Summer Camp in sight!

 

The very thought of summer camp brings seasonal excitement that goes back more than 70 years now (yikes!). I loved being in the woods all day (so it seemed), swimming endlessly (the one “sport” I excelled in), feeling the mystery of campfires, learning new skills with new friends – choosing my own colours to make my own boondoggle.  Those camps of long ago are long gone now, but the memory lingers on.

 

But that strong pull of the season has made “Summer Camp” a regular part of my art year – as I’ve learned that Summer Camp is where you find it.

This year my plan is a variation on past themes.  I've looked at paintings of different types of landscapes by known artists, then looked for a similar local vista and recreated it, maybe in the style of the artist, maybe using new media, whatever unfolds.  If I get carried away, I’ll also do the artist’s portrait.

And I did get carried away when I cut the ribbon to open this year’s Summer Camp.  What better artist to lead the way than Georges Seurat, whose “Sunday Afternoon”  at Chicago’s Art Institute was the first real painting I ever saw.  Love at first sight!

With its shoreline theme, Seurat’s “Evening at Honfleur” made a useful match with Ambleside, the shoreline in the photo above.

 

So here’s Ambleside in the style of Seurat.

 

What if it were hanging on the Art Institute’s walls?  Just think:  Instant acclaim for me if only it were large enough.

 

Onward now to portraits of Seurat, both of them in pastel but applied differently.

 

It’s so hard to turn lights out at the end of the first day of Summer Camp -- so I kept going.   I’d also been attracted by this engraving with a shoreline at “The Bay of Naples,” by new-to-me artist, Elizabeth Greatorex. 

 

Her very name is intriguing.  A type of dinosaur?  No, it’s more likely related to “great rocks,” or a half-dozen other Anglo-Saxon possibilities.

 

Without years of supervised study, I can't replicate Ambleside as an engraving.  Instead I chose the simplest printmaking technique – preparing a textured, stamped “plate” and stamping it on my paper.

 

An interim stage:

With additional blotting and rubbing, here’s the final “Shoreline/Great Rocks.”

 

And Elizabeth herself?  Same method, stamping the paper with inked texture.

 

The finale:  Does she look a little like “A Rare Bird With Feathers”? 

 

In this get-up, she just might fit in with the party crowd.  Let the summer begin!