It's funny how some images burn themselves into your brain.  One of my earliest memories is of a painting of a "sett" - the ancestral home of a badger kinship group.  It was an illustration in one of my picture books and I must have studied it frequently because I can still see the inhabitant, who seemed to me to be a bachelor.  He was wearing a snazzy smoking jacket, affected an aristocratic air and apparently had nothing much to do. The room was cozy and I think it had rounded ceilings, not unlike Bilbo's home in "The Hobbit" film  (I have to tell you that it broke my heart when the dwarves dragged him away from it to an "adventure!").  But the best feature of that, my first dream home, were the books.  There they sat - tall piles, multi-coloured piles, crooked piles, fat piles and scattered books left open for dipping back into.  Mr Badger was of course holding one.  And next to every chair  - a  reading lamp.   

I doubt that I could read at the time, but I already knew that I LOVED books and the thought of being somewhere cozy in which there was nothing to do but look at them felt, oh, so right.

So here we are.  Every comfortable chair in this house has a good reading lamp and there are piles of books, as well as eight or ten which are on the go - books bought, borrowed, three-dimensional or digital.  Nirvana. The only other place in the world which I find quite so perfectly comfortable is, believe it or not, a room in a church basement with stacking tables and chairs. 

On the same day every week up to thirty-five of us meet there and paint our hearts out;  this has been going on for 52 years although with a changing cast.  I could and do paint at home but it's not nearly so much fun as being immersed in the collective talent, all of whom have a delicious sense of absurdist humour.   Last week one of the members, the multi-talented Louise Scott-Bushell, had introduced us to scratch-boarding. Exacto knives flashed and many delightful and disparate images emerged from the black.  I did a small sketch of Jewell for Jon as a wee Valentine's Day surprise (which he ruined by rummaging on my desk for something. Oh, well. ). This week, many of the others had already ramped up to complicated and exquisite pieces.  I worked on the value study for another horsey oil but spent much of the day snooping at what everybody else was doing with their scratchboards.

Here is the sketch of "No-surprise Jewell."  Multiply any good feelings you have about it by ten and you get some sense of what the others produced yesterday.  This badger gal felt both graced to be in their company and completely "at home."

Old houses tend to be dark;  for many good reasons, the square footage of glass had to be limited.  I love old houses but I also love light, so where we need privacy we have chosen stained glass  and eschewed curtains.  The results are pretty special on a sunny day and I often grab my camera, no matter the season.  

I also have an emotional relationship with windows.  For example, I have used the one over the kitchen sink in my childhood home  when my mother had locked me out by mistake;  luckily the garage was open and I was able to find a stepladder and clamber up into the kitchen because the sink windows were unlocked.  As I crumpled down onto the counter I found the message my mom had left:  "The key's in the garage, darling."

I have similarly had to break into a high school, again through no fault of my own!  My husband, who is appointment-challenged, was inside the locked building, probably marking, when the dental office had called to alert me that he was MIA.  The office staff had gone home and there was no phone access.  It is a large building but I finally found an open first-floor window and was able to complete that day's spouse-duty. Over the years, many of the dental staff have become good friends, probably out of pity.

My brother remembers seeing me exit a first floor that way when I saw a construction crew starting their chain saws to fell an ancient maple. It was hopeless, but Scott remembers noticing that I can really run if I'm mad.

Quite aside from their occasional usefulness as doors, in my experience the glory of windows is their ability to "reframe" our glimpse of life through a transparent plane.  In fact I have quite a number of digitals which I troll through from time to time, imagining a series of beautiful windows, a series which is yet to be seriously begun.  All I have to show for the concept is one older watercolour;  it was painted the spring I used hyacinths to fill the window boxes outside the bank of windows in our living room. Their heads lolling, they filled the room for weeks with the glory of their amethyst tones and gladdened my heart without offending my nose.  

I must get out my trolling rod and go fishing in  my "Paintables - Windows" file.

The talented Doug Mays uses the phrase "the mantle stage" when he's talking about the necessity of leaving a painting alone so that it can decide if it is finished or not.  I personally have always thought of this as the "piano stage" because I do tai chi in the dining room and each full turn creates an opportunity to see the new painting afresh.  At the moment the creamy French horse (title still eluding me) sits in the front bedroom, which also uses creams, but has no chance to talk to me as I have a rotten messy cold and have banished myself to the back bedroom until I'm no longer plague-ridden.  The best I can do is to take a digital and study that, as impersonally as I can manage (this being my baby, of course).  If I post it into the website's "Work in Progress" at least a comparative look is available, as there are six so far.  Having done that, I would like to add more rich creams to the mane, more speckling, and deeper shadows here and there.

Each post of a work in progress is an opportunity for me to ask "Is this closer to the target or not?" That said, art is also a moving target or a camera would have done the job.  This painting from the "Tapestry" series was on its way to high realism but I lost my heart to it somewhat earlier.  I'm glad I did.

