Crazy weekend

I've survived a crazy weekend, lots of choir rehearsals last week and a lovely performance on Saturday night (Darwin Chorale at the CDU theatre) followed by a craft fair at the waterfront yesterday. That was the really crazy bit, it's the build up here, temperatures up around 35 degrees centigrade, humid but no sign of rain - the craft fair became something of an endurance test. I'm amazed and grateful that so many people risked heatstroke to come out and buy their Christmas presents!! It's lovely to have the ambiance of an outdoor event by the sea, but sometimes I think an airconditioned venue would make more sense. I was so hot and grumpy I didn't even go for a stroll around the other stalls...

The last couple of months have been busy, not only with choir and craft fair preparations but with a commission - a lady who bought some of my prints many years ago and then moved away from Darwin, tracked me down online and requested some ginger cat paintings. Luckily this is a subject I was happy to tackle as I have a ginger cat who turns up in my paintings now and again! Here are the three paintings which I sent down south a couple of weeks ago.

Today I've got the day off work to catch up on exciting things like cleaning the bathroom!! and baking cookies and apple crumble for my neglected family!

Hope you had a great weekend, and hope we get some rain soon :)

new lino print cards

Last time I showed you some gouaches I'd done, and here is a lino print that developed from one of those gouaches. It's a two plate print, which I haven't done before, tho I've done lots of reduction prints.

Here they are on printing day looking a bit patchy. When I'm doing a 'serious' print to go under glass, I use proper printing ink and a beautiful holbein roller - not too hard not too soft! But when I'm making prints for cards or collage I use acrylic paint and a foam roller, and treat it more like a stamp. The results are not as clean and dense - but it doesn't matter because I work back into them with coloured pencils and paint, or cut them up and collage them. I think the fact that they're not 'perfect' makes it easier to be playful with them.

Here's a finished card, I'll have some of these at the Saltwater Craft Fair at the waterfront on  23rd Nov!! and hope to add one to my etsy shop this week...

I hope your November is going well, it's the hot and steamy build up here, also luscious mango season, and looking forward to the pineapples ripening in our front yard.

little gouaches

After I finished the acrylic paintings for the garden exhibition, I dug out my gouache paints with the idea of doing regular little post card sized paintings... of course I've only done about half a dozen before other projects have intervened, but I hope to get back to these in the christmas holidays.

this one done in the nick of time for the garden exhibition!

this one inspired a lino cut I'll show you next time.

Coming up next month is the Tactile Arts members show - on the theme of Cyclone Tracy, and the Christmas Craft Fair down at the waterfront, not to mention a customer request I'm working on, so I'm very busy in the studio at the moment!

A Cautionary Tale

Right at the end of August my computer stopped working, it just wouldn't boot up. I thought, never mind, lucky I took out the extended warranty. Little did I realize that it meant I had to send it away to Sydney to get fixed. It took a week for the freight connote to come by post from Sydney to Darwin, a few days for us to get organised with bubble wrap and the right sized box. A week for the computer to be freighted to Sydney, over 3 weeks for it to be fixed, and another week for it to travel back...about 7 weeks in all... next time someone offers me an extended warranty I'll be asking more questions!!

Now I'm back in the 21st century I'm looking forward to catching up on some blog reading :)

I'm sure I have lots of things to show you, but will have to get photos organised...and my brain in gear!! For now here are the lino prints I showed in 'The Magic Garden' exhibition at Tactile Arts at the end of August.

Where are you now and what do you love?

Over on Kat McNally's blog she is hosting August Moon a fortnight of writing prompts. This post is in response to two of those...

The second prompt is what are you doing right now? Maybe to record what you do through the days so you can see patterns emerging, habits, see things you can change maybe. I feel like I need to spend time on this prompt, particularly to keep track of what I do on my 3 days off (I don't feel there's much room to move on my work days...)

It's already made me consider ... We've been on economy drive this year, I've been baking more so that we don't spend so much on biscuits, treats, museli bars that seem to take up half my trolley. BUT if I'm spending prime time Saturday morning baking muffins instead of painting, or catching up with a friend for a cuppa, or dragging the kids out of the house somewhere, is it really the best use of my time? Could I be slotting the baking in somewhere else? It will be interesting to see what else comes up from this exercise.

some of the sketchbooks I have on the go

The third prompt asks what do you love? I love books, I buy poetry books and don't read them, I have such a backlog, I get a poem a day in my inbox and struggle to get to them... I love art supplies, I'm addicted to sketchbooks and journals - there's so much potential in a blank sketchbook or notebook - all the things I might fill it with, the projects I might start, they are hard to resist.

I love music, love going to choir, but don't listen to much at all anymore, the kids have their music on and they drag me to watch some you tube video or other, and my partner plays guitar, practicing a lot at the moment and sounding good, so there is music around me all the time. What I love is to listen to radio national while I'm painting or doing housework, I listen to books and arts daily the music show, science show... anything except politics!! on my old school portable radio.  I love the idea of gardening, but don't do that much, it's something I need to make time for.

What we have around the house is too much stuff!! We're a household of hoarders, and could do with a good cleanup and chuck out, but who's got time for that?

making time

My intention this year was to make more time for art. I cut back my work days to 3 a week... but then life intervened, my workmate left, I worked full time for a couple of months, and now I'm back at my traditional 4 days work with Friday for art and the weekends for family, errands and snatches of art...

To be honest, working 3 days I felt guilty, lazy, flabby. I wasted a lot of time in my head justifying my 'slackness', instead of embracing the time and getting on with it. I'm probably making more art in a busy 3 days than I was in a lazy 4 days.

So nothing has changed, my intention is to live creatively, to give myself time for art - no matter what else is going on, I can spare 10 minutes to sketch or play with gouache or write each day.

This post is in response to the first prompt íntention' - in Kit McNally's August Moon writing challenge, you can find out more about it here.

 

pain and pleasure of painting

There hasn't been much evidence of painting on my blog this year, and I guess that's because I haven't been doing much! I've been really dissatisfied with most of the paintings I've started, and ended up discarding them or painting over them. It got to the point where I was avoiding the studio, going for a walk or baking muffins instead!!

I had a chat about all this with a friend who was visiting Darwin last month. Marita is an amazing painter, her work is exuberant, colouful, wild, playful....and she's prolific!! Her advice was to stop worrying about the end result, to set aside some time each week to paint for the fun of it, just to see what happens, not to censor it before it's started, to play!...

I've tried to hold onto this idea of play as I've started these garden paintings over the last month. I'm still dissatisfied, they fall a long way short of what's in my head! But at least I have something to show you, and a beginning to work on, or develop further in the next painting... and something to show in an exhibition coming up at the end of the month.

These are small 6x6 inch canvases, inspired by things I glimpse in gardens on my walks around the suburbs!
Best wishes to blogland, xxx