PREPARING FOR MALLORCA - Drawing With Nature

SEED POD ON TREE IN LA RIOJA

DRIED SEED POD - READY TO DRAW

 

THE OLD OLIVE TREE

 

THE APPLE TREE

At the beginning of our stay in Spain we were on a day trip with the school, hiking in the autumn woods with a group of school children. We stopped at one of the the park buildings and I found seed pods from this tree on the ground. I saved them. When they were dried I thought they might make a good drawing tool, and they did! We lived a couple of blocks from  the Parque del Ebro along the river in Logroño so in the spring, when the sun finally appeared, I would go there and draw the old trees. It was an unexpected pleasure!

 Here is a photo from a recent show where I included all the drawings, along with antique prints of trees done by artists who accompanied the survey expeditions from the 1800's. Both of us discovering and drawing trees!

TREE SURVEY, an installation of eleven ink drawings on paper and ten antique engravings

And lastly, a photograph that has been hanging in my studio for many years.

This is Brice Marden making beautiful organic line drawings with a tree branch!

   

 

 

 

 

PREPARING FOR MALLORCA - Black and White

EATING ORANGES IN THE GARDEN, ALCAZAR, SEVILLE, SPAIN

 IN ESTELA, NORTHERN SPAIN

 ALONG THE GUADLAQUIVIR RIVER IN SEVILLE

 AT THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE

TWO VIEWS OF CADIZ

At my workshop at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, we paint the first day in black and white.

It's a good way to acclimate and become acquainted with a new environment. I thought of this when we were planning a ten day trip to the south of Spain in 2012. I knew we would be tourists wanting to see the sights and not have a lot of time for painting so I packed a tube of black watercolor, a couple of brushes and a small block of paper. I enjoyed painting the man in the garden, perhaps we can get someone who is not painting to sit and read a book, pose for us.

In addition to capturing the new scene in front of you, drawing, with brush or pencil, is a way to make marks and patterns that can create a new language that says something about the landscape.

Google images of Van Gogh's drawings with a reed pen and ink.

More about this in my next post.

 

PREPARING FOR MALLORCA - Small, Medium and Large

How do you make large work when you are traveling and have to carry it back in your suitcase?

Here are a couple of suggestions for going from small to large that are also very process oriented.

View from Horsefly Mesa by Raoul Anchondo, mixed media, 50" x 70"

The artist used thirteen pieces of paper, from 9" x 11" to 28" x 40" (upper left), then

mounted them together afterwards. This was not planned beforehand but happened during the drawing process when he realized he wanted to expand it to include more of the landscape.

Field (MacDowell) by Dawn Clements, watercolor, 36" x 41"

Lynne Horning sent me a link to Clements' website. You can see from this watercolor that she is working on folded paper. I am not sure if she folds it first or after. I have heard about other artists doing this but in a different way. They work on the paper while it is folded up and in the end have a large composition (or not a composition) of different drawings all together. This is another method that is process oriented and is not overly concerned with the final outcome

   

Yagul by Meredith Nemirov, watercolor, 10" x 18"

When traveling I like to bring some pre-cut accordion folded watercolor paper. Sometimes I work in a linear fashion, left to right, other times I start in the middle. I end up with a more panoramic view of the landscape but also a variety of smaller studies on each folded section. I wonder how it would work if it was a vertical orientation?

Yagul, left section

Aspen Studies, watercolor, 9" x 20"

This one presents four different observations or ideas of looking at the trees. 

Take a look at the series, In The Garden, that Jennifer Bartlett did in the 1980's when she 
spent the winter in St. Tropez, France. She decided to work on one size of paper only,
but used a large variety of mediums to interpret the same subject. 
www.locksgallery.com/exhibitions/jennifer-bartlett2