Artist in Residence @ Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park

This year I am enjoying the much needed isolation after 5 months of intensive and challenging projects. This is a time to reflect and simplify while make work between scattered bike rides and hikes.

A  powerful thunderstorm rages above the artist cabin, a perfect time for me to update my blog.
Here is whats up on once blank walls so far. Some pieces from last year for inspirations, and a bunch of stuff to finish and blank stuff waiting to be made into something new along the floor.

While hiking I collected a beautiful little bird skull.The reason I have a heavy bandage is that I chopped off the tip of my finger while using my new axe while super tired. Blood spurted everywhere but It is healing nicely after a week. I focused in meditation that it would grow back like an amphibian. The force is strong in me, though I may be in the nubbin club with my two best friends. The core grounds keeper here also has the same marking, Maybe its a man's right of passage. lol.

This year I decided to time lapse the progression of my paintings as I create them. I posted them to my you tube channel and have them linked below. They are short so have a quick gander.

The first painting is in the style of Russian/Greek Orthodox Christian iconography. It is done with acrylic on panel. I intended on using real gold building but did not have enough, instead I used my next favourite gold product made by Golden Acrylics. It has fantastic reflection and glint, the nearest I have found to the real thing, though considerably less expensive and fare easier to apply.

I was inspired after painting the icon to paint a larger version of a gesturing hand to represent learning. I am also excited, not only to be time lapsing my work but also with my inventory and organization that I have been able to update while working in the Artist Cabin. Exciting! Stay tuned………Definitely more to come!

Never stop improving your technique

Practice does make perfect. With art you've got to practice, practice and practice some more.

I know I need to put in more quality time to get to where I want to go artistically. I am taking another 3 day workshop with Martinho Correria titled: Studying the figure through the Masters at the Calgary School of Art at Cactus Arts Supply store. Check out their respective website for more info. Its nice to see some familiar faces as well as many new ones for this intensive in classical atelier methods of instruction. I love the private training, you always get pushed beyond the levels and learn so much, making the price worth every penny. I highly recommend these courses and others like them at Swinton's Art Supply etc. if you really want to learn artistic skills and techniques directly form those in the craft every now and again I ma delegated at the opportunity to improve my skills as a student and devote some time to improving my practice.

After the first lecture we worked on tracing gesture type drawings from old masters works to get a feel for the essence of "gesture drawings". It is challenging to remove what you know and previous skills and learn to work a different way. These gesture drawings are meant to be simple ways of conveying the weight and feeling of a model and freezing it into a moment as models tend to move even when posing for a long time. This means you have to learn to capture the feeling behind the figure being drawn.  We traced a myriad of figures done by different artists for reference.

We learned how to properly prepare a pencil and how to hold it for this type of drawing. This one was plastic composite and not wood, I was fooled at first, until I got my exact blade in it, it shaved weird. Then you make a point in the lead with some sandpaper and use smooth wrist and arm movements to create soft and curved S and C curved lines.

We practiced on a small Brague drawing example. First doing a gesture drawing to capture the feeling of the form and then moving into getting the basic shapes and proportions of the figure in place. I took additional notes during the demos to add to the invaluable handouts our instructor Martinho provided.

After a lunch of a delicious "Manwich" at the Holy smoke Grill across the street, I felt groggy with so much meat and bun in my belly. I set up my drawing board on an easel and set up the reference next to the paper another student was kind to offer me to try and work on. This pose is a little intimidating given how much time we had left in the class.

We worked on drawing our figure larger using comparative proportions. I think my guy is a little thick, in places, there is some definite tweaking needed before continuing onto the next stage. But I did manage to get the majority of the figure blocked in in the time given. I look forward to learning more in the next few days, we will see how things develop, I hope this interests you and you come back to check it out.

Ciao for now = :D