Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 63

Grassy Slope with Rocks

Detail from an as-yet-unfinished painting from this weekend. It's Saturday at 5:45 and I'm still in the studio on the warmest day yet this year - I need to get out of here! Heading to my garden...

Ruahines

This is something I've been working on for the past few days, inspired by some photographs taken in the Ruahine Range (New Zealand) by my longtime blog friend Robb Kloss, who loves these mountains with his whole heart and writes beautifully about his treks there on his blog, Musings from Aotearoa. I asked him if I could work with his photos and he said sure. This whole painting is too greenish-yellow, and I may go back and put an olive-ochre glaze on it, but as a further experiment in using acrylics, I learned a lot and am pleased with how it went this week.

Here's a detail, approximately actual size:

 

And here's an earlier stage of the painting, which makes me want to go back and try the scene in watercolors:

Bon week-end!

 

Related articles

Experiments in Acrylic
Things we miss

Forsythia

It's almost warm this afternoon, but I had to wear my leather gloves, a headband, a fleece jacket and heavy shell parka this mornign while riding to work. The forsythia is in full bloom now in Montreal, and I saw a magnolia flowering in one of the alleys yesterday, looking like a flock of white birds fluttering on bare branches. However, it's still pretty grim otherwise. A tulip here and there, and some crocuses and daffodils bedraggled by rain. I'm sure spring will arrive eventually...she seems to have taken a detour somewhere on her way up the east coast. If you see her, please send her this way!

 

The Puzzling Peter Doig

Yesterday was the final day of a large exhibition at the Montreal Musee des Beaux Arts of the works of Scottish painter Peter Doig, who grew up in Montreal and currently lives in Trinidad. I finally got myself there, in-between services at the cathedral. The show focusses primarily on his recent work, done after his return to Trinidad where he's lived since 2002. Doig is a highly successful contemporary painter; in 2007 the sale of one of his paintings for 11.3 million set a record, at the time, for a living European artist.

There was a lot to like in this show, though I admit that I spent a good deal of it feeling puzzled. There were a number of paintings I didn't like at all - or didn't get, perhaps -- and what I felt were his strongest works seemed either anomalous, or maybe had been de-emphasized by the curators.

Doig's best-known works seem to be huge canvases like this one, or the first painting above, set in Trinidad, where he now lives. The paintings incorporate staining techniques, drips, brushwork, and thick impasto, as well as neon or metallic paints on occasion, to create vibrant, interesting surfaces. He's a remarkable colorist, though some of his choices appeal more to me than others. The introductory notes to the exhibition put him in the tradition of Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Bonnard - a short list that includes three of my favorite painters. It would be a stretch for me to put him in that same class, but it was a show well worth seeing.

Rothko was also mentioned. There were two enormous paintings, far more abstract than the others, that I liked very much. This one in particular was far more mystical than the other works, and gorgeous in color and surface. I was intrigued that it consistently drew the largest crowd, and the most people sitting or standing in front of it for long periods.

Doig grew up in Montreal, and Canadian scenes feature in his earlier work. This painting, "Spearfishermen," is set in Trinidad, but it reminded me very much of some Inuit works I've seen - perhaps it's the hooded figure in yellow in the canoe, plus the spear. I wondered if there is a connection for Doig.

One of my favorite pieces was this etching, titled Corbeaux (Raven). It was stuck in the lower right corner of a wall of small works in the last room -- barely noticeable -- but it had an undeniable power for me, also akin to some Inuit prints.

I was surprised, later, to find a related painting in the museum's own permanent collection, as I walked through the building on my way out.

Along with the crows, my favorite work in the show was this portrait -- also small and relegated to a corner. It's so beautifully and freely painted, and the color palette he uses is subtle and phenomenal -- my photo (all these were taken with my phone) barely does it justice.

The show's title is "Nulle Terre Etrangere" (No Foreign Lands) and the accompanying text states that Doig, who has lived in many places, no longer considers that there are "strange places," merely that the traveler is the one who moves between places of equal weightiness and identity. Many of the works are Gauguin-inspired and dreamlike, showing a ghostly artist within a tropical scene, or figures in boats, far away from an island in the distance. The comparison between these artists is inevitable, and holds up, though in the paintings where Doig tries to distance himself - such as a geometric ping-pong scene without tropical reference - I think he's less successful. I haven't read anything yet about the artist's explanations of his work, and I stayed away from curatorial essays, wanting to experience the works without interpretation. What I found myself responding to the most seemed to be either simple, monumental images of people or animals, or the most abstract paintings -- probably not surprising, given my preferences in art.

