7 hours

I have until 7 pm this evening to complete 3 paintings.

This on top of making 3 dozen scones and banana bread for cricket tea tomorrow. I haven't made a cricket tea for a couple of years on account of having a very spirited toddler who was in the habit of running off with all the chocolate crispie cakes (a cricketing favourite).
Maddy is still in the habit of forcing her way to the front of the queue to get the pick of the cakes but I can't avoid my turn any longer.
There is quite a science to it and you have to cater for about 30. This involves 4 loaves of bread, an industrial size pack of tea bags and 2 kilo of sugar, at least 3 homemade cakes (if you want to be taken seriously) and if you are feeling particularly Delia Smith.....homemade egg mayonnaise sandwiches and something with chutney. Avoid anything with salad.....I digress. Where was I? Oh yes. 3 paintings.

I'm a member of Eynsham Arts Group and we meet on the last Friday of every month. (tonight). We often have guests come in to give talks and tonight Steve Taylor, who runs his own printing business, will be giving a talk on Fine Art Giclee Printing. Not only that, but he has offered to produce a print test for one of our members free of charge. We each can bring up to 3 orginals from which one will be selected to go into a draw to select a lucky recipient.

The images ideally should not be varnished or have a reflective medium (which excludes all the completed work I have in my studio). Hence painting 3 new ones without (a) gold or (b)varnish.

Its midday now and I'm hoping to sneak into the studio this afternoon while my children play contentedly and without the need for intervention and/or refereeing in the garden where I can keep an eye on them from my studio. I know. I am an eternal optimist. Wish me luck....I'll post the results later on.


......later on.
I have finished two out of the three. I really don't like the third one so I'm abandoning it for now and I'll just take two along to the meeting tonight.

Here they are drying in my kitchen.
I chose familiar subject matter!!

Another portrait of self

I often think of myself as some kind of flower.
Most often as an aging tulip. Ruby red in parts still, but with petals beginning to disarray. I love the brightness and colours still....a little brassy but with what I would like to consider some class.

But enough of this navel gazing. I think its time to dust off the overalls and join my family down the cricket field for this year's beer festival.

Calico skies

Occasionally I get requests for paintings that are interpretations of childrens' favourite nursey rhymes or songs. I have also been known to paint the odd bedroom wall. This is an interpretation of Calico Skies by Paul McCartney.

That was the week that was

Its been very manic chez Cook recently....entertaining children 24/7 and being a WAHM have proved very challenging this week. Add to that an incontinent dog, a cat that makes Sweeny Todd look moderate and a shortage of wine and its no wonder my left eye keeps twitching. Its not all bad news as I have completed some works which I'll be posting over the next few days. Having a sleepless 3-year-old means I have only but a snatched moment to post.

Here is the commission from a husband to his wife.
I was aiming for restful and loving.
Its quite big.....45 x 60 cm and I am especially pleased with the stamens. If you double click to see the larger image you hopefully will see what I mean.

More to post tomorrow.....for now my attention is being most vocally demanded elsewhere. Sigh.

PictureDreams is spreading its wings

Very soon, I shall be featuring guest artists on my website. As well as offering hand printed cards and more limited edition original paintings for sale.

I hope my customers will enjoy the wider variety of work for sale.

As a taster, how about this?
Its a digital painting by an up and coming artist Clare Brunwin who is currently studying BA Hons in Fine Art at The University College for the Creative Arts in Canterbury (previously known as The Kent Institute of Art and Design). Definitely someone to watch.

I should have included some more information with this - sorry. The canvas is A1 in size and called ‘Turmoil’. It was produced using a photograph and a outline of a face, scanned into the computer and manipulated using wellknown photo and illustrating software. Special effects were added in and then the finished work printed onto canvas using a computer printer with matte finish.

Another Limited Edition

Number 1 is for a special lady celebrating her 99th birthday. Her favourite flower is the fuschia, and since she is danish, the flowers *had* to be red and white.!!

Its all Greek

The meaning behind all the intertwining flowers I've been painting recently is probably quite obvious. They represent people, or more accurately, lovers.

Inspiration for these came from a story from Ovid I recall reading over and over as a youngster. I was (and still am) fascinated by Greek mythology.

Zeus and Hermes disguised themselves as poor peasants and visited a small town. They began asking the people of the town for a place to sleep that night. But "all the doors bolted and no word of kindness given, so wicked were the people of that land."

Except for one humble home.

