September always hits the ground running, the highlight being our annual art-camp weekend at Geneva Park.  Fun, WOW.  Over-stimulation, DOUBLE PLUS UNGOOD.  But if the title baffles you, I recommend you read the post of March 4, 2019  - “Earplugs as a Cultural Icon” (click on April 2019 under Archive in the right column)

Let’s assume that the vast majority of the 120 artists gathered there have short alleles and that we had been careful to assure that the previous week was quiet and restful, with lots of time to sleep, exercise, eat carefully…yada yada.  And was mine?  Well, NO actually.  This year it had been particularly packed and stressful.  I should know better than to do this but there you go.

To make things worse, I wasn’t going alone, but was packing for triplets.  On Tuesday, I had realized to my horror that I hadn’t even done the rendering for two of the three portraits I hoped to finish over the weekend.   I also needed to transform the drawings on canvas into value underpaintings, which then had to dry.  And of course then there would follow three  (x 2) transparent primary layers, each of which would also need to dry thoroughly.  Yikes!! I could already feel my alleles shrinking.  And I had to remember to pack all of the triplets’ essentials --  pigments, mediums, drop sheets, lights, shapers, brushes, brush cleaners, et cetera.  Theoretically, I could borrow a missing item, but your kids and their mom are used to their own stuff.

By Friday morning, had the Sainted Judy not driven, I’m not sure I could have but she did and we found ourselves lakeside that afternoon.  Phew.  We unpacked, organized our gear and got ready for our traditional cocktail hour before supper.  Amid the laughter, the junk food, and the toasts, it emerged that we were all in varying degrees overtired and jangled.  I felt so much less alone that I made a mental note to have t-shirts printed up and distributed the week before next year’s art camp reading  “SO SOON OLD;  SO LATE SCHMART.  THINK AHEAD!”

Which brings me to the issue of food.  The back of the Tee could read ‘SO SOON FAT.”  I doubt that I am the only artist who eats her own weight at art camp.  There is food everywhere you look, and for someone who w/couldn’t eat until I hit puberty  (you try eating when you’re not hungry), I am now someone for whom the butter calls my name.  The only reason I don’t overeat normally is that it makes me feel horrible.  Next year I must try to remember that and the fact that it consequently interrupts my sleep.    What can I say?  Short-allele-ers  are fragile flowers.

Judging by the lack of conversation at breakfast, we all felt a bit ragged.  And it was only Saturday morning of the major work day, a day begun and interrupted only by yet more overeating.  Porridge, bacon and eggs, cinnamon buns, full-bore coffee, and fruit salad started my day.  Feel free to shower me with abuse.  I have to learn.

Fragile flowers also crave quiet time.  This is not quite the same as concentration or even digestion.  Every artist responds with a wry grin when someone says, “It must be so relaxing to paint.”   Well, it’s not.  Sure, painting has elements of deep meditation and complete absorption - "flow" - but they are intimately allied with intense problem-solving and even physical work.  We create art because it’s too wonderful not to, not because it’s a way to kick back like couch potatoes.

If we had thought we were tired the night before, you should have seen us overeat again at supper, conversations polite but disintegrating into incoherence as we grimly chewed.  Thankfully, the fruit of hard work was there as the walk-around that evening proved.   Even in workshops where everyone painted the same scene, every richly-covered canvas was different, even viewed through the lens of the heartburn I so richly deserved.  Good grief!  What am I - ten?

When we packed up on Sunday morning, you will understand that I am relieved to have misplaced only one whole bag of gear — pigments, in particular, if you’ve seen it.  Dream prophecy (or mine at least) proved unreliable, as it did not show up behind the kitchen door this morning.  With any luck, it won’t have to drag its own way home like the dead son in “The Monkey’s Paw.” But even if the bag is irrevocably gone, the weekend was as always worth its annual assault on my nervous system.  At present, I am endeavouring to apologize to my digestive system.  But take heart, those of you who were also there and are similarly occupied.  Like phoenixes, we artsy-fartsies will rise again, fluff up our short-boy alleles and live to make each other laugh another day.  Thanks and love to all old friends and new for  Geneva Park 2019.   

​I’m just back from a holiday where I accomplished absolutely nothing.   I slept late, binge-watched Netflix, and read a gazillion books -- all without leaving home. I walked in fragrant gardens and towering forests while accompanied by my beloved Theodore.   My holiday required neither airports, nor time changes nor strange beds.  It was quite perfect and the the first time in months I feel rested.

But inevitably I reached the point where I was boring myself, let alone any poor soul stuck in my company (sorry, Darling).  This, I have come to recognize,  is a sign that I need to start a new painting, probably a  portrait.