On January 8th, 1928, Sylvia Townshead Warner observed that the Thames had flash-flooded London and filled the basement of the Tate Gallery, "which may help to settle the question of the twenty thousand Turner sketches."  Lives there an artist who does not have a cache of sketches secreted in the basement?  Those of us who love to draw often do so for recreation;  I might watch Charlie Rose and sketch the talking heads.  Once, when being audited (all was in order), I sat and drew the hapless CCRA employee while he rifled through the pile of folders;  by the end, he was more nervous than I was.  I have drawings of horses at the races and  kids at the beach,  of gorgeous flowers who remained planted, doodles near the phone , caricatures from every meeting I have not chaired and lots of life drawings.  While I certainly have not kept them all of them,  the quip about Turner's twenty thousand did strike a nerve.  Pity the one tasked with sorting and choosing and storing anyone's "keepers."  Wisely, Robert Genn consigned many pieces to the fire shortly before his death.  There is an argument for winnowing earlier as well.  For one thing it creates space, a commodity in short supply in our sweet old house.

While consigning paper to the circular file is no great feat, it requires mental toughness to destroy paintings.  Hope springs eternal that they can be fixed, rescued, reborn, and so on.  The best option, in my view, is simply to start another right on top.  This works brilliantly if and only if the offending painting was done in acrylic.  Just gesso over it and Bob's your uncle, with the bonus of some free texture.  Unfortunately, I am an oil painter and I don't think it's recommended to gesso over oil;  please correct me if I'm wrong.  


Thus,  in our basement there is only a small collection of  sketchbooks but quite a number of nice big ugly canvases, all  just daring the Thames to flood.  There were so few drawings that I was inspired to take digitals of them at least this afternoon.  


Conclusions:
1.  There are hardly any.  Turns out that I had the common sense to turf as I went.
2.  My most successful drawings are inspired by life drawing.
3.  I have absolutely no ability to draw myself.  Even if I occasionally capture the intent stare necessary to self-portraiture, Jon inevitably comments:  "Whoever that is, she scares me."
4.  I can get a fair likeness of others, thank heavens, as long as I use pencil or conte to model the contours.  Pen, she better for chairs and the like.

This is the preparatory drawing  for "Pensive"  (see "Size Matters"  27/10/14 in the archive). 

Finally, some work started.  This beautiful creature (male?  female?  under-carriage unavailable) was photographed in France recently by my talented cousin, Shelley Keele Harynuk.  I fell in love with it as much because of the creamy palette of not only the horse but of the background.  That prompted me to paint it on an unstained wooden panel and to leave the surrounding wood grain exposed.  I drew it first in chalk, then painted a red oxide mid-tone on the horse, and, finally, finished the white section of the value underpainting.  Tomorrow I hope to add the dark values.  Then I will decide how far to go.

Deciding how far to go turns out to be crucial, and not only to teenagers.  When learning the technique from Kathy Marlene Bailey, all of us struggled with infatuations.  Right now, I am besotted with the combination of red oxide and white.  Tomorrow I shall have changed my mind and fallen for a full value underpainting.  And the three days after that, no doubt I shall want to walk away when the three primary glazes are finished.  Some of us decide to stop there and occasionally I do.  Let's find out.  In the meantime I have a good digital of Stage One, which I can bemoan IF I GO TOO FAR.

It's strangely exciting to return to routine after the happy tumult of the Christmas season.  I have sharpened my pencils, lined up my pens and paid the bills.  I have washed the kitchen floor which  had increasingly resembled a Jackson Pollock.  I have put away most of the decorations and, for the first time in six weeks,  glimpsed the top of the table saw (aka wrapping station).  I have found the bird book and identified the two new arrivals at the feeder (a Carolina wren and a common redpoll).  I have stared at the bird feeder for several hours.

It seems I have run out of excuses not to begin a painting.  As I have said, for me, getting started is worse than giving birth to an elephant because I'm often not even sure that an elephant is what I'm hoping for.  In addition, facing the challenges of glaze oil never ceases to daunt me;  luckily I get so addled by the prospect of juicey colour that I meekly submit to its siren call.

Presently, there are two images which have lodged themselves in my "must do" lobe:  one concerns Tash and Nikka and the photos I took the spring that Nikka was born.  I have long since forgiven Tash for resisting every effort I had made to learn to ride;  she hid out on the back fifty whenever I showed up and churned out robust and most unladylike farts whenever I did  succeed in clambering onto her.  If, at any point, Tom had mentioned that Tash was pregnant, I would not have inflicted myself upon her.  But he didn't say.  And she didn't say.  And there we were - cranky in a fug.

Once Nikka was born, while Tash became no more fond of me, she didn't mind having her picture taken with her lovely foal so I switched gears and re-introduced myself, this time as a baby photographer.  She was in her hormonal  Happy Place and completely ignored Despicable Me and the camera.

There are four good shots of that spring, all caught on the same day.  I have painted one of them in watercolour but I think it's time to move to oil and tackle the background as well.  I have always thought yellow dandelions and green grass to be beautiful so it's time to start thinking about how to build layers of grasses.  You will be the first to know when/if I figure it out.