The disguised Gods came upon the rustic cottage of Baucis and Philemon. Although they were very poor, they gave Zeus and Hermes what they had to eat and drink. Baucis noticed that although she had refilled her guest's cups many times, the pitcher of wine was always full. Realising that their guests were in fact gods, Baucis and Philemon knelt before them begging indulgence for their simple home and fare. Philemon thought of catching and killing the goose that guarded their house and making it into a meal for the guests. But when Philemon went to catch the goose, it ran onto Zeus's lap. Zeus said that they did not need to slay the goose and that they should leave the town. He was going to destroy the town and all the people who had turned him away. He said Baucis and Philemon should climb the mountain with him and not turn back until they reached the top.

After climbing the mountain, Baucis and Philemon looked back on the town and saw that it had been destroyed by a flood. However, Zeus had turned Baucis and Philemon's cottage into an ornate temple. The couple were also granted a wish; they chose to stay together forever and to be guardians of the temple. They also requested that when it came time for one of them to die, the other would die as well. Upon their death, they were changed into an intertwining pair of trees, one oak and one linden, standing in the deserted terrain, forever in each other's arms.

Elusion

I have been working on this lily canvas for some time...in between holidays, crimson paint shortage, and the general chaos that accompanies school holidays when you're a WAHM.

This week I decided I wanted to change it. It didn't sit right and the right feel was eluding me.

So I redrew.


Then I reblocked the colours to build some texture.


And now I am putting the life back into the petals.

I should be up all night finishing this. I have taken the paint beyond the boundaries of the petals to give the feeling of sweep and flow. When I add the next layer of background I will redefine the flower again. I paint most of my flowers this way....they come and go on the canvas while I build up their structure. I find it difficult to paint something within a boundary. Thats just colouring in.

Red

Here is that huge red painting with the background completed. I'm not sure how well the photo will show the gold, you might have to click on it to see the texture properly.

People who paint, meditate

Perhaps thats true. I am in the studio at the moment trying to recreate IKB (international Klein blue) as its the perfect colour to introduce to a triptych I'm working on.

This blue is extra special. You can never truly represent it on a screen, but face to face it draws all the light from the room and the blue seems to pulse back at you. If you are interested in seeing more of Klein's work, a good place to start is at the website www.yvesklein.org
and if you ever happen to find yourself in Nice, you must visit the Museum of Modern Art there, which has an entire floor dedicated to this artist's work.
Apparently he died young - at 34 - suddenly and tragically from a heart attack following a bad review from a critic. Sobering thought for all of us.

Blue

Remember I always go on about Yves Klein Blue?
Well here it is:
According to Wikipedia....

Many of his early paintings were monochrome and in a variety of colours. By the late 1950s, Klein's monochrome works were almost exclusively in a deep blue hue which he eventually patented as International Klein Blue (IKB, =PB29, =CI 77007), although the colour was never produced commercially.

As well as conventionally made paintings, in a number of works Klein had naked female models covered in blue paint dragged across or laid upon canvases to make the image, using the models as "living brushes". This type of work he called Anthropometry. Other paintings in this method of production include "recordings" of rain that Klein made by driving around in the rain at 70 miles per hour with a canvas tied to the roof of his car, and canvases with patterns of soot created by scorching the canvas with gas burners.

Klein and Arman were continually involved with each other creatively, both as Nouveaux Réalistes and as friends. Both from Nice, the two worked together for many decades and Arman even named one of his children after Yves Klein.

Sometimes the creation of these paintings was turned into a kind of performance art—an event in 1960, for example, had an audience dressed in formal evening wear watching the models go about their task while an instrumental ensemble played Klein's 1949 The Monotone Symphony, which consisted of a single sustained chord.^[2][3]

Immaterial works

Le Vide displayed at the Galerie Iris Clert

“

Recently my work with color has led me, in spite of myself, to search little by little, with some assistance (from the observer, from the translator), for the realization of matter, and I have decided to end the battle. My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner, in my next Parisian exhibition at Iris Clert's.

”

In another act that became known as an Yves Klein artwork, he offered and managed to sell empty spaces in the city in exchange for gold. He wanted his buyers to experience The Void by selling them empty space. In his view this experience could only be paid for in the purest material: gold. In order to restore the "natural order" that he had unbalanced by selling the empty space (that was now not "empty" anymore), Klein threw the gold into the river Seine.

Aero works

Le Saut dans le Vide (Leap into the Void)

Klein is also well known for a photograph, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) [1] , which apparently shows him jumping off a wall, arms outstretched, towards the pavement. Klein used the photograph as evidence of his ability to undertake unaided lunar travel. In fact, "Saut dans le vide" was published as part of a broadside on the part of Klein (the "artist of space") denouncing NASA's own lunar expeditions as hubris and folly.