It kills me that I am drawn to faces, where so many things can go, oh, so wrong.  The existence of facial recognition software makes the point that exact measurement is sufficient to identify one face out of millions.  Theoretically, all I need to do is to pull out the callipers.  (I often think of the famous story about Colville when his wife answered a reporter’s question about what he was working on by replying “I think he’s about to start a new painting.  He was measuring the dog this morning.”).  Because correct proportions and relationships are vital to portraiture,  I usually take the time to superimpose a grid as a template for free-hand drawing.  If I’’m lucky enough to get mostly everything right,  the human eye, which performs facial recognition unconsciously and perfectly, will not shout “Who the hell is that?” when confronted with the image of someone it actually knows.

A big ”however” follows.  If portrait painting were nothing more than careful measurement , cameras would have replaced paintings completely a century ago and live action animation would have been perfected.   Even when proportion-perfect, portraiture in oil is a brute exercise.  That same exactly-proportioned face is a mobile canvass of minute muscular movements.  In older faces, characteristic expressions have generally etched themselves into laugh lines or practised squints, but no matter the age, unless one has had too much “work” done and ended up with a frozen visage, faces are naturally mobile.   Having to work from multiple digitals is scary but often necessary to attain this marriage of appearance and expressed personality.

I will stop here for now, because the portrait that called me yesterday is in those early stages that are mostly about drawing and  some modelling of shape through burnt umber, red and yellow glazing.   All that I have done other than that is to establish the iconic turquoise glasses, whose colour will be echoed in the jewelry to come much later.  It's still really rough -- lots more fine-tuning and multiple layers to come.   

​More about “Masochism” aka “The Art of Portraiture” next week.  If you see that I have changed the subject, it might mean that the underpainting went south and is now cowering in a corner of the basement or worse.  Pray for us both.

By the way, if you live in Southern Ontario, do go out to your garden tonight after dark.  Fireflies everywhere!!

Even though I was half-expecting it, the presence of a large front-end loader up on our lawn in front of the studio still came as a surprise.  It was the deep growling vibration which gave it away.  For four months there have been machine sounds on all of the streets near us but the metal monsters maintained a polite distance on the far side of the tree line near the mailbox.  Today was different.  I realized why the City had sent out scouts several years ago to document any existing cracks in our house.  No kidding.  A glass paperweight underscored the point by committing suicide from the stone mantel.

Any thought of painting today evaporated.   Then, as the windows rattled, I started to think about it.  It might have been a great day to paint on yupo paper with watercolours. As you know, yupo does not absorb water, so the pigment dries in place and can be easily lifted if needed;  most of us consider this a huge plus.  On the other hand, if you move that new painting before it has dried, your new creation might repaint itself as you are driving home.  Had I only thought of it in time, I could have painted a dog today and ended up with a jungle.    Or vice versa.  Or an egg beater.  The possibilities are endless.  So many missed opportunities in this short life.

I was, however, relieved not to have been painting in oil today.  Especially during the final glazes when the proportion of oil to pigment is higher, a freshly painted section can sag and harden that way if left in a vertical position.  This time of the year when the angle of light is almost flat and a painting on the easel is completely reflective and blinding in the late afternoon, I have a hard time judging how much oil is too much.  Sags are a permanent disaster unless you are prepared to wait a couple of years to sand them out.

Mary Pratt has a practical solution to this problem.  After a day of painting, she places the painting flat on the floor to dry.   Mind you, I doubt she has a dog.   With Theodore in mind, I manoeuvre the wet canvas past the cream wing chairs by the fireplace and try to drop it in front of the pilot light.  And there it lies today, safely protected from sagging yet free to recreate itself with abandon.  After all, it is not quite finished and may have some opinions of its own.

Come to think of it, maybe I should have stretched out in front of the fireplace myself.

Yada, yada, yada.  I keep nattering about portraits and have yet to begin one.  In my defence, I am in the mood to do something big, if only to take my mind off the machine noise which promise to last four or five more months.  If it helps, think of this as a character study.

I took the shot in Cathedral Grove this fall thanks to my cousins, Shelley and Jack, both brilliant photographers.  When my battery failed, Shelley handed me a wonderful camera to use.  It felt like winning the lottery.  The gigantic Douglas firs and Sitka spruce towered over us but ironically it was at ground level where I found the most arresting beauty.  This ancient,  bark gleaming in deep jewel tones, has robed herself in hanging mosses.  Whether or not the tangle of roots belongs to her, their sinuous blue grace enhances and counterpoints the gorgeous centenarian, who might easily pre-date Columbus.  

It took an entire day but the grisaille, which was a real stinker to sort out, was finished yesterday.  Now I am anxiously waiting for it to dry so I can start glazing on the transparent primaries.

