The mess and the makings

| maggiebird

A new painting is taking shape, which means I’m making lots of color sketches at my little art desk. This is a shot of the mess and the makings.

I use a metal palette for nearly all my watercolor paintings, although sometimes I dip into a round plastic palette when I need a color that’s not in my metal palette. You can see by the stacks of yogurt containers that I eat a lot of Pavel’s yogurt.

These are a few of the studies I’ve made for this painting. The earlier ones don’t really look like anything, just blobs of color.  You can see that the Space Shuttle Endeavor is going to be part of this painting.

Don’t worry, the stained paper towel on the table has been used to mop up cadmium red and burnt sienna. It just looks like blood in the photo. Well, it looks like blood in real life too. While painting, I go through a lot of paper towels—Viva brand is my favorite—and they litter the floor around the easel. When I’m working on a particularly red-heavy painting, the drifts of  red-covered paper towels make the studio look like a scene from a Stephen King novel.

These two studies are my favorites. They will go together somehow. I’m still working that out.

And this is part of the final drawing. I spend a stupid amount of time on drawing—nearly 12 hours for this piece. But while I’m drawing, I’m also planning the painting, thinking about what I want to do. Where will I lose edges, where will I find them? How will I place the value pattern? How will I apply the paint?

I paint in my head many times before I ever put paintbrush to paper. I often dream about it in the early morning hours when I’m in that half-sleep waiting for the alarm to go off. Those are pleasant dreams, mostly, because watercolor wipes off easily in dreams.

For the love of a hound

| maggiebird

Cordelia and Jack

 

Cordelia and Jack
© Margaret Sloan 2012
Watercolor on paper

My friend Cordelia has two rescue greyhounds, a little female and a great big male. I was surprised to find just how big they are, and also, what great dogs they make for working people. She says her two dogs sleep most of the day, frolic a bit when she comes home, then need to rest up. They are lovely dogs who will take a lot of petting from the houseguest with the big camera.

It was great to spend a day with her, photographing and sketching. I got my dog fix, and had a nice long girlie chat with Cordelia.

First show!

| maggiebird

Landscape Study of Nevada desert
© Margaret Sloan 2012
Watercolor on paper

If I’ve been absent from music parties, family functions, and the blogoshpere, it’s only because I’ve been preparing for a show. My first solo show! (You can read about it on Facebook here, although I’ll be posting more about it as the time draws near. Oh yes, you can bet I will.).

I’ve been painting my brushes ragged to complete a couple more paintings, but as usual, it’s a slow process, with many studies, and lots of time spent staring and pondering. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, painting (for me) is not a relaxing weekend hobby. It’s Work.

Okay, I admit,  it’s work that I like to do, but that doesn’t mitigate the struggle of forcing my interior thoughts onto smooth white paper. It’s focused work, which means I have to take a break every couple hours and do something that’s not work, like cleaning the bathtub or doing the laundry. And yet, while I’m scrubbing, I’m still thinking about the painting, still considering colors, shapes, and brush strokes. While folding socks, I ruminate, talk to myself, and plan my next few passages.

The picture above is the landscape I’m putting into one of the paintings. Below, you’ll see a study for the man in the portrait. In my mind, he’s inseparable from the landscape where we met. When he’s finished I’ll tell you that story.

Facing down Facebook

| maggiebird

Yes, Facebook has turned my head, and with misgivings I’ve created an artist page. It is a pretty way to show my paintings, doodles, and drawings to people, and I hope that they enjoy seeing my creations pop up in their news feed. I hope to offer some work for sale soon, so I’ll let you know any news on that front too.

If you think you’d enjoy seeing my work in your Facebook feed, then please, like my artist page, subscribe if FB will let you, or just visit when you feel inclined. This link should take you there.

https://www.facebook.com/MargaretSloanArtist

https://www.facebook.com/MargaretSloanArtist

Thanks!

Maggie

Little cloud

| maggiebird
Little Cloud
Oil on Panel
© 2012 Margaret Sloan

This painting captures a fleeting hour of a Northern California morning on Windy Hill. The South Bay stretched gloriously at our feet, but I blinkered my eyes and found a less dramatic scene: the last of the morning fog drifting over a little hill. It was the kind of hill that I might have climbed when I was a child, peering in squirrel holes and looking for foxes.

These days I’m finding greater success in painting small slices of the view, in making the landscape more intimate. Limiting the painting to this small view made seeing the composition and the values easier. I was able to wrap my head around the color shifts, and win more arguments with the paint than I lost.

Maybe that’s the kind of person I am right now; my present tense has gotten smaller, more confined to small views. Once-upon-a-time I took epic (seeming to me) journeys, traveling across desert horizons and through mountains of rainforests. But now I stay home mostly, in the place where I was raised.

