It is such mundane work really. Yet, sometimes, I find it to be SO very fulfilling getting things ready to go out/go back out the door again. For me it is sort of a ritual …putting things right again. Regaining a balance before getting down to the work at hand.  And soon I will be getting some small pieces back from a show.  I will probably need to clean and touch them up too.

So, despite my tendency to let things hang at the edge of my to do list, I liked getting them done.  Sure, I will have to do a few more in a couple of weeks, but now I am ready to throw myself back into the fray.  Those new BIG mylar drawing and series of watermedia panel pieces are just waiting to be worked on. Delicious work indeed.

Drawing and painting, puttering about some at home/in the yard.  Frankly there isn’t much more than that to report.

Well yeah, the painting and drawing is really exciting and I shouldn’t downplay that good piece of news.  And, OK, the weather is cooperating quite nicely for visual research/sketching outside and the house and studio will be getting some much needed electrical upgrades this week.  (Is this the first hint of stage three in the studio renovation!?  Only a little, sideways.  The electrician has to be here anyway for some household work … so I am piggy-backing for an extra $100.00 or so)   Hmm, I guess all of this doesn’t really warrant a ” there isn’t much” remark does it.  Sometimes I am so silly, jaded, or spoiled … maybe all three.

This work is one of my latest.  It is a pretty simple, understated, playful, and hopefully, an elegant little piece.  This one is only 12×12 and done with mixed aqueous media on panel.  The title is “Late Summer’s Humid Sky. Currently it is in a show at Bridgewater College.

I hope you enjoy it.

Tomorrow I am hoping to get in some good photos or drawing done along a creek not far from the house, and maybe a trip to the museum in the afternoon too.  If I get anything good from either of those, I’ll post again soon.

No, not the checkbook, the household income, or even taxes. Not money at all. Just trying to stay balanced while moving forward on multiple tracks. The four main tasks in the studio right now are:  1) starting new watermedia works … mostly on panels but a few on large paper too;  2) making some repairs (to pieces that were a bit marred/scarred during their recent travels or shows;  3) getting started on two new large scale Mylar drawings, and  4) the semi-annual general studio clean up.  (Maybe I will talk a bit more about some of those last three in a later post!)

During the last few weeks it has been much less hot … and frequently less humid too.  With a little less water in the air, the clarity of the light has been intoxicating. A foretaste of Autumn is in the air!  Other times, the humidity returns and cooler nighttime temps create morning fog which rises from the rivers and streams that abound in our hills and mountains.  To be sure the greens still hold sway over the landscape, but subtle changes are becoming more and more visible. The vistas of Fall are not really here yet but the landscape is slowly opening up … summer’s ebb means that some trees and plants are becoming a bit less dense of late. This gives me new glimpses, new possibilities!

So I have been jumping at the chance to plan new works … and to get outside for sketching. The back of the car has frequently had all the “stuff” needed for sketching, drawing, and  even photographing in preparation of new works. Even my briefcase is bristling with sketchbooks and supplies. Balance is hard when I am feeling so visually alive!  My excitement may not be contagious but it has some marvelous consequences. It can mean that the whole painting gets done on site.  Like this one I just did the other day.

I admit that I might take the image to new places or re-use it in a much larger work.  But it is SO enjoyable to work en-plein-air again!

This is how I used to paint ALL the time.

Gathering painting materials; organizing the equipment and materials in the trunk/boot of my car.  Driving out to spots that I had identified earlier, or sometimes just stopping when something caught my eye. Then I would spend about two hours working from the scene before me. Afterwards , I would repack the supplies and start off again or head back to the studio.  Usually I ended up with a piece that would either deserve a little finishing in the studio (cropping a touch or a few minor additions/deletions) … or a piece that was destined for recycling.

Today I got this little sketch done while working with my students from a Watercolor Landscape class.  It is small piece, all in all only 6×8 inches.  It is a good start.  Could end up as a larger work, in one of my watermedia multi-panel works (see one on my website at: http://www.johnahancock.com/paintings.html), or just as a nice little stand alone piece.

This might be me “channeling” the English landscape paintings that I saw in the Tate Watercolour show a bit.  Then again, I probably do that a good bit more than I think I do anyway. Whatever was going on with my painting, it was a deliciously gorgeous day outside after the blustery edge of Irene passed by here in the mountains of Virginia.

  1.  Because there were so many works I had NEVER seen before. I     had seen other works by these artists … but not these pieces. That was such a treat.  The artist that struck me first that fits into this category is Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  His work titled Fetges from 1927 caught me off-guard.  I am not sure that I think it is a show stopper … but its careful and elegant  execution was superb. It was wonderful, not so much as in Matisse’s “art like good arm chair.” Rather , a better analogy would be, that it is like  an excellent bottle of wine, delicious and quietly exhilarating … and, yes, a little intoxicating too.

2.   Artists who are completely new to me. (Hey, I AM an American   and I don’t get to see every English watercolor artist or see every review of English work.)   One such artist Eric Ravilous whose work, The Vale of the White Horse, 1939, felt like a kindred spirit to the paintings of Charles Burchfield … at once romantic and yet completely modern.

3.  While it is not pleasurable to look at the                         devastation and depravities of war, it was good to see an artist use this medium, which is so often mistakenly associated with mundane imagery, pretty pictures, and wimpier children’s illustration (no slight intended to my illustrator daughter there … she uses watercolor and isn’t wimpy at all), to take on a subject such gravity and which is so much the antithesis of those aesthetics. While Eric Taylor’s piece, Human Wreckage at Belsen Concentration Camp, sometimes reminds me a bit to much of Henry Moore’s series done in the Tube during WWII, it is still a wonderful piece.

4.  There are dozens of works that caught my eye or  made me wonder at the technique, the vision, or the ideas of the artist.  One of the best of the 20th century pieces in that vein is Valley and River, Northumberland, 1972, by Edward Burra.  It is quite simple and straight forward; almost childlike in it’s unabashed clarity. Yet something about this piece … with a hillside that seems oddly like it ought to tumble down out of the sky (or at least off the paper) … creates a satisfaction, a sense of rightness or honesty.  Even the rock wall, at first looking almost amateurish (look closely at the blocks), ends up becoming a convincing and sophisticated paint passage.

5.    For 5, 6, 7, & 8 too, I think I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

9   Well, this last one may be a bit off target.  The artist is really not so much a twentieth century painter even though this painting was executed in the early years of the century.  He is the American expatriate who made his living in England and whose brush must have flashed its way all across the page.  It is not my favorite of his watercolors … but there are not any I know that I would not love to see again and again. This piece is no exception.  Of course I am talking about John Singer Sargent’s painting of Miss Wedgewood and Miss Sargent.                                                               

This show, which closes tomorrow on August  21st was exquisite.  It could have been even more of a block buster; a few more very new works might have made it stronger … as would the exclusion of one or two pieces that stretched the watercolour definition a bit to far afield. But all in all. I am still beaming with joy.

If you need any more persuasion consider viewing this Tate video:

http://makingamark.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-watercolour-exhibition-at-tate.html

I expected many items such as the early maps and the small scientific illustration pieces. And, of course, I expected the delicate work of the landscape painters so I was ready for the works by Turner, Cozens, and Cotman. Expecting them didn’t make them any less wonderful though.  But there were several pieces that just stopped me in my tracks.  The first was a small study of an oak leaf by John Ruskin.  I must have spent 20 minutes in front of that small work. I even got into a discussion about it with a fellow painter.  It turned out he was also an art professor; a nice chap from Vancouver.

 Ruskin’s piece didn’t have all that atmospheric quality that I so love  and  admire when I think about English watercolour from the 18th  and  19th century.  But it was SO honest.  The marks created a surface  that  not only looked rough but, on closer inspection were rough.  Not  any  accidentally rough and jarring marks mar the image, these are  so  completely intentional.  It is almost as if Franz Kline or Lucien  Freud  had taken up painting studies of leaves. In fact its directness  made it  seem, at least to my eye, almost American in its approach  and spirit.  Yes, I  know Constable had that intensity of mark making at times as  well …  but never, to my eye at least, to this extent and on such a  small  scale  format.

The next piece that astounded me was one I had never seen before,  not even in reproduction.  It is titled Blue Night, Venice.  Painted by  Herman Melville who I must admit is an artist with which I am less  than familiar.   But this piece is astounding. While it is not very  large, the deep night sky color in the upper two thirds of the painting  is completely seamless … and completely integrated into the  landscape below.  It almost seems to be poured into the composition.  While it is naturalistic at every turn,  it is as magically hypnotic and enigmatic as any surrealistic work by Magritte. The simple elegant quality of  that large area of wash would make most any water media artist go green with envy.  It would astound, and might scare away, many watercolor  students too.  Melville’s work was one of those pieces that stops the public, the amateur, and the professional alike.

Probably the biggest take away I had though was my renewed excitement about the painter named Girtin.  I had almost forgotten about his work. His delicate use of tone, his complexity of design so mark him as a painter of his age.  But the exquisiteness of his work is enough to make me wish I had painted those scenes.  Since leaving the exhibit I have been spending time re-exploring his work.  As I have done so, I have noticed that his coloration and tonal ranges remind me of the still life painting af the American 20th century painter Charles Demuth.  They shared an ability to capture both subtle texture and detail with such seemingly simple means and precise, deft brushwork.

I am so glad I got to this exhibit.  I am even more glad I went alone.  I wallowed decadently in the joy of spending the afternoon lost in this show.

At this point I will stop.  Frankly I need to spend some time digesting the newer works a bit more before I talk about them.  But they were just as astounding as the ones I’ve mentioned so far.

More later on those beautiful pieces!

My daughter, now studying illustration, used to complain that I judged things to harshly. Well, that is what she said as a teenager anyway.  As an art instructor, I always tried to think about the balance between challenging and encouraging my students, between being really humane while being completely honest.

Well this spring, while I was sending some of my work out for being judged for shows around the country …. I was judging again … this time for the North Carolina Governor’s School VISUAL Art auditions and the VMRC show in Virginia. Turn about is fair play.

And it helped that I was getting outside both my studio and my regular classroom settings too.  I had the pleasure of teaching a workshop at an artist’s co-op.  Great students, and so much fun to work with too. Nothing like seeing other folks play/experiment  with your ideas and techniques to stoke the engines of creative desire!

Above & below are some of their collage work.  An exciting spring indeed!

And I have already decided on the direction of the new watermedia on panels series, so I will be doing lots of visual research (sketches & photographs, designing & revising) on that front.  For that series, I also have some fresh ideas (as well as twists on some previous work) that I think will be fantastic to explore.

So it is now time to clean the studio a bit … the autumnal equivalent of spring cleaning I guess. Quickly too, so the dreaded post show lethargy doesn’t set in.

Watch for new pieces, finished or in progress, in the next few days and weeks!

On the exhibition preparation front, I am so glad today is here. A few more hours of trying to get the last piece for the Greer Museum show done (always wanting JUST ONE work to be nearly perfect).  Silly me … will I ever learn?  NOT likely. After one more class this evening, and despite the oncoming windstorm, it is off to West Virginia for the night and into Ohio on Wednesday.

The 20 foot (see the sheetl rolled up top?) piece below was in its last stages yesterday … but the images, textures, and maps are not fully integrated.  Now the last few lines are, maybe, in place. I think it still needs something. I guess I will just have to see it installed to figure that out. But for now, Phew!  I am done. The reception is Thursday evening.