Once upon a time

Once upon a time, somewhere between the water and the sky, there was an enchanted island that was not quite an island. To this magic land, in the dark of autumn and winter, our intrepid grey-haired adventuress was drawn in pursuit of her mythic late-life quest.

Laden with a knapsack of special wands and sustained by a custom-brewed elixir...

she explored the Not Quite Island, discovering many things there that were Not Quite what they seemed to be. She found a mermaid, locked in wood but still smiling:

and a school of silver fishes, flashing through the air.

She learned that seagulls could overpower humans....

...but that Genial Giants ruling the island's cement plant spread a benevolent influence over all.

She found treasure troves of colour and shape displayed in the open...

and came at last to the site where treasures were hidden and yet to be revealed:-- a creaking old building destined to vanish in the summer of 2017.

Here, she met with an unexpectedly congenial troop of comrades (most of them half her age), each of whom was pursuing her/his own quest. But under the guidance of a Wise Woman delegated to instruct them, they all learned together the Four Magic Questions that they could expect to be asked, again and again, as they continued their journeys:

- Are the negative spaces interesting?
- Is there an overall balance?
- Are the elements varied?
- And most mysterious of all: WHAT IF (this element were changed,
etc)..........?

Already, our heroine had proven herself through the many trials that had been set for her. (see here and here and here). Now, in these final days in the vanishing building, the Wise Woman assigned three more challenges. The first was to create a sampler of different textures.

 

The second was to add the element of texture to the shape of her elixir cup, the same design that had been used in a previous exercise.

This time, the emphasis was not on tone or shade but on how a pronounced texture will draw the eye.

The third and final task required careful preparation. Guided by the Wise Woman, the troop of seekers discussed, first, the symbolism of different colours, recognizing that these can vary across cultures, and second, the possible symbolism of various geometric shapes.

Then, their assignment was to recall a fairy tale, select a specific scene in it, and recreate that scene symbolically, using only two colours and black and white. This was not to be an illustration, but a symbolic representation in a composition that satisfied the Four Magic Questions.

In the spirit of the Not Quite Island, our heroine chose the story of Dvořák's opera, "Rusalka," based on a Slavic fairy tale akin to the "The Little Mermaid." The chosen scene was the unforgettable "Song to the Moon," when the Rusalka, the water nymph, sings to the moon of her love and longing for the seemingly unattainable prince. You can listen to this astonishingly beautiful song sung by the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and be thrilled to the core. (And you can view more delights from the Not Quite Island here).

In this final stage of her quest, our elderly heroine created this symbolic representation:

Now, with her trials for this stage completed, has our Canadian Goose turned into a swan?

Not Quite, but working on it.

Stone, paper, scissors

-- and colour! Give me paper, some kind of marker, and some kind of colour, and I'm happy. A pretty stone paperweight (taking a bow in the upper right corner), and scissors are nice extras -- and lately in my art class, I've enjoyed playing with all of the above. Are you ready to whisk through three weeks of homework with me?

Here's a nifty exercise in "reduction" -- getting down to how much of an object's detail is needed for someone else to recognize it. Here we go, in a series of 2-inch squares. First one: A simple drawing of a recognizable object.

Second: Reduce the object by cropping so that it can still be identified.

Third: Crop further so that an innocent bystander wouldn't have a clue what it was.

Fourth: Reverse the tones -- what was white becomes black, what was black becomes white.

Then, add another two squares -- one using black, white and one colour; the second using black, white and several colours -- and put all of them together into an engaging composition.

Okay. I did the project but I'm not wildly satisfied with the outcome -- despite hours and hours spent wracking my brain on what to choose and how to put it all together.

The next week's homework had nothing ambiguous about it, just a lot of hard labour doing something that looks deceptively easy:-- making a 9-step tonal scale from white to black. Last semester, we did this in dry media which was tough enough.

It's even harder in paint. But here's the outcome in all its glory:-- the 9-step grey scale, with colour chips matched in tone to the greys. On the right, an exercise in seeing how the same tone of grey (the small square at the centre) appears to be a different tone on each of several different backgrounds. (Some of these subtleties cannot be captured by the camera)

We're into colour now! Hurray! Our first experiment was reproducing some of Chevreul's theories on colour perception. We each made a simple design using two colour complements (opposites on the colour wheel).

Then we viewed our own for a minute or so as it hung on the white classroom wall, and then we turned our gaze to the wall itself. Voilá ! Against the white, the colours reversed -- my prominent red-orange leaves showed as blue.

With these colour exercises under our belt, we created a tonal series based on our own simple design. The first: Shades of grey. The second -- exactly the same object, in shades of one colour (tube colour + different amounts of white or black). The third -- same object in analogous colours ("neighbours" on the colour wheel). The objective was to match all the tones, from one panel to the next -- so that if you blur your eyes, the lightest shape in the centre panel matches the lightest grey in the first panel, and so on.

