Blog

I’ve used Facebook for a long time now, but have become increasingly concerned at the constant “enhancements” that encroach on my privacy yet are poorly explained. The anxious feeling has been growing for a while now. I resent the time it takes to figure out what they have done, what it really means, and then ensure my information stays safe – despite the fact that I have always been careful bout what I put on there. I have deactivated my account and am going to go back to using my blog as my primary means of chatting with friends, as well as sharing my art. What does this mean? There will be more posts here, and a little more that’s not strictly art related.

Edited 3 hours later – back on FB as can’t do some work tasks without it, as not able to split them out due to way I set things up. Will be doing some re-arranging instead…

My good friend, and awesome photographer, Sandra Robinson kindly let me use one of her recent photos. Okay, so I took it from her Facebook page, but I did tell her I was going to! The thing that appealed to me the most was the horizontal bands of color running throughout the shot. I love the sea, and have always wanted to try windsurfing. There’s an exhibition coming up in September at the Thornton Gallery in Hamilton, called “The Great Waikato Kickoff” – timed to coincide with the Rugby World Cup – works need to have a Kiwi connection for the tourist market so this seemed a good image to start with.  Of course the final result is only similar to the original but Sandra’s photo made a fantastic starting point.

Over at the GPP Street Team Michelle’s asking if the change of seasons brings a change of colour palette. My initial thought was no – my colours are what the are. There is something that changes with the seasons, and that’s the size I work at. But then, as I looked for examples of the size thing, I started to notice that there are changes in my colour palette – subtle, but the changes are certainly there. By the way, we’re just about at the shortest day and so far it’s been a winter with record temperatures; records highs, that is. Today is overcast and about 17 (63) degrees. A socks and t-shirt day, not a boots and cardigan day.

Why does the size I at work at change with the seasons? Practicality. My art room is in the old caravan shed; it’s unlined, with a concrete floor on dirt, and uninsulated corrugated iron walls. In a world – cold! To get to it I have to dash outside in the pouring rain, only a short distance but thoroughly unpleasant on a bad day. For most of the year I work BIG in the art room, flinging paint round and being messy. Then, for the coldest wettest months of the year I work on the desk in my inside office that I use for studying and to run our small business. This means working smaller, and working neater. I try hard not to fling paint up the walls (but haven’t always succeeded).

Looking at the images in my files, I can see that I use more warm and even hot colours in winter when I am working smaller. The big works are often quite cool blues and greens. It’s not something I had been conscious of before. Thanks for opening my eyes to it Michelle. Below are some poppie paintings; the full size sheets of watercolour were done in summer but the 10″ square poppies were done this morning. The large blue one was also a summer paintings but the small red painting was a winter one.

Whenever I get some new paints I take the time to record them in my wee color notebooks. I like to know how it goes on, how it mixes with other paints, what it looks like really diluted. I also mix my new colors to see what results I get – that’s pretty random I know, because there’s no logic behind the mixes, but it’s amazing what you find along the way.

A week or two back I got some new Golden Fluid Acrylics – Jenkins Green, Viridian Green Hue, Indian Yellow Hue, Payne’s Gray and Anthraquinone Blue. All are new colors to me except for the last , which is one of my staples. Today I finally had time to record them in my notebook, so I spent a happy half hour or mixing different combinations and then noting the colors down for future reference. None of the results are spectacular because of the colors I happened to buy last time, but that’s okay. I quite like Anthraquinone Blue and Viridian, and can also see uses for Indian Yellow with a tiny hint of Viridian. The Jenkins Green is surprisingly dark straight out of the bottle but washes out to a lovely mossy color.

I have scanned the two pages I did this afternoon, plus an old page which fills my heart with joy each time I stumble across it while looking for color ideas – Orange, Magenta, Phthalo Green and Phthalo Blue. I also cropped in close so you can see how lovely Anthraquinone Blue really is! Enjoy.

Over at the GPP Crusades Michelle urged us to talk about where we live; maybe document changes we have made or explain what makes our home special to us. I decided to do both, but in two very different ways. The first is a page for my scrapbooks that shows the “after” from our 2008 kitchen renovations. Thanks Michelle, it was high time I documented the change from a 1950s drafty old kitchen to our modern kitchen/dining room. In the second, I have just quickly documented on a photo why our home, a plain house built in the 1950s, is special to us.