Scale remains the main problem.   While the maple leaves and the trunk might pass for sugar maple, in fact, those leaves have been dropped by another true Pacific rainforest giant - acer macrophyllum — big-leaf maple, whose leaves can reach 12” across. Turning bright yellow in fall, they punctuate the multitude of greens in the landscape.  I suppose I could insert five Skye terriers end to end to convey the enormity of this tree, but, as always, I'm open to a better suggestion!

A few posts back I wrote about da Vinci’s sfumato or smoky softness of line.  Because I so love the results, my most recent landscapes are all about figuring out how to create this effect.  I’m still not sure whether Leo always painted wet-in-wet oils but even if he didn’t, I still find it working this method promising.  As you know, that’s why I prefer oil to acrylic, which not only dries while you stop to adjust your ponytail clip, but even has the impudence to alter its colour, for heaven’s sake.  Of course the car, my clothing, the living room fireplace where I lean canvases to dry more quickly all bear witness to oil’s willingness to move but at least they are emblazoned with colours I chose.

The original image of the Rocky in winter had such a quietness to it that, while I built it the painting as usual, I strove to keep each layer somewhat loose.  Only the open water  and some cliff crevices approach defined contours and even there I softened edges.  The surface is still pretty wet and reflective but you get the idea.  I feel as though I'm on the right track.  Next up:  actually get back on the horse and explore this technique with portraiture.  Gulp.

There’s been a lot in the news about da Vinci lately;  in fact a new biography characterizes him as possibly the most “diversely talented” human being ever.  Quite apart from his brilliance of invention, often centuries ahead of his time, da Vinci’s paintings continue to fascinate us.  The Mona Lisa is not a particularly beautiful woman but the way he rendered her image completely elevates the painting.


Lighting was part of the magic:  “You should make your portrait at the fall of the evening when it is cloudy or misty, for the light then is perfect.”   As a result, there are no strong tones anywhere.  Everything is muted, softened and a mood of calm dominates.


That is not to say there is a no detailed underpainting.   This is particularly noticeable in his “cartoon” (or drawing) of “Virgin and Child with Ste. Anne.”   Graceful but distinct lines of the drawing anchor the portraits.  I love the fact that the faces are exquisitely accurate;  people do not look alike and art with generic faces falls short for me.  He mustn’t have thought  feet were important — here they are crudely depicted, as is Ste. Anne’s hand (which he was probably having trouble placing) and the women’s headscarves.


Yet this solid linear structure is brought to glowing three-dimensional  life by means of softened darks and lights.  This kind of application is called sfumato --  “smokiness, ” which looks as if it might have been rubbed on by hand (we can see his palm print in one painting).  Again, in the fully painted major works, this sfumato dominates the work, and is achieved by multiple glazes using earth tones — ochres, siennas, umbers - on top of a restricted palette .   Martha Stewart’s “duck egg” palettes would be right at home.

I’ve been in the mood to return to portraiture.  Da Vinci reminds me that there’s nothing harder or potentially more beautiful.  Wish me luck.

Thirty Rock had a great early episode about Jack and Kenneth.  Jack, the boss who knows everything, brags that he always wins at poker because of his ability to spot the “tell” — the gesture which betrays someone's hand.  Ironically Kenneth can beat him because, of course, he completely lacks deception and the signs which reveal it.

As a sometime portraitist, I am on the hunt for a different kind of “tell”  — the look that hints at that person’s essence.  You rarely find these in a studio photograph, although exceptional photographers like Yousuf Karsh and Tony Hauser come to mind.  Perhaps it is because we are most ourselves when doing what we love.  Neither Rachel nor Leslie, the two musicians, were thinking about anything but the music.

The "Tell" need not be a facial expression.  My “Reading the River” series created itself.  I began to notice that simply being on a river was sufficient for many to show themselves.   Here are three with a common element -- the presence of a fishing rod, a directional bias in the posture,  and the complete absence of photo-shyness.  

True confession.  I wore orthopaedic shoes —brown Doc Martin’s, I guess —for what felt like forever.  Age seven to twelve, actually, at which point I refused to embarrass myself further.  My flat feet seemed to have been reshaped from duck prints to what my love calls "your Egyptian feet” — always ending with “I don’t know how they hold you up”).

But my feet are making duck prints again and my back stopped speaking to me at noon.  Yet again I am in deep water with no land in sight (although the duck feet might come in handy).  Turns out that “It seemed like a good idea at the time” is a dangerous way to choose subject matter.

Little girl in white dress.  What could possibly go wrong?

