water, water everywhere

painting cloth has been an interesting and absorbing process though it feels like the more I learn the less I know

water has been my focus for the past two weeks, both still and moving

the sample below is the one that intrigues me the most... it has an atmosphere of both lightness and heaviness to it, in both the air and the water

as if sound can only fall noiselessly back to earth as the air is too oppressive to carry it

a stillness that is absolute

 below, the water is blue and the sky a pale misty blue-grey, as if there was high humidity and the colour has been lost to it

interestingly, I think it also works in the inverse

in the orientation below, the blue is the sky and the water a limpid silver, as if in the evening when the sun is diffused by cloud and the reflections are long

I used a granulating water colour called "forest grey", folded the cloth in half along it's length and painted on the colour in a fairly dilute, watery wash

when it was almost dry, with just a hint of dampness remaining I opened it up and this was how the paint had settled, the gold-brown pigment creating a horizon line all along the fold

of all the cloth I have  painted over the past few months this piece, in it's simplicity, is my favourite

below is a shibori-style piece with the gathers running through the centre length of the cloth, to emulate a river

not a terrific success - it would be better if I had not done such regular rows of shibori but...

turned on it's side it's like tree bark - very like the poplar trees in the yukon with their long grooves or the cottonwoods here

an unexpected but interesting outcome

and last another pale water piece painted with the same forest grey as above bu this time scrunched up a bit so the gold pigment settled into what look like pale cracks 

I've also made two more squares of linen with stitched "ice cracks", ready for whatever might come next

so, the work goes on, the quantity of prepared cloth increases and I need to start thing about how it will all tie together

not sure how, but when in doubt, keep making samples and eventually the ideas will come... trouble is, sampling can only take me so far and I'm keen to take this further now...

considerations

a lot of thinking happening these days

looking, thinking and then looking again

mostly at cloth

below are three pieces of soy milk pigment painted cloth from my first attempt, each interesting to me in their own quirky way

the gold coloured one was laid over some of my pressed flowers and leaves from the Yukon, the mottled one was a mop-up rag used to clean the excess pigment off the vinyl after the cloth had dried and the bluish one at the end was painted from the "dump pot" (the receptacle where the paint dregs leftover from each of the day's painting trials get dumped and a piece of cloth gets painted with them at the end)

I'm thinking of combining them in this way though not in these proportions so some mulling going on about that

below is a piece of linen painted with watercolour paint, crumpled slightly and left to dry in that state

it was a granulating paint so the pigments have settled in an interesting way - this one is pale as I want to print on top of it with a piece of driftwood I found a while back - the bark is still attached and it's cracked and and textured in a most interesting way

I've sealed it with varnish and now just waiting for that to dry - in the meanwhile I'm debating whether to print with paint or ink... and with what colour...

the final considering is focused on the cloth below - a shibori-style very small piece of linen

the colour is rather regular across the surface of the cloth, the pigments didn't settle out along the folds and dips though the cloth has retained the texture of the process

I pressed it with the iron but it wouldn't flatten at all - I suppose it will eventually but I'm thinking now of leaving it as it is

the pattern is like diamonds and the way the light hits the folds emphasizes that

painting cloth, either with soy pigment paint or watercolour is an imprecise process, with each pigment behaving in it's own way, usually because of it's weight

you can make some adjustments for that but there are still enough other variables like the weight of the cloth and the warmth of the day that will have their say in the outcome

and that is usually where the magic is

additions

a bit of studio time over the past two days has resulted in me taking the collages of last week and begin to move them along

the bases I showed had the bare bones elements of the landscape in place; snow/ice, the river, mountains and sky

I've mentioned before how much these old pilings that still line the river at the site of the old shipyards mean to me and as it's likely they will figure prominently throughout this journey of exploration I want to include them in the collages in one way or another

from November 2023

these are works-in-progress with hand-stitch still to come and I'm not sure what else

one thing at a time

for now, some machine stitch and a couple of small pilings

I often "see" the landscape in bands and so here I've made bands of snow/ice, river, mountains and sky

I liked the pilings I added here very much at the time but looking at the photo of them has me wondering about taller ones so I will be investigating that tomorrow

this next one has much taller ones... this collage has been my favourite from the very beginning and I'm trying hard not to let that get in the way of the work but the fear of messing it up is pretty strong

hand-stitching is next for this one as well and then I'll likely sit on it for a while and have a think

the other thing that fascinates me in reference to the river is "the ways"

the image below is a still shot from a short film about the sternwheelers

"the ways" at the shipyards early 20th century

and this next one was taken in almost the same place last year - I doubt these are original boards but they have been in this place since before I was born... old remnants or under boards of a sort perhaps?

April 2023

I'm not using them in these first collages but they will definitely factor in somewhere along the way

in the meanwhile I've been doing some research into the definition and history of the term but I think I might be more interested in them as a metaphor... not sure exactly for what but sending the boats down the ways into the river launched a lot more than they themselves

and so the journey continues...

