I’m quoting The Hardly Boys film by William Wegman here. But that feels appropo on days like these, when one might feel compelled to paint the same scene over and over and over in some attempt to get it right. Here they are:
One place I have been lately, is in my studio, a place where I never ever felt that I could possibly spend enough time. My studio is chock full of art supplies, paper, unfinished projects, etc., and I had a running joke with myself that if I were ever locked inside, I could not possibly use up all the supplies I had. Whoever would have guessed that this would more or less come to pass?
So I set out to try and try and at least use up the watercolor paper I had on hand, and started painting really quick gestural wet-on-wet landscapes, using pen, gouache, Daler-Rowney acrylic ink, and India ink. My husband calls them “scratch paintings.”
Sometimes I work from my photos, and sometimes I page through photos on Flickr, painting places where I have never physically been, but now at least have virtually been, thanks to the generosity of many fine photographers.
While I have been painting, I have been listening to Dorothy Dunnet’s The Lymond Chronicles (my second time through this series), which has been incredibly transporting. As a result, I have knocked out about a zillion of these things, and feel compelled to keep going, even though I am starting to feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, except that instead of boxes of typewritten pages, I have boxes of watercolor paintings.
I recently sat at my dining room table and just knocked out a bunch of these little paintings, just for the sake of practice. Sometimes I get into a kind of groove and out of maybe 16 sketches, came up with a few that I like. The are a manifestation of wanderlust, which I more or less constantly have.
In September 2014, my family and I traveled to Newfoundland, the homeland of my father’s side of the family. It was a fantastic trip. We went out to a gannet reserve at Cape St. Mary’s, on a particularly windy day. My brother is a birder, so he was on a quest to see the gannet rookery, and it was quite a marvelous place.
This is from a photo that I took on the walk out. The actual painting is 18″ x 24″ and the photo is not really doing it justice. I gave the painting to my brother for Christmas, though there’s not a bird in sight. (They are all down at the rookery.)