Even before I started, I knew I'd be longing for coffee -- and that image kept me going, especially the third panel with its warm orange/brown tones.

As I write this, I'm preparing for my 8th and final class. You'll be seeing the coffee mugs again and some much more exciting stuff. But right now, this is the moment I've been waiting for to share a picture I saved from last summer:-- a perfect 9-step grey scale that neighbours down the block painted on their front porch steps. It's a little distorted by the bright early morning sunshine and the shadows from the porch railing -- but they absolutely nailed it.

Mad about art?

Salvador Dali would probably have had a good laugh that his words are immortalized on pencil souvenirs at the Salvador Dali Museum in Florida. (Who knew?) But two weekends ago, when I had my art class on Saturday and a separate 5-hour art workshop Sunday, I ended up feeling a little Dali-esque myself. (Think sagging watches....) 

It's all been good, though, and here's a quick recap. In early February, we did a cool in-class exercise, outlining reproductions of masterworks on acetate sheets and then analyzing their compositional components. Given a spread of choices, I opted for Seurat's "Bathers at Asnières" while my class buddy, the tattoo artist, went for the Dali.

The following week, we slogged along on the subject of the Golden Mean, or Golden Section, or Golden Ratio. 

Oh, I shouldn't say "slogged;" it's just that my eyes glaze over with the math part of it. But it's another one of those things that I knew about theoretically but had never worked with -- until this very useful course. That week's homework was to photocopy a number of images and use them to make a composition using the Golden Mean.

I controlled my impulse to use a whole bunch of stuff and selected just two images to work with - sunflower petals and a painting artist figure (which, yes, could have benefitted from an added pair of boots).

After a fair bit of fiddling, I settled on five repeats of the figure, contributing to the key vertical and horizontal lines that are placed on the Golden Mean.

The next class, we honed in on line itself as an element of composition. Our assignment was to find or make images in which the composition depended on vertical, horizontal, diagonal, organic and implied lines. I sorted through my stash of postcard reproductions and then went totally crazy. With coloured paper and cutouts, I created a gallery exhibit for them in a scrolled format -- an April Fool's spoof, with a sneak preview in February, as the exhibit was being installed. (With a tip of my new ear-flapped cap to my friend L, who professionally installs gallery exhibits with flair and authority).

First, the Vertical Room:

Next, the Diagonal Room (with the paint barely dry on the walls):

Then, the Organic Room. Can't you see those draperies writhing along with the paintings?

On to the Horizontal Room:

And finally, the Room of Implied Line -- where the repeated shapes of Altdorfer's magnificent horseback trumpeters create dynamic curved lines that cut forward into space.

With a Canadian holiday and no class that week, we were given double homework. The second assignment was to use ruler and pen and -- in no fewer than 200 (yes, two hundred) straight lines -- create an interesting composition.

And now hold onto your pencils for that extra mid-month workshop at the City of Burnaby's Shadbolt Centre, where our session was held in one of the older buildings in the lovely park.

Our instructor in "Anatomy and Figure Drawing" covered lots of ground, and we did lots of drawing. Here's a quick sampler, starting with the traditional quick poses:

Then a contour drawing, trying not to look at the paper -- a sure way to create a vanishing wrist.

A focused drawing on the lower back torso:

A neat and challenging project placing the model's poses in perspective:--

WHEW! It was a wonderful experience but good to have that weekend behind me and get back to my tranquil early morning weekday hours in my studio. Here's the view as I walked in the door, the week I was working on my "On the Line" exhibit. What's that saying that used to be posted in every workplace? "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps."

All we have to do is....wait for it

For a while there, it seemed that it would never end. The snow that usually breezes in for a day or two before Christmas was like the visitor that just didn't know when to go home -- called up their friends, in fact, and invited more of the same.

Still: It *was* an excuse to go outside and play. My best memory of the endless snow shovelling was the morning that the sidewalk ice was beginning to loosen enough to pick up shards, which I had fun placing along the fence top of The Yellow House.

Beating me at my own game, my pals down the block exceeded all expectations the next day when they excavated huge ice slabs from the street in front of their house and ringed their corner of the block with a mini-Stonehenge.

Remarkably, this looked very like the medieval stone fortifications called cheval de frise that we saw years ago in Ireland around the remains of old forts.

The snow was also an exercise in patience. All one had to do was sit tight and wait -- something I thought about on my studio mornings as I worked on the fourth in my Flash Mob Series -- "Sit Tight." For once, I stuck successfully with my original sketched plan.

Again, I worked over an old painting and found the early stages eerie and fascinating.

In fact, even as I continued obliterating the old stuff, I found that I couldn't quite let go of some of its patterns.

And here it is -- a bright sunny day in the future when the Winter of 2017 is just a memory, the finale of "Sit Tight" (copyright 2017).

For the work in progress, click here and repeat the mantra, "Flash Mobs are everywhere."