Happy Autumn!

Watercolour , "Autumn leaves and berries".

Peach boy, the three little pigs and a surprise in a gumtree

 Since we hadn't been to Carrick Hill for a long time it was decreed that today was the day.Carrick Hill is an old period home built by Edward Hayward and his wife Ursual Barr Smith after their marriage in 1935. It is very much inspired by 16th, 17th and 18th century fixtures they had bought on their travels and which they commissioned their architect to incorporate into the building. It was a little piece of high living in the suburb of Springfield, Adelaide It is filled with antiques and has a huge William Morriscollection. It is just the place to go to have time out from the suburbs but still remain in Adelaide.

 This time although the scaffolding was up  the gardens were still lovely.

Mr McGregor still did not want bunnies in his garden,

and the scarecrow was still scarey!

Momotaro, (Peach Boy) was still there with his dog and his monkey.

The fairies still watch over the garden

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The dirt was so dried up it was no wonder the wolf from The Three Little Pigs was howling!

*Note to self ask Santa for one of these houses for a studio for Christmas*

But the piece de resistance was not this,

or this....although it was amazing!

But this...............

can you see it yet? 

Yep, it was Blinky Bill!

A good day!

If you want to know more about Carrick Hill click here

Thanks to Holly Clarke for the koala pics.

Robins in Autumn??

It is autumn here in Australia right now, warm and pleasant days followed by cold nights. In fact our clock went back one hour last night giving us a delicious extra hours sleep.  So why you may well ask am I drawing robins with all their winter connotations? I think it is a throw back to my recent winter holiday in Ireland where I was inspired by the sights and sounds of winter.

 I have been continuing to explore the oil pastel medium where I scratch the image onto the paper through several layers of pastel. It feels really intuitive for me to use this technique so I would like to see how far I can go with it. It is challenging to place colours where I want them to be when I scratch through the surface. It is  also challenging to have a top layer that isn't black so that is what this little experiment has been about.

 I love the velvety texture of the oil pastels which gives a mellow bloom to the surface of the paper.

Sorry that the pics are not very sharp but I photographed them rather than scanned them as I am waiting for a new scanner.

Little Aussie Bees

Today was a glorious autumn day, too nice to stay inside so I went for a walk to local park to see if I could find some inspiration for my drawing. I was hoping to see some autumnal colours but no, it all looked very green. I guess all the trees in the park are natives, non deciduous which is a good thing! Anyway I saw a beautiful gum tree and asked my daughter (who was acting as photographer) to take some pictures of the beautiful delicate pink blossoms... and then I saw them, the cute little Aussie bees working their little socks off gathering pollen to make their honey. I don't think I would have seen them if I hadn't expressly gone out to look through eyes that were seeking the small things that we normally pass by.

Photo credit, Holly Clarke.

Seraphine, outsider artist

Last night I was fortunate enough to chance upon a French/Belgian film on TV called Seraphine, the story  of Seraphine Louis also called Seraphine de Senlis. Seraphine, (born in 1864) was an orphan by the time she was 8 years old which meant a life of  servitude and cleaning people's houses lay ahead of her. 

Seraphine had a secret passion however, she believed angels were guiding her to paint pictures. She created  wonderful images of nature, colourful flowers and leaves were woven into magical creations that were way ahead of their time. 

Seraphine was extremely devout and was inspired by her religious faith and the beautiful colours in stained glass windows.  She was discovered by an art collector who she worked for who spotted her talent and encouraged her gift and became her patron. The story is not a happy ever after tale, but it is a beautifully told story of a simple but driven woman  who was an intuitive artist, driven to express her spirituality through her art. The film demonstrates the fine line between passion and obsession and mental illness and is very moving.. Even if you don't want to watch the movie, you may like to look at some of  her art. Seraphine died in 1942.

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Oil Pastel.... because sometimes you just need to play.

I recently found my oil pastels and decided to have a play. Do you remember when you were a little kid making images with crayons where you would put lots of colours on the page, cover them with a darker colour and scratch an image out? Maybe it was just me! The images I produced became more developed as I progressed in this experimentation, for instance the tree in the first image is less intense in colour than the second image of the tree.

 I love the way you can produce an image by scratching your particular method of mark making onto
the oil pastel. It is almost a way of sculpting an image by using a sharp tool. No two images will ever be the same as the mark making is random.

It is possible to manipulate the random nature of the colour by choosing where to place the colours on the bottom layer.

The image above had the hue changed in Photoshop to produce a different feel.

This method of image making produces images which are full of texture and which have an ethereal feel.

 

Do you dream in colour?

In Adelaide we are coming to the end of what is known as Mad March. There are so many events on in March in Adelaide that it would be impossible to go to all of them. I had the pleasure of seeing Neil Finn and Paul Kelly play a free concert in the city a couple of weeks ago to open the Adelaide Festival.

http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/

https://www.facebook.com/adelaidefestival

This was one event amongst many since as well as the Festival there was the Fringe festival which is the second biggest Fringe in the world after Edinburgh.

http://www.adelaidefringe.com.au/

There were artists from all over wandering around entertaining us for weeks. And still it goes on. If you ever want to come to Adelaide come in March when Adelaide becomes Radelaide!

It has been exciting having so much artistry going on around me but I still managed to get into my shedio. (shed/studio) A while ago I posted some black and white images which I had made through a visualisation technique, well I finally got around to resolving those images in colour by using acrylic paint.

See previous images here.

http://lindaeclarke.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/visualisation-way-i-see-it.html

 These are my colour renderings. I haven't decided if I like the black and white ones or these best. What do you think?

"And the whale jumped over the moon." acrylic on board



"Have you heard the news!" acrylic on board

. I made a few changes as you can see particularly by making the flower into a more open style flower. I particularly enjoy seeing my images in colour as they have gone through many stages before this, roughs,sketches, tonal studies and finally the colour rendering.
 I dream in colour!