Klein's work revolved around a Zen-influenced concept he came to describe as "le Vide" or in English: the Void. Klein's Void is a nirvana-like state that is void of worldly influences; a neutral zone where one is inspired to pay attention to ones own sensibilities, and to "reality" as opposed to "representation". Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art - paintings, a book, a musical composition - but then would take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell, as it were. In this way he tried to create for the audience his "Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility". Instead of representing objects in a subjective, artistic way, Klein wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence. Klein's work strongly refers to a theoretical/arthistorical context as well as to philosophy/metaphysics and with his work he aimed to combine these. He tried to make his audience experience a state where an idea could simultaneously be "felt" as well as "understood".

Well. There you go. xx

Wishing stones

Being inspired (again) by my love of aboriginal art. These are my wishing stones.


They might not make much sense. But they do to me. Each one represents a wish I've made and a stone I've collected and this picture serves as a reminder to me in my studio that anything is possible if you believe it to be.

Floods

Our village has been under severe flood warning alert for a week now.
I was a bit worried about the studio as its lower than the house and reached from the garden. Which is across a road and field from this:

This is Eynsham CC Cricket Pavillion. To give you some idea of the depth of the water - the pavillion is raised 4 feet off the ground on stilts (which are submerged).

Thankfully the water didn't rise much further and sandbags weren't needed outsde the studio door after all. A flooded studio isn't the end of the world in the grand scheme of things and I really feel for those who are suffering hardship and loss, and on a lighter note in Lucy's case - a lack of tea.

New ideas

I was lucky enough to be given a set of lino tools the other day and have been pondering on designs for some limited hand printed runs...to be sold either as cards or prints to be framed.

I did a couple of drawings in ink (I love my Faber Castell Pitt pens), and with the help of a well known paint program, scanned then coloured them in to see how they'd look as lino cuts using just 3 colours.

The first two are possibles, the last blue one is a scan from a gardening catalog which I messed around with. I think is too complex to use as a lino design. But would make a fantastic canvas painting. Hmm. Be interested to hear what others think.


I love the blue in this one. It reminds me of the Klein blue I saw so much of in the South of France last year.

Limited Edition Back to Black

I have painted a limited run of 25 of these on canvas paper.
They will be on sale on the website after the weekend. After these sell, I will paint no more of them so if you would like to order one before they go on general sale, please email me.

Each one is mounted and backed and ready to frame. The overall size is 10 x 10", and the price is £35 including UK delivery.

Escape

Lost myself in a giant canvas this morning. I am painting a super-size version of this:The canvas is 40 x 40 inches and almost overwhelms the easel. My first task is to build in the rich red/gold background. This is physically hard work as I put on gold first than work red into the wet paint until I almost work it back off the canvas again. I am going to do this a few times to build in the texture.

This is the result of the first working. Two hours of hard labour :-)

The photo is at an angle as the studio isn't big enough for me to get far enough away from it to fit.

Where does it all come from??

Just spent 2 hours clearing out the studio and once again I fill a large bin bag with detritus and petrified insects from a month in the studio.

My Plan.
I am on a mission to get another gallery to represent me, as well as get some more exhibitions. So, part of The Plan, is to get organised in my work space. I find it incredibly difficult to keep the studio (or myself for that matter) tidy when I'm in the middle of painting. I figure I make up for it by having the occasional blitz.A couple of weeks ago Lorna asked to see my sketchbook and I said I didn't have one....completely forgetting about this which has lain hidden. Its a book of all the 'paintlets' I've ever done. Some of them never made it into canvases and I spent a lovely hour going through all the hundreds of designs. I am going to revisit a few, especially for lino cuts. So Lorna...if you want a look see...let me know.

However, so much for clearing out all my tenants......2 spiders are back already!! They must like my taste in music...............

Flow

Last night was a busy studio night. I set to work on the pink lillies I'd blogged earlier as a paintlet.
This canvas is 45 x 60 cm so there is plenty of room to get some nice sweeping brush strokes going. If I can avoid it, I prefer not to draw on the canvas first, and develop the subject straight on the surface. You get a much more organic feel to the paint, and its a good way to build up the colours.

All the more fun when you stick some loud music on. This was painted to some vintage David Bowie, and it was great for loosening up after painting in miniature.

Back to Black

This idea started life as a large canvas, but got put to one side. In a moment of whimsy I painted this last night as a card instead....its 13 cm square and quite a challenge to paint. I'm used to large canvases so it this was a good exercise in painting discipline to paint small.

Card painting

PictureDreams will soon be offering limited edition handprints and cards in a few weeks. I was working on this handpainted version as a birthday card for a friend but I think I got carried away with the colour and its too.......well, too paisley is what springs to my mind.

I started off just half doodling with a chinese ink pen then made the fatal error of attempting to colour it in. This design is better suited to a suicide print lino cut with fewer colours.

Sometimes less really is more ;-)