In the country for Easter

Quiet country life; just sketching in conte. Waiting for the chocolate eggs to fall from the sky, instead of the snow that I woke up to this morning.


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Location:Chesterville

Acquarium

Well, not sure what I'm really doing, just painting. What really is painting, anyway? Where does the boundary of it's definition lie? This more like exercise for the brush and mind.

Anyway, I've been thinking about water all week.

Studio Working

I've been spinning like mad for several weeks now, some of it completely inactive in the studio due to company at home, but some brief intervals of furious work with dubious outcomes. I think I've been thinking too much again, perhaps that tendency to obsess about things was evident once or twice.

Am planning towards showing my chessboards at the Canadian Tournament the first week of July this year, so have looked into the idea of getting prints done of the boards in particular. There is indeed a whole world of things I just don't know, that is abundantly obvious. Sigh. So many numbers. I hope to have this option figured out to lay it beside the option of having a gallery show, to see which would be more beneficial in the end.

What I have done in the studio is more exploratory than brilliant, if I was to assess it. I have two more chessboards in progress, one sculptural and one simply oil.  When painting, mostly they are I guess landscapes, or gestations of landscapes. I don't even know if they are finished, or still in progress. One is below just for an example. It's more like reflex painting, where one starts with nothing particular in mind but just a brush in hand and then lets the shoulder wander around the boundaries of the paper. Fluidity becomes of prmary importance, rather than the technical merits of memory.

 I've also been working on some non-traditiona media, like these little paper tubes my sister brought home from work. Old paper rolls of some sort - very cool really. Why? Uh, why not. I like their roundness, for a simple answer. They have no particular purpose, so will probably just be disgarded later, but in the meantime they provide a whimsical 'canvas' to paint one.

Then there is this marvellous paper (have you heard this before perhaps?) that has all these holes in it, that provides an lovely challenge to ink in and around. This is just something in progress, that I can work on even if people are here gabbing in the background. Just letting the mind wander and find interesting stories to tell from the forms inherent in the paper.

And, of course, don't mind the questionable photography. I did shoot these myself.