After Montreal, the show will travel to the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, its only other destination. Do visit the museum's site to see more and better reproductions of the works.

 

Pomegranate Season

Art of a different sort: the weather is still pretty miserable here, so we've been consoling ourselves with cooking. There are beautiful pomegranates in the stores right now, so the other night we decided to make a few recipes from Plenty, a vegetarian cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi that our friend Janet recently lent us. (We've got his Jerusalem cookbook and have enjoyed it a lot.) The pictures here are from the cover recipe - baked eggplants with pomegranate garnish.

Above, J. is using the author's technique for seeing the pomegranate - you basically hit it with a blunt instrument on the outsdie to loosen the seed chambers, and then the seeds just fall out. It's so much easier than any other way we've tried - you can see at the bottom how cleanly the fruit empties.

Here are the baked eggplants, broiled for a few minutes to brown them on top. You score them and brush them with oil and bake for a fairly long time; we used small Italian eggplants, not the big kind.

And the finished dish. The sauce is buttermilk whisked with Greek yogurt, sprinkled with zaatar. J. added some toasted walnuts; we didn't have the thyme sprigs that were called for. It was delicious anyway -- as our Iranian friends would say, nush-e jan! (Bon appetit -- or literally, "food of life.")

Learning from botched attempts

 So, to continue experimenting with the acrylics, I've been working on an Icelandic landscape. Above you can see the initial lay-in, rather watercolorish, on a toned background. Should have stopped right there!

The image above shows the end of the second session, and already I was losing it: the background is nice, but the foreground is getting too detailed, too overworked, too harshly contrasty.

Yikes. It's like two separate paintings! So I stopped here. One option would be to back now and paint over the whole bottom half of the painting - acrylics, being forgiving, will allow that. But when I got out some cropping corners and took a closer look, I saw that what's really needed is a pair of scissors -- the painting is really at the top of the page:

This is close to actual size - about 11 inches wide, and although the screen doesn't show the color or resolve the surface detail as well as in real life, it's pretty close. This is much closer to the direction I want to go in, and this failed painting has shown me a lot -- so it was well worth the effort.

Have a good weekend, everyone! The sun is actually shining here, so I hope to spend some of it outdoors.

Experiments in Acrylic

 

This is an imaginary landscape painted in acrylics on paper, using washes, glazing, layering, and sgraffito. I was surprised and happy about how much texture and surface interest I was able to achieve -- I've always had a bit of a bias against acrylics but there's a lot going on here that would be impossible to achieve in watercolor or gouache. I've used some of the same techniques in large mixed-media calligraphy pieces in the past.

Hadn't intended to start a renewed drawing-a-day practice but it seems like that's happening on its own. No promises to keep that up, however. I'll be writing some regular posts too, pretty soon, but thought you might like to follow along with what's happening in the studio. Lots of indoors time here in Montreal, still. It's a bit warmer but grey and rainy. The forsythia has bloomed, though, in spite of it all!

 

Related articles

Alpha and Omega

Still Life with Succulents and Shells

This one probably says something about my state of mind at the time - the focus on detail in one area, surrounded by simple outlines of other things.

 

Oval Things

Still life with mangoes and avocados.

This is a drawing that wants to be a painting. The two sides of this sketch are shown below; the version at the top of the page has been cropped as the composition might be in a painting. I was all excited about the ovoid shapes of the atulfo mangoes which cut large interesting shapes out of the busy patterning; the eggs and avocados along with the other ovals on the table; and also by the colors which you can't see here: the yellow mangoes, the deep brownish-green avocadoes on an irregular dark blue dish, and the brown/terracotta Mexican bowls on the mustard-yellow Mexican cloth, contrasted with the brilliant blues of the highly-decorated Moroccan plate at the left. The eggs (dyed red and pink for Easter) could be virtually "re-dyed" in a painting, either yellow or blue. The mango at left might want to come down in the frame and be cropped off, and I'd consider putting another one on the patterned blue plate.

 

Mostly, it feels really good to be drawing again.

Orchids

A detail of last night's sketch. I always enjoy zooming and cropping in Photoshop. It works the same way as physical cropping corners, allowing me to find and consider the better parts of the work. Turning the drawing upside down and sideways is good too. Here I'm mainly happy with the liveliness of the line, especially in the orchid at the bottom left, above.

Here's the whole thing:

 I also love the combination of this particular orange and deep blue in the center here -- it does nothing for this painting, in fact the whole foreground would be better in cool tones, but it's something to remember for another time.