The fact that her skirt was tulle apparently registered enough for me to identify it in the last post.  I ADORE tulle.  If anybody ever gave me a ballet tutu I would probably never take it off.  Thousands of hints have failed to produce a tulle anything and thus I am reduced to painting it on others.

Loving it and painting it are different continents.  Today the charm of the tousled layers has come head to head with the sorting out of said layers. Cross-eyed trying to establish just how many tulle overskirts she is wearing and where they do and don’t overlap, I am driven by the grim truth  that, if I get it wrong, the painting won’t read right.    

So this means returning to first principles.  Yes, the glaze oil process as I practise it necessitates least five separate layers of paint.  And yes, that allows for corrected rendering at least four times.  But it has been my experience that getting the drawing right at the beginning makes the difference and that means paying close attention to detail and line at every stage.  Portraits are, of course, the most dependent on exact rendering.  (You will remember that my lapse of judgment chose to paint a portrait surrounded with tulle.)  I stood at the easel today for three hours and staggered through the drawing.

That propelled me into the grisaille, or value study, which establishes the tonal structure like a sepia-tone photograph.  Nothing slapdash here either.  I have learned the hard way that careless brushstrokes will return to haunt me.  So whether I am painting a leaf or a nose, I try to imagine the “grain” of the area and echo that with my brush.  Again, the damn tulle.  Four more hours for my arches to sink.

Our marriage has precious few secrets.  But I don’t remember anything in our vows which said I couldn’t keep a small dark chocolate stash for those late afternoon duck-print moments.

As the cedar-strip canoe painting nears completion, I have been re-establishing its focal points.  Unquestionably, the deep-toned wood of the canoe dominates;  it is the bride of this event.  The bridesmaids take the form of  two long-dead cedar logs; maybe we should reconsider them as grandmothers. Truth be told, the bride is a bit long in the tooth herself.

Her first posthumous life began with Jon’s family forty-five years ago.  Bridie didn’t get a lot of use, perhaps because her first outing (in Algonquin Park) involved a snowstorm in August.  That consigned her to a spot in the backyard under an enormous oak which, when it succumbed to old age, landed on her.  Jon and I claimed the body and decided to fix the old gal.  The canvas skin was irreparable so we set out to fibreglass her.  I do not recommend this.  First of all, it added 15 pounds of weight and NOBODY wants a portly canoe. To make things worse, the process of fibreglassing killed the grass in our backyard;  we spent the next five years with a canoe-shaped dead zone. So Fatso is now a flat-water day-tripping kind of gal, redeemed only by the elegance of her lines and the transparent siennas of her hand-built frame.   Always a good girl, never fast.

Rounding out the wedding party are  the pale coltsfoot leaves (which I softened because I found them too strong) and dark but glowing river rocks.    Of tertiary interest, they are present but unobtrusive  and reward the eye with some low-key interest.  Check.

The biggest problem in this painting was unity.  The water near the canoe was so slow as to reflect blocks of sky;  further to the left, however, the current picks up and breaks the surface into myriad wavelets.  Thanks to the input of three dear friends, all of them good painters, I was reminded that the sky blue needed to be substantially present there as well.  They also reminded me that the bride sets the palette so the sienna needed to appear more often in the painting.   Check.

I think we are might be ready to head for the church.

Have you ever lived with an oil painting that was brand new when you got it?   Until I actually began painting in oil, I had not.  In fact, it was two or three years after I completed my first glaze oil that I recognized the subtle and wonderful metamorphosis oil canvases undergo.

At first, the surface is all shine and reflection.  That alone was enough reward for me at the beginning.  One of the frustrations I had had with watercolour was the loss of glossy colour as the paper dried.  Acrylic seemed no better, usually going flat, and it even had the nerve to darken as it dried.  But oil — well, hello!! Unfortunately,  an oil painting is a perfect devil to try to photograph right away, as there is always some reflection or glistening, no matter in what plane you choose to photograph it.  My careening off the buffet in July was a direct result of that problem;  out of desperation, I had laid a large painting on the floor in order to photograph it from a minimum of direct (and therefore reflective) light.  Having failed spectacularly to descend successfully from my aerie, I am just grateful that I avoided landing on the canvas — remember those Wile E. Coyote runs in mid-air?  Well, they work.

The great news is that oil paintings age slowly and with infinite grace.  The surface will age into a satin neither matte nor glossy but simply aglow.  I have realized that when I attended many a formal dinner dances in university, I was always in peau de soie, which had that same low and lovely sheen-- proving that not only is our aesthetic sense pretty much consistent but, if we are patient, life  will burnish our oil paintings into a canvas wrapped in peau de soie.  Such happiness.

And that is why I paint in oil.  Just one more reason to learn patience.  Bonus: I am really unlikely to dribble the main course onto it.