Riding down the broom

| maggiebird

Happy Halloween Week!

For bizarre family reasons (my father is a tried-and-true horror movie fan, and we spent Saturdays watching Bob Wilkins’ Creature Features, evenings watching Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, and Night Gallery), Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I love the scary stuff (as long as it’s not too scary).

So this week I’m promising to post every day, sending paintings of seasonal spookiness out into the blogosphere for your enjoyment. I’m the witch on the souped up broomstick, laughing like a hyena, carrying you away into the night.

I hope you enjoy the flight.

Loving the fiddle

| maggiebird

I’ve been working on this watercolor of my friend, Cyndi, holding her fiddle. Finally it’s finished (oops, except for strings. I’m going to add those using chalk).

I don’t have much to say about it right now, except that it took me longer than I expected.

Vignette camera on the Droid

| maggiebird

image

I just put the Vignette camera app on my new smart phone. It’s really fun to add all the funky effects to make it look like—gasp!—film. I expect apps like this will dislodge a smart phone-powered avalanche of arty photos that look like they were taken with an old Diana or Holga camera. I never had one of these when I was a kid, although I believe my little brother, always on the cutting edge, and freer with money than I was, had some kind of cheap camera bought from an ad in the back of a comic book. I remember he was a superstar for a while, because he had a camera, and took arty photos (even at 9 years old, he was a creative genius). I was jealous, fit to beat the band.

But now I’ve got a smart phone, and I’m going to be playing with the camera function like I’m in my second childhood. (Crazily, when I first wrote this post, I kept writing “phone” instead of “camera.” Since we all now take photos with our phones, will the word camera drop from our vocabulary?)

I love my DroidX, although I don’t like the name. It sounds like a robot. Who wants a robot except for testosterone-flushed young male gamers? I’d rather have a puppy. I expect I’m more the type for an iPhone, but there was the AT&T issue. So far, Verizon has been expensive but great.

So my droid is known as the blue puppy (it’s dressed in a blue silicon case, until Otter box finally starts making Droid cases). Then I think I’ll call it the gray dog.

Man. Can I waste a lot of time on this phone, and I don’t even play video games!

We all need to get a Flying Pig

| maggiebird

Blogger  Ricë Freeman-Zachary, at the Voodoo Lounge, once again kicked me into gear, right before a long weekend, with her post about flying pigs. If you’re an artist having trouble getting to work, I suggest you read that post. Read it now.

On that long weekend away from my day job, I had lots of time to paint and draw. Sure, I could have spent the whole long weekend watching movies, or reading chick-lit fiction, or surfing the internet (and I did actually do some of that).

But for most of the weekend, I heeded Ricë’s flying pig, the one that said, “It’s your life. You choose,” and I sat at my little drawing table and painted.

One of the things I made was the silly comic at the end of this post (you can click on it to make it bigger). I admit to having loved comics when I was a kid; I still love them, although they’re of more grown up fare now, and usually I loftily call them graphic novels. I’ve had ideas for them rolling around in my brain for some time, but had a dozen reasons why I couldn’t do it.

Bless this blogger Ricë. I don’t know her from beans. I’ll probably never meet her. But I read her blog every morning, loved her book Creative Time and Space. Sometimes, along with making me laugh so hard I snort coffee out of my nose, she inspires me to get to work. Such is the power of the internet.

Some pig.


Days of miracles and smart phones

| maggiebird
Pen and ink
Copyright Margaret Sloan

I made a phone call to my mother a couple weeks ago using Google Voice. I sat at my kitchen table and chatted into my computer. It was the coolest thing.

Mind you, it’s mainly cool because for the last  5 or 6 years I’ve been with AT&T. During that time, I’ve not been able to use the phone in my house. I’ve had to stand in the street to make a call. Yakking on the phone at my kitchen table in my pajamas, with a cuppa and unkempt hair? What a luxury.

The farm in Oklahoma where my mom grew up didn’t have electricity, let alone a phone, until 1949. When I told her I was talking on the computer, my mom laughed. “It’s a far cry from the days when I was a little girl. If we wanted to talk on the telephone, we had to walk a few miles to the one farm that had a phone. That phone was an old hand-crank phone you had to yell into.”

Last week I got a super duper smart phone, a Droid X that does just about everything except wash my car.  And yes, I can use it in the house, at the kitchen table, to make phone calls! 

