Cath Sheard Art

Category: Uncategorized

  • Anyone for half a pear?

    Michelle Ward’s GPP Street Team Crusade No 28 is about “portion control” – using part of an image to create interest and mystery. Last month we were challenged to really explore a shape, I chose the pear. You can see some of the images I created here, here and here. I have kept using last month’s PEAR shape, and have been making new images on watercolour postcards. This way, I get to do the Crusade, and keep up my stock of postcards for sending off quick notes to people. Win win! For these three I used acrylics, gesso and Stazon ink pads, acrylic stamps and handcut stencils and masks.

  • Pears for charity

    This pear painting, inspired by Michelle Wards Crusades, is now being exhibited in Auckland at the Bruce Mason Centre as part of the LIFE Exhibition and Shave for a Cure. A generous portion of all sales from the exhibition will go to the Leukaemia and Blood Foundation of NZ.

    Tomorrow night some donated paintings are being auctioned in a gala event. Some of the artists are even having their heads shaved for sponsorship money. How brave is that? I was especially keen to support this event because when my cousin Dean and I were 14, he died of leukaemia. The sale of my pear painting is one small way I can help stop that happening to someone else.pear-007

  • New Mt Egmont painting – looking at the values

    This week I have four days off work, and I intend spending the whole time painting. I have to get some big works done for an exhibition in Auckland. BUT this coming Friday is Waitangi Day. It’s the day New Zealand celebrates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the document that more than 150 years ago was signed between Maori and the Crown detailing how this land would be in the future. It gives Maori equal rights in law – amazing for a colony in the 1800s – and probably one of the reasons New Zealand has, in the main anyway, thrived as a bi-cultural society.

    This Friday my town, Patea, celebrates with an event called Paepae in the Park. It’s a massive day with music, food stalls, speeches – all celebrating our diverse community (Patea has a high percentage of Maori, as has this area generally). Businesses are closed but to support the day I open the library, which is next to the park where the event is held. A top NZ band, Katchafire, is playing this year, and we expect about 5,000 people to attend. The library has disabled access toilets, and offers people time out in the shade and quiet. I also think it is good for the library, and me as library manager, to be seen to be involved in events within the community. Last year the event did not go ahead because of a massive industrial fire in town on the day. The year before I had more than 700 people through the doors on the day – amazing, because at that stage our usual weekly footprint count was only 500.egmont-and-cowsWhat does that have to do with painting? Well — I am going to do some small, 4×4 or 6×6, acrylic paintings of Mt Egmont to display – and hopefully sell – in the library. The Mountain (Maunga) is very important to local Maori. When they have been away form the area, seeing Mt Egmont signals that they are ‘home’. So I have cropped a favorite photo of the mountain to square-ish, and turned it to gray-scale to make  the values more obvious. And tomorrow  head into my art room to get messy. Love it.

  • Playing with acrylic & mediums: Golden Landscape 7

    I have been working on some small 4×4″ canvas again, in a continuing series, this time using more mediums and a high gloss resin-type glaze over the top. The series alludes to, but does not replicate, the land I see around me here on the West Coast of New Zealand. The strong hot colours refer to the weather we are having at the moment – really hot and quite dry. I love working in this format; I can put 4 or 6 canvas on my desk and work on all of them at once, so that there is a relationship between them.

    I use mainly Golden products – in this case I used light modeling paste, pumice gel, garnet gel, gesso, and a then gloss glazing medium.  The colour is all Golden Fluid acrylics – I buy the small bottles and just love them. When I first get them I smear some of the colour on the lid of the bottle so I can see the colours when they are all standing in the drawer they’re stored in – saves me picking up the bottles and checking the colour as I work. I put the paint on with brushes, my fingers, a palette knife, a sponge and even a syringe I got from our local vet. My hands always tell the story of what I’ve been doing, what colours I’m into at the time…

    Works in this series are for sale in my Etsy store. golden-landscape-7

  • Pears on the brain

    I’ve been putting my pear collages into Photoshop and playing around with them. Looking at crops, colour schemes and textures – just seeing what works and what doesn’t. Some of these ideas may well turn up in a series of new paintings I am doing for exhibition in Auckland later in the year. Originally I was going to do a series based on my obsession with the moon but, to be honest, I think the pear shape affords me more opportunities.  I have to do what are, for me anyway, some quite big canvas – up to around a metre square – so I need a basis for the series which I feel can translate in a variety of ways, shapes and styles.

    In case you are wondering, this is a follow-on from Michelle’s Crusade No 27 which you can read about here. So inspiring, thanks Michelle.