My friend Cynthia Brannvall (an artist whose wonderful work taps into some larger, softer universal landscape) wrote to me, “One of the things that I find so beautiful about your work are the little, beautiful moments of everyday life…in this day and age when we are assaulted with stimulation and virtual realities, I find the little and ordinary gestures of real life to be more and more precious.”

I guess for me, small is comfortable. I like the up-close view, the things seen at trailside. I find value in landscapes that are familiar to children, in the possibilities of squirrel holes, foxes, and little white clouds.

Big heart in a small package

| maggiebird

Ruth
Watercolor
© 2012 Margaret Sloan

I finally finished this portrait of my fiddler’s aunt (my aunt-in-law, I guess). She was a tiny thing, but her heart was as big as the world. She accepted me into the family with joy and kindness, even though she’d never before met me. She loved to feed people. She loved to be around people. She was funny, opinionated, and caring.

The yiddish in the painting says, “small hearts surround the big world.”  
I’d have to work to grow my heart to be as encompassing as hers.

 

The night the fish ate the circus

| maggiebird

My niece asked me to post this drawing I made for her and her sister several years ago. It came from a dream I had in which my nieces and I were called up onto the stage of a circus. (Had we seen Cirque du Soleil yet? I’m not sure.)

The dream was fun, perhaps inspired by my childhood desire to run away with the circus, a desire which had been fueled by the Disney movie, Toby Tyler. (Mr. Stubbs! Mr. Stubbs! I want to run away with you!) Then, what luck for a day dreaming 10-year old! A troupe of traveling circus performers set up a little ring in a nearby vacant lot and parked their travel trailers in our neighborhood.

My parents romantically called it a Gypsy circus. Where they really Rom? I don’t know. But, gypsy or not, they were fascinating. And when one of the little circus boys told me that he couldn’t play after dinner because he had to go do his chores—he had to feed the elephant!—I packed a hairbrush and a pair of clean underwear in my lunchbox, knocked on their trailer door, and told his mother I was running away with them to join the circus.

She was wiping a dish with a plain dishrag. She didn’t smile.  “You have a good family,” she said. “Go home.” And she closed the door in my face.

That was pretty much the end of my Toby Tyler aspirations. The next morning the circus was gone before I caught the school bus.

But dreams are a different act. In my calliope-filled dream of ringmasters in bird costumes and camels and strong men, lions and magicians, the music played and the crowd roared at our antics on stage. Then that little blue fish that you see in the bottom corner? He suddenly became a big fish. He opened his mouth and -slurp!- sucked the whole circus into his belly. And I woke up, brain on fire to draw this scene before it faded into the mental attic where dreams gather dust.

Some circus coolness

Know of a good circus? Leave a link in the comments.

Un beso del polvo

| maggiebird

Saturday I spent painting from the top of a hill where I had a great view of the bay. I love the bay, and am as proprietary about it as if I owned it outright.

This was turning out to be a rather sweet little 5×7 painting, and I was looking forward to finishing it up next Saturday. I was feeling pretty proud of myself. I put it on top of my palette saver to carry to the car, picked up the palette saver as I spied a brush I’d dropped and left on the ground.

I bent over to rescue the brush.

The painting slid off box.

The painting landed face first in the dirt.

Some of this dirt will brush off, but that smudge that looks like a kiss from the universe? It’s pretty well ground into the paint, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

Universe: 2,999,999
Margaret: 0

Happy New Year

| maggiebird

Small hearts
Watercolor
© Margaret Sloan 2012

I’ve been working with this bit of text quite a bit. The letters are Hebrew, but the words are Yiddish. In Yiddish, you would say (please forgive any mistakes in my transliteration): Dos kleine harts nemt arum di groise velt.

It means, loosely, small hearts hold the whole world.

I think it’s a good thing to post on this first day of Rosh Hashanah. In case you don’t know, that’s the high Jewish holiday when the gates of heaven open and you’ve got ten days to make or break your chance to get into the the book of life for another year.

I won’t misrepresent myself here. I am not Jewish; I’m an angry-at-G*d, disenchanted, fallen-by-the-wayside Christian. I don’t attend church, but I do attend High Holy day services with my fiddler. It makes him happy, and, truth be told, it makes me happy.

The way I understand the services I attend, we are supposed to come humbly to G*d and repent of all the bad things we’ve done the last year. But not only that; to deserve our inscriptions in the book of life, we are supposed to be nice to others (and the congregation where we attend includes the earth in the recipients to our niceness, something I can get behind wholeheartedly).

I honestly don’t know if I believe there’s a Big K*huna in heaven scribbling in a book of life, but I do think the world could use a big dose of niceness about now. I hope that in our small hearts we can cradle the world and help heal it of the anger and hate and meanness that hurts us all.

L’shanah tovah, all.

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