We are all shaking our heads at the wonder of it, and a Paul Simon song has been ear-worming my head ever since I got this silly phone.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry

Return of the prodigal blogger

| maggiebird
Joe Pastel on Canson Mi-Tientes paper. I'm not yet finished with this. I have pages and pages of notes from Christian and Rob. Corrections like: make the background distinct from the foreground, dull down the "heavenly light" in the background, get rid of Joe's "mohawk." And lots more things to work on. Whew!

I’ve been letting this blog slide the last couple months, as I’ve been busy with other projects, plus a camping trip to Nevada.

I’ve been trying to finish up my projects from my fourth year at the Atelier (At the top of this post, you can see the last portrait I made in June), and then, just when the school year was finishing and I thought I’d have some time to rest, Christian Fagerlund (the teacher who’d taken over the last few classes at the Atelier while the usual teacher, Rob Anderson was away), offered a portrait painting workshop—6 people, 8 classes, twice a week—during the month of July.

Christian is a wonderful painter, and a brilliant teacher (I’ve been so lucky to have such wonderful teachers: Rob, David, and now Christian). Taking his class has been worth the exhaustion of driving to the East Bay twice a week during rush hour traffic. I’ve learned so much; I can feel my brain fizzing and buzzing like it’s full of 7-Up.

Now I’m taking a much-needed break from classes, and will practice what I’ve learned. That means discipline to work at home the same number of hours that I worked in classes (plus those two extra hours I spent driving to Oakland!).

I also want to get back into the swing of blogging again. I wish someone would give me a push, but alas, in the blogging world, you really have to learn to swing yourself.

Two drawings

| maggiebird

In The Art Spirit, Robert Henri says, “The most vital things in the look of a face or of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory. The memory is of the vital movement.”

Often, when setting up a long pose, I see the moment I want to capture right away; sometimes I have to watch the model for a while, even talk a little with him or her, to find what I’m looking for. And then, after the long days of model and artist assuming the same position, the pose loses that crystalline moment that interested me to begin with. I must remember to continually restate that first found emotion, that vitality of personality that captured my eye and intellect.

Gesture drawings are good for capturing initial emotions and impressions. The two drawings connected to this post were started each as 10-minute drawings. My goal when I made the sketches was to choose a composition that clarified the spirit of the pose and then get down as much information as I could while the models were there so that I could finish the sketches at home.

Things suffered: perspective, proportion, hands, foreshortening. But in general, I feel like I remembered the feelings—and the narratives—I had in my head when I composed the drawings. I wonder, what narratives do you see in these two paintings?

A sleepy list

| maggiebird

Katherine Langrish at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles has a lovely blog about The Pillow book of Sei Shōnagon, a very old book in which the author sometimes makes lists. Lists of depressing things. Lists of adorable things (duck eggs!).

I love this idea. Don’t we all love lists?

So here’s my list for tonight at bedtime:

Places I love to sleep

  • Stretched out on the front seat of my car at lunchtime
  • In an upstairs bedroom
  • In a tent by a lake in the high Sierra
  • Under a mosquito net in Mexico
  • On the deck of a sailboat on the Caribbean Ocean, under the stars.

What’s your list?

Better places to be

| maggiebird
Año Nuevo Beach

Today I woke up, still tired, and slightly depressed. The day ahead looks long and boring, and while that’s usually a good thing (it means no tremendous drama), sometimes I think my life is getting a little too boring.

I also woke up thinking about my favorite blog, Into the Hermitage, by artist Rima, who is a working artist in England. She used to live in a wonderful wheeled house, and blogged about her adventures. Now she lives in a wonderful English village, all thatchy and thick white walls. I hopped over to her site and found that she had posted about a successful selling at a wonderful fair. Good news from a wonderful artist.

We anglophiles tend to fantasize about the British Isles, filling our dreams with romantic images such as the ones Rima posts in her blog.

I posted these paintings, made last summer on a wonderful wild day on the coast, to remind myself (and any other Californians who are dreaming of other worlds) of the fantasy of our lives here on the California coast. Año Nuevo is only a short drive away, easily accessible. It’s not as medieval and thatchy as Britain, but it’s wild and beachy.

Año Nuevo Headlands