I went to take a look at hers and she was talking about a poem she had read but then couldn't find. I thought I would have a look and see if I could find it and came across this - not sure if it was what she was looking for but it realy spoke to me..... I also found through Deborah's blog the Sketchbook Project which has wonderful things going on. I wish I had found this sooner as I would love to have taken part in the latest project but with mailing times to and from here it would leave me less than a month to fill up and entire sketchbook and I am not sure I could do that! Going to keep an eye on this and maybe join in something else.

"From the start, From my Heart, That's really art!"
Randy Vanlandingham

Colour

I recently made a list of my favourite artists and wrote down why I liked their work - the artists are many and varied in style, Monet, Bonnard, Seurat, Macke, Thiebaud, Diebenkorn, Hopper, Rothko to name a few. The predominant theme that ran through my little discourse was colour. It struck me as strange that something that I find so difficult myself, is what I love in other's work. I discussed this with Michael Newberry in my mentor session last night and decided that I need to use colour more as a concept within my work. So I have gone back to revisit the cotton reels as they are nicely brightly coloured and will use these as a base for a few more small works, experimenting with colour in seeing how it positions itself in space according to its hue and saturation.

Today I went to a bazaar of local handicrafts which was very interesting. Wonderful sight of hundreds of Persian, Afghani and Pakistani rugs spread over the grass. The majority of the carpets are reds and blues but amidst them there was one that stood out in the crowd (no I didn't buy it)- it was a Tabriz carpet from North-Western Iran, 80% silk, 20% wool. In each of the four directions that you could look at it, it took on different colours. One way it was the most delicate pale steely blue, in the opposite direction it was apricot, from one side it was pale silvery and the final side a deep goldy colour - just unbelievable. The tufts were very fine - about 800 knots to the square inch. The central panel was a snake design, interwoven snake-like emblems, very different from any other rugs I have seen. And the tufts were cut at different lengths in the pattern so there was the added textural differences. Just absolutely beautiful.

I may not have bought that, but I did buy three copper pots, one large with a brass base, rather rustic, the middle sized is engraved all over the outer surface and is slightly over an 1/8th of an inch thick and the smallest one was unpolished - a sort of old pewter colour. I love the warmth of the colour of copper.

It is rare for me to be out in the middle of the day - during the week I would be at work and on the weekend at home, so it was quite a novelty to be outside those two places. Now we are in late autumn it is dark in the morning when we leave for work and nearly dark when we get home so I have missed seeing how the landscape is changing with the coming of winter. The colours are wonderful, leaves are varied from a deep golden yellow, to a more acid yellow, burnished coppery pinks to deep apricot, and the most wonderful deep rosey reds. I'd forgotten how wonderful autumn can be!