another update...

I am still working away on the paintings for April, while my studio angel, Kitty, works on the 3-D iceberg. These two paintings are almost finished (they're both 4' x 6') and this week I will attack the 8' x 13' painting of the St. John's Harbour. I hope to start painting the 3-D piece next week, and I'm counting my minutes, since I can only work when the building is open.

Here is the current state of the sculpture...

Progress

All the pieces are slowly taking shape. Kitty Drake has been helping; the sculpture now has paper on it and the Narrows has most of its underpainting.

The mulberry paper, adhered with cooked wheat paste, drew up when it dried, pulling away from the indentations in the armature. It's like a drum-- tapping different spots produces a variety of sounds. Now we are experimenting with small areas to re-form the paper to the original shape.

It's all a learning experience!

Where has the time gone? I'm working at the Rooms these days, being artist-in-residence. Working around bad weather and a bad shoulder, but working, nevertheless. These pieces will be exhibited in the 4th floor gallery with a view of the Harbour in April.

The wonderful thing about working there is having the fabulous tech staff to help with, well, technical stuff, like building stretchers and armature. I'm working on a large painting, 8' x 13', that will hang on the wall beside the big window, several smaller paintings and a 3-D piece.

From my little plaster carving, the shape was scaled up and the armature base cut from a sheet of plywood. It's seen below with the somewhat photographically skewed sketch of what will be the 8' x 13' painting of the narrows.

The painting is no longer all white, and the armature is covered with 2 layers of paper.

Here's the current state of one of the 4' x 6' pieces. More to come!

on the table this week...

My studio has been filled with paper- Duncan printing my annual calendar page and the two of us madly assembling copies of Notes (toward a poem about play) by Don Austin, published by Running the Goat. The launch was last night, so today I can