Cath Sheard Art

Tag: process

  • 60 postcards to make for Legato shareholders

    As part of my ‘art share’ offer to raise money for our trip to Italy, for the Legato exhibition, I have to make 60 postcards. These will be mailed back to shareholders once we reach Cassino. I am working on heavy weight watercolour postcards; they come in a little silver tin and the lovely to work with. I have made a digital montage of images of Italy and the Cassino area, the artworks I have created for the four men I am honoring, photos of the men, and words about the trip like Italy, Legato, WWII, peace and the men’s names. I’ve printed multiple copies of this A4 montage.

    I decided to work in two batches of 30 postcards each. I put a very light wash of Nickel Azo Yellow on the postcards then quickly blotted with a paper towel to get some texture. Once that was dry I added splashes of Cadmium red medium and again left them to dry. Once they were really dry I added runs of the same red, quite dilute, as I had done on the original artworks; it brings a sense of blood without being too obvious. Once they had dried, I tore the digital collage sheets into strips and have adhered a strip on each one that is about a 1/3 of the width of the postcard.

    What comes next? Tomorrow I’m going to hand-cut a stencil of the main lines of two different poppies, using acetate and a tiny soldering iron.  In the meantime, here’s the digital collage I made.

  • Patea Freezing Works – Framework

    I showed details from this painting a few posts back when I was talking about the colors I am using. Those photos also give some idea of the mark making involved in these pieces. I start most of the works with a few lines in a black Cretacolor pastel pencil – both as a rough guide to placement and just to get some marks onto the canvas so it’s not so ‘new’ any more. From there I put really runny white acrylic over most areas and start brushing thin acrylic color into the white. Again, just tinting the surface and giving me clues about what goes where. In some areas I will keep working away at it until I have a fairly flat area of final color. While this is happening others areas are drying as quite pale washes.

    Once I have paint over the whole canvas, and some areas at a near final colour, I start blocking in larger areas of more concentrated colour. I use big brushes, a lovely wide 1 1/5″Color Scraper, painting knife and old credit cards. As I get more color on I start adding marks using the knife, the edge of the credit cards, brush handles etc. I also scratch paint off again with the same tools. With some of the flatter areas I may mist them with water and then blot some of the paint off with a paper towel. I keep an old houseplant watering bottle on my desk for doing this. The Atelier Interactive paints are especially receptive to this sort of treatment.

    Framework

    Most of the finishing of the work is done without using a brush, except for a rigger, because I like the marks to show.For me it is important that people can see my hand in the work. I think over time we each develop marks that are distinctly our own; even if someone else tried to copy them, they’d never be quite the same. It’s like giving an authentic signature and a forgery to a hand-writing expert; the differences show.

    So, this work is titled Framework, and as with the others in the series so far it is 16×16″ in acrylics on gallery wrap canvas.

  • The works – thinking about colour

    After my last post Margaret made these comments “Coming from a place where the grayness of the days often sets the colour schemes I use in my own work, I find the vibrancy of colour in yours quite a contrast. I’d love to hear a little more about how you go about choosing your colour schemes. E.g., are the colours vibrant because of the emotionality you feel about the topic/place.? I love the boldness of the purple/ green combination.”  Thanks Margaret, it’s lovely to hear from you and know that you took time out to really look.

    I guess the first thing I’d say re the colours is they’re a reflection of where I live. A lot of New Zealand tourism marketing is based on slogans such as “100% pure” and certainly where I live that’s true. The air is very clean and clear and as a result colours are clear as well. Grass is green, the sly is blue, the cows are black and white or vivid iron oxide red.

    I think the colours are also a reflection of my feelings about the Freezing Works themselves, and where I live generally. Patea is a poor, rural, low socio-economic town that knows hard times personally. In some ways it is not always an easy community to live in. The derelict works are ugly, just as the closure was ugly. But I love both of them; the town and the ruins. Being raised here was good for me, coming back here almost 20 years ago now was also good for me. Living here gives me the chance to work full time, be an artist, publish a newspaper, care for Mum and still be happy – try that in the city!

