new projects...

Don't you just love it when you get something wonderful and unexpected in the mail? That happened to me today. I received this special drawing and I can't tell you how delighted I am. The artist is our new sponsored child. This is the first contact we have had with her. Our former child has turned eighteen and has graduated from the program. We were assigned a new child and I have been eager to start a relationship. So the journey begins...

Whatever I had on my to do list for the weekend has now been bumped - I can't wait to send off a letter and some drawings of my own. While it is sad to have one relationship end, I am looking forward to having a young child again. Milagro lives in El Salvador and she will turn eight in just a few weeks. We already have a lot in common - she likes to draw, coloured pencil is her medium of choice and she loves to draw flowers (if you have visited the gallery of my website, you will know that I love drawing flowers too). We are kindred spirits already! :-) And, she want to do well in school so she can be a school teacher when she grows up. Well, hey I teach art...

So my new projects are to create some drawings for Milagro and I think it is time I learned a bit of Spanish so I can write some of my letter to her in her own language. Translators are provided but I think it would be fun to try Spanish myself. I speak French, (enough to write a child anyway) but we have never had a child from a French speaking country. We once had a child from Malawi. I loved getting letters from her family as her Uncle could speak some English and he would painstakingly write out letters telling us about their lives. For the record, I did say a bit of Spanish...that is a big enough project for now!

I attended another art club meeting last night. We had a second night of critiques. If you missed my report on critiquing your work following the last meeting, you can click here to have a read. The guest was Svetlana Swinimer. Her analysis of each painting was very good and she was amazingly fast in summing up the strength and weaknesses of each piece. I know that when jurors look at slides or digital images, they often view them for just seconds before moving on to the next one. After watching Svetlana, I know that a quick accurate reading is possible.

Here are some of her thoughts:

- Even if a piece was quite good, she would ask us "What is missing?" Asking this question revealed ways the piece could be taken to a new level.

- She asked us to honestly compare our work to an other's. If our art were to appear next to someone else's art, would ours "collapse"?

- Artists must always be growing and not "riding on the backs of others". We must be "discovering new territory or we are not artists". Our desire should be to grow, not to create "pretty paintings".

- Like last time, she picked up on boring shadows. Shadows were either not cool enough or did not have interesting colours.

- She stressed doing study pieces. Do grisailles to practice volume techniques. Practice painting with just one light colour and one dark. Learn to see gradations well.

- Her main teaching was to look for warm, cool, dark and light. She said this was very important. For example, a warm painting needs a bit of cool colours in order to stand out and be noticed.

- She suggested limiting the colours used. Use two complementary colours and then only neutrals. She thought a couple of the pieces were guilty of having too many colours.

- She stressed planning out relationships before you start to paint. For example decide how the sky will relate to the water, and the water to the land. How will the buildings relate to the land? What will be dominate, what will be dark, what will be warm, cool etc.?

- Make sure that there is a "conversation" between the elements of your painting. This dialogue across the painting can be achieved through colour harmony. Don't let parts of your painting become "isolated".

- Don't over analyse why you are doing a piece. Once you have started a work, follow your intuition.

- She cautioned the audience on following photo references too literally. As artists we need to make decisions regarding colour and composition. When we accept what we see in the photo, our art suffers and we don't learn. I couldn't agree more. To many cp artists over rely on photos.

- One area that she stressed caused me to really think. She felt strongly that a painting should only contain one set of complements. So for example if a painting has reds and greens, it should not also contain purples and yellows. She felt that two of the paintings were guilty of this and that they suffered because of it. One was a lovely bright abstract painting and the other was another contemporary work filled with graphic elements and it reminded me of Cubism. Her argument was that using two sets of complements "upset the viewer's nervous system" and left viewers unsettled. She did comment that some artists used this intentionally, to have a sort of shocking effect but she wasn't a fan of this approach. I did not agree with this idea, especially when viewing the two paintings she thought suffered because of this. I found them very interesting, bold, engaging, bright and warm. The two sets of complements didn't seem to be having an adverse effect on my nervous system. :-) I pondered this on the drive home and then went to my studio and got out some art books that I knew had pictures of my favourite paintings. Yup, two sets of complements all over the place...and these are master painters not amateurs. So I guess I will happily differ in my opinion and I will just hope that jurors that look at my work share my type of nervous system and not hers!

All in all, another very interesting experience watching and listening to someone critique art.

You have probably heard that the pieces juried into the Coloured Pencil Society of America's Explore This exhibition can now be viewed. If you missed this announcement, this exhibit featuring coloured pencil and mixed media, can be viewed on-line. Just click here.

Finally, last week I was given a blog award by Jan Gibson. It took me so long to accept the award that coloured pencil artist Laura Hardie also gave me the award! So I have better get on the ball here...thank you ladies - I appreciate your support and your kindness. As part of accepting this award, I am to list seven things I love...(I apologize in advance for my rather boring list) :-)

1) I am madly in love with my husband. I have been since I was 16. I guess family and friends can squeeze into #1.
2) Art, big surprise right? I love all media, all styles and I love learning about art, looking at art and creating art.
3) Animals. I love my dog and all the animals I have been privileged to share my life with in the past. I love wild animals and domestic ones and I love learning about them.
4) I love music. Right up there with art really. I was a music major in university and I love all sorts of music - classical is my favourite genre.
5) I love to sing. Sort of goes with #4. I love sight singing new choral works (this challenge is a real joy for me). My favourite works to sing are Masses in Latin or German, (usually those composed during the Baroque and Classical periods). For the curious, I sing 2nd Alto - tenor for fun and soprano only in the privacy of my home. Why are sopranos so fun to parody? :-)
6) I love walking in nature. I do this everyday with my dog. It makes my day.
7) I love elemental weather. Which is good because of #6. I love the smell of rain, the sound of wind, the feeling of warm or cool air on my skin, I love the sight of falling snow and I love fog.

