Cath Sheard Art

Tag: paint

  • My mapping went “awol”

    As you saw a few posts back, I am fascinated with the way modern Aboriginal artists map the land, often from memory. I had a play a week or so back and at the weekend found time to have another shot.It’s not as easy as it looks! Why? Because my brain automatically decides to do “western perspective” landscapes instead, and not very well at that. I think producing something that satisfies my idea of ‘mapping’ the land around me is going to be way more of a learning curve than I had imagined. Bring it on I say…

    In the meantime, here are just four of the many I did at the weekend, all on Fabriano Artistico140lb 5×7″ watercolour paper with Golden Fluid acrylics. It was interesting to see the work got looser and more abstract the longer I had a brush in my hand.

  • Painting interlude

    I have not really done any painting in the past week. I have two problems mainly:

    1. The weather is so hideous. It is 24 degrees or so here most days and incredibly humid. My acrylic paints are giving me grief; they get to the tacky stage almost instantly. Awful.  There is no way I would consider varnishing in this weather.

    2. Our wee dog has been increasingly sick over the last week. We have it under control now I hope but it has been very time consuming. She is my only baby and I have been really worried about her. You can meet Faith here.

    I’ve been going to bed early each night so she can cuddle up with me and get some ‘Mom sympathy’. So while I soothe her, I have been rereading some favorite art books. Such as the Acrylic Revolution, and some books about journals and mixed media. Then I scribble some notes in my art journals; so the time has not been wasted. It’s amazing what even that small amount of research does to rev up the brain and get the creative wheels spinning.

  • Joy with paint

    Do you paint with joy? Do you paint to bring joy? Check Jonas out – it looks to me like he paints *with* joy – and in doing so his paintings bring joy. Stunning; especially some of the landscape panels at the end of the video. Enjoy 🙂

  • My hands are tools as I paint

    Some people could eat a 4 course meal with only a fork, and not have a drop of food on them. Or cook Christmas dinner for 10 and emerge from the kitchen looking pristine. Me? I can’t eat, or cook, without spilling, dripping or slopping. It’s not that I’m clumsy as such, just – I don’t know – a bit uncoordinated I guess.

    And when I paint? Yes, the same thing applies really. They say a picture paints a thousand words; in which case my clothes, and hands, tell quite a long story. I have tools – brushes, scrapers, knives – and paper towels, rags, wet wipes etc. Yet, somehow, I always end up with paint on my clothes and on my hands. The food mess may well be lack of coordination, but (forgetting the clothes for a moment) I think the paint on my hands is really about something else.

    I am one of those people who likes to touch things. I’m a librarian by day; I touch the books, I touch my customers – sometimes I hug them if they need it – I touch my scrapbook pages, my pets, my mother, flowers, the hand of people who serve me in shops.

    And I like to touch what I paint. I pick the small canvas up and hold them in my hand as I paint. I pick up the tubes and bottles of paint and feel the weight of them and, of course, I touch the wet paint! Not deliberately, but then again, perhaps really it *is* deliberate? Perhaps for me part of the process of painting is feeling my way through the layers of paint and glazes and marks. Feeling what is right, what needs changing…

    I think that for me painting is not just about the image, the colours, the texture – it’s about the feel of the process, and the feel of the finished work. And that’s why my hands tell a story – because for me painting is as much a tactile pursuit as a visual one. How about you?