    I am using what is, for me anyway, a limited colours selection – mainly to help tie the individual works together a bit more. Sitting on my desk I have Naples yellow, permanent green light, brilliant orange, transparent yellow, titanium white, phthalo blue (green), manganese blue, quinacridone magenta, permanent violet dark, quinacridone violet, ultramarine violet, and phthalo green (yellow). I chose this colour set, ok two sets really, after doing some of the colour exercises from Nita Leland’s Confident Colour book.

    It’s been interesting to try to explain a bit about the colours; I may end up coming back to this later on. In the meantime …the photos (taken at night wiht  aflash, so dodgy colour) this time show some of the detail from a painting I am working on at the moment. Hopefully you can see that there is a reasonable amount of texture going on. I like my marks to show, to leave traces of what I  have done and how I got there.

  • Patea Freezing Works paintings – Derelict XI

    A couple of months back I withdrew all my works from my website, Etsy etc while I thought long and hard about the direction my work was going. My intention was to come up with a body of work that sat well together, that I could show as a whole, and that all said “she painted it”. I took the advice of a good friend whose work and business ethic I admire, did lots of research, immersed my self in the subject and then got painting.

    And I am happy! I have done 6 works so far, with four more almost done. I set myself a standard size, a limited number of colours, and an overall style. It’s amazing how much freedom I have felt with those boundaries in place, because it lets me be very free in other ways but still know they will ‘hang together’.

    I think  for me there are two really pleasing outcomes from all this work. The first is that the works do all look like one person did them – I can see my own style in them. The second, and most important thing in a personal sense, is related to that. These feel far more true to what I really what to paint, and how I like to make marks, than all the works I have done in the last 18 months or so. I am not sure why this is, but I am glad it is.

    So, here is the first of the series. I’d love to hear what you think.

    Oh, and here’s where I am at with writing an artist statement to go with them: The Patea landscape, both seen and remembered, is the starting point for my current work, especially the derelict Freezing Works which is being dismantled even as I paint it. These works explore the boundary between reality and abstraction; the colours are an expression of my feelings about a place or a moment in time. The Freezing Works was a multi-layered environment, built over many years and in many geographic directions, and in the same way the paintings are layered with marks made by scraping, wiping, dripping and pushing the paint around until the surface matches the memory.Derelict XI

  • Odd and ends in our house

    Well, Christmas is over, I have a few days holiday left, and it’s raining so, yes, I have been painting hard out. I should have some work to show you tomorrow as I have 3 40cm square canvas all but finished. Initially things weren’t going so well with them, but once I realised the problem was I had other people’s work in mind, not my own, the problem vanished! People worry about artists copying their work but I couldn’t if I tried. Seeing other might influence me, but once I pick up my mark making tools it is *me* that comes out on that canvas each and every time.

    Today I purchased Alyson Stanfield’s book The relatively pain-free artist statement – you can read about Alyson here.  Why? As I mentioned a while back, I have started on a new body of work; it’s quite different from what I have done before and I want to market it well. That means writing and talking about it, so I figured the advice of a professional was warranted. I’ll be working through the book starting tomorrow, and will let you know how it’s going.

    When I’m not painting I’ve been busy with Mum as the chest infection I gave her sprang back to life as soon as she finished the antibiotics. I think since she had pneumonia in the middle of the year she’s been a bit more susceptible. Here’s what our dog Faith had to say about it today:

    Today I have been relaxing on Grandma’s knee, on the mohair rug in 26 degree heat, cos Grandma’s been sick. Mum went to the hospital with her the other night and waited 4 hours – she was a bit cross when she got home. But not very cross, cos she says sometimes it has been Grandma that makes the doctors and nurses run late, so fair’s fair.
    Grandma has a chest infection, but the staff kept asking about the big bruise on her arm – and Grandma couldn’t remember how it happened. When we got home Mum and Grandma were laughing, saying that a this rate the Police will be round any day to accuse Mum of beating up Grandma.