So that's it. A long post but if you have hung in this far and you would like to know more about child sponsorship you can visit the World Vision website here. For less than the cost of a daily cup of Starbuck's coffee, you can help a child receive medical care, an education, buy supplies for their school and for their playground. Sometimes the problems in this world seem overwhelming but you can make a difference, a very important difference for one special child. If World Vision doesn't suit you, there are lots of other similar programs. Just do a google search...

critiquing your work

Do you ever wonder what people on a art jury look for in a painting? Have you ever wished you could listen in on their conversations? I recently had the opportunity to hear someone critique quite a few paintings over the course of a couple of hours. I took pages of notes. I am sharing some of the main points here in the hope that you will find this information useful in critiquing your own work.

So how did this come about? I am a member of an art club here in Ottawa that holds monthly meetings on the west end of the city. The guest this month was Claude Depuis from the National Gallery of Canada. Mr Depuis was invited to spend the evening critiquing the work done by the club members. Many members were interested in having their work critiqued so I didn't bother taking anything of mine. It was very interesting to hear what his observations were so lets get to it:

• Overall, he found the work presented for critiquing to be "too deadly serious". He was looking to see if a painting was "slightly playful". Paintings tend to become 'too deadly serious' when we are too focused on our work.
  
  
• In general, he felt that the members exhibited a "fear of wasting material". The paintings were too "tight" and he felt that the artists would naturally loosen up their work if they didn't fear wasting paint and paper. His advice was to start buying cheap paint and to play versus trying to complete a finished work every time. "It's only a painting! Risk ruining it."
  
  
• He had a real problem with artists using paint colours straight from the tube. He could spot this easily. Colours weren't subtle enough or complex enough. For more interesting art, one needs to creating colours by mixing colour. Some artists had used grey paint for shadows and his advice here was to always make your greys and to add colour to you shadows. Overall, he found that people didn't use exciting enough colour in their dark areas.
  
  
• I think almost everyone has heard about not using black paint, but someone obviously hadn't. One painter had used pure black in a large area of their painting and it deadened the piece. His advice was to throw out black and to create your darks. At least mix the black with other colours. This of course applies to coloured pencil too.
  
  
• For painters, his advice was to loosen up their work by using large brushes. He disliked repetitive brush strokes (this was boring). He observed hesitancy in brush strokes which he said allowed the viewer to sense the artist's fear. He urged painters to work from a toned ground instead of starting right on top of a white canvas.
  
  
• Values often needed to be darkened and enhanced more. He was looking for dynamic light and shade. He suggested going from black to white, the full range of values, in each painting.
  
  
• He recommended that people go beyond real life to intensify colour.
  
  
• Overall, he felt that the painters needed to draw more. Over the course of the evening, he continued to stress the importance of a strong foundation in drawing. "You can never do enough drawing."
  
  
• After looking at all of the paintings, he asked the audience if they wanted hundreds and hundreds of paintings. His point? He felt that the paintings he saw revealed a desire to do quick paintings. People put only so much into a painting and then called it quits to presumably go on the next piece. He recommended that the artists spend much more time on each piece. He wanted the artists to challenge themselves and to strive to master skills and techniques. The work exhibited could have been better if the artists had stayed with the paintings longer.
  
  
• Following this comment was the advice that preparation at the beginning is critical. The decisions we make in a few critical areas at the beginning can make all the difference in a piece. Here is something he said that I say to my students: Ask yourself, "Why am I painting this?"
  
  
• He checked each painting to see if it had enough contrast.
  
  

So what do you think? Is your work lacking something? Perhaps you would like to take your art to the next level. Why not set aside a bit of time to do your own analysis? Clear an area and get out your paintings. Really look at them and ask yourself if your values could be punched up a bit. Ask if your work is fresh and slightly playful (or does it fall under the deadly serious category). Do you have enough contrast? Are you drawing skills strong? How about your use of colour? Upon examination, would you say that you took your paintings far enough or did you move on too quickly? After having suggested this activity, I must also say that while an honest assessment is valuable, getting too critical and down on your work or yourself won't serve you at all. Please also take the time to note what you do well and what you got right in your paintings! Jot down your thoughts and then refer to them the next time you paint. Learning to look at your work critically takes practice but the more you develop this skill, the more your art will improve.

On the filing front, well yippee and woo-hoo...the mountain has been reduced to nothing but a wee molehill. You know how you dread a job and it turns out to not be as bad as you expected? Well, this wasn't one of those times. :-) I dreaded it and with good reason! I spent at least eight hours on the weekend doing nothing but sorting computer files. I had art images in JPEGs, PowerPoint and bitmaps. I had text files, pdfs, files and images for my website, teaching exercises in a variety of versions, kit images, photos scanned and manipulated, on and on. Three computers down to one. I have created many, many file folders and renamed oodles of files (hopefully for clarity). My next challenge is being able to locate stuff under my new system!

At least it was very cold here this weekend - it was -30 degrees C (-22F) here Saturday afternoon (including a wind chill) so I guess it was a perfect time to be stuck in a chair doing this dastardly deed. Ugh...I have learned my lesson though. I will never let my files get so unruly ever again!! Never!