a little bit a lot

this week I didn't have a lot of studio time but I tried to make good use of the time I had

using a planner has helped me take a more intentional approach to my work - knowing what I want to do makes it possible for me to jump right in to making when I have limited time available - no wondering what to tackle, just jump right in

the work I'm doing lately is all inspired by the Yukon River and below is a piece of linen I painted with pigment-based paint using vine black, indigo, titanium white and new-to-me vivianite, a beautiful pale slightly greyed blue

the cloth is still wet in this image and since it dried it has paled slightly but not much - now to wait the requisite 4 weeks before I can start to use it

it's the only drawback to this technique but it does give me a lot of time to think about what I might like to do with it

from there it was on to collage - a rummage through my box of painted papers yielded a fair number of papers in the colours of a winter landscape of mountains and a river

in amongst the papers were a handful of small torn fragments of a much larger drawing... it was a random abstract style of drawing done last summer using black ink, an indigo inktense block and charcoal done on a very large sheet of cartridge paper

when I had finished the drawing I turned it over and tore it into several large pieces and was then meant to use a few of them as the starting point of a new drawing 

 the fragments were uninspiring though and in frustration I tore them into small pieces and threw them in the garbage... looking down at them a few minutes later I thought a couple of the ones that I could see looked rather interesting so I fished a handful out to play with some day

some day was today

choosing the ones that had large areas of blue I twisted and turned them, switched them around some more,  and came up with something I quite like -  a twisting dark blue river winding through a snowy landscape... bare-limbed trees, a little fence - even the pilings 

just not quite sure which way should be up

version one

and version two

both work quite well I think but I'm leaning toward the first one

after that, a couple of simple collage starts - neither of the next two are finished yet, nor am I convinced these are the final orientations

I do like making these, having the painted papers scattered around my worktable...  trying different combinations and layouts, looking for interesting marks that can tell a story

a little bit of creative time has provided a lot of inspiration

why fight it...

yes, why fight it... I like the sound of that much better than "surrender to it"

I suppose because I really am a "fighter" in many ways, mostly internal and the idea of surrendering just doesn't sit right - more control in the former I think, more of a choice

anyway...

I fight with myself in order to do the things I want to do but I have learned, to quote Michael J. Fox in the movie "The American President" that you don't fight the fights you can win, you fight the fights that are worth fighting

and in a very strange, twisted way that suits me a to a tee...  I've stopped fighting the disappointment in not getting my drawings right the first time but am sticking to the fight to get them right in the end

it's most definitely a fight worth fighting

today I took that to a new level and drew #2 right beneath #1... no need for a new page - easier to have what I don't want right in front of my face

above - inktense pencil

below -a  tinted charcoal pencil

the tinted charcoal pencils by Derwent are my new firm favourite

the colours are perfect and the way they take water is so delightful

I like the inktense but I just don't have the energy for them right now

sporting a cold, I'm too tired to really dig in to figure them out

just not a fight worth fighting right now

it never fails...

this week has been a trial and error sort of week

it never fails that the first thing I try is far from the mark but I find I can usually end up with what I'm after if I jut stick with it long enough - the work shown here is most definitely a product of that kind of determination

first it was getting the colours in the photograph the way I wanted them

the day I took this image was a fairly dark day, the sun low on the horizon as it is in the Yukon in winter; unfortunately that made the colours come out much bluer than they actually were - pretty, but not what I had seen, nor wanted to work with

careful editing brought back the soft and silvery greys, the sooty blacks and the yellow gleam of sunlight on water

my first drawing was over-worked, most especially the water

to break free of trying to capture every single detail I did two timed drawings - the upper one was done in 4 minutes, the lower, 2

they may not look much different but in the lower one,  the crack in the ice at the base of the pilings is quieter in line and the colours were literally dashed on the pilings in the final seconds

painting trials were next, with watercolour and ink

three very large sheets of cartridge paper later I had a few crops to work with

it's so interesting to me that when I have a pencil in my hand I labour over every single line yet the minute I pick up a brush I am slapping paint on any which way I can, usually making a big mess of everything - with drawings I have to set aside the first effort aside and try to speed things up whereas with paintings I have to do the exact opposite

what the heck?

below is the third try for the pilings and I really can't quite believe I did it

it astonishes me how quick random marks and rubbings can translate so easily into 100 years of weathering

another section of the large sheet was cropped down and folded into a little book

the front cover below is perfect for that land of ice and snow, mountains and rivers, and again, though I didn't purposefully try to draw Grey Mountain, the image below could probably not be more accurate

one of the pages inside

so pleased with these, both the results and the effort

I just need to remember "draw fast, paint slow"

wooden sidewalks

one of my earliest memories is of playing on the wooden sidewalk in front our house

it was early summer, and the tree that grew right beside it was fully in leaf but only just

I think why I remember this so well even though I was only three years old is because the scent of the leaves was very strong,  a sap-green smell that filled the air and only seemed to stronger as the sun shone on

sitting underneath it, the branches concealing me, it was a lovely home for me and my dolls, the leaves casting shadows on the soft, smooth boards which had become "beds"... it was a charming little hideaway. and I played there for a long time before my mom came looking for me

several years ago I came upon a number of photos of my dad taken at about the same age, many of them of him on various different wooden sidewalks all around Whitehorse - sometime around 1941-1942 I think

and so an idea started brewing...

this week I made an attempt at achieving something that would look like an old and ragged wooden sidewalk using cloth and earth pigment paint

two versions, one with small boards, the other, a shorter version but on larger scale (width, not length)

below is the top of the smaller version

and then the underneath

the topside of the larger scale

and again the underneath

in both cases I prefer the underneath sides; the boards are well defined and the cloth, though still looking a little gritty is much smoother and more even than the topside

it's usually the other way around but one of the pigments I used doesn't like to mix well with others nor does it like to sink

the fact that you often get to choose between which side you prefer is one of the side benefits of this technique 

the drawback...?

I have to wait four weeks before I can start to take these further

on the other hand, that gives me a lot of time to ponder what "next" might be - as yet, there is no plan whatsoever

this was just a kind of fact-finding mission to see if it would work and now that I know I can do it I need to think about what comes next

in the meanwhile I want to have another go at it but this time on a larger piece of cloth

and so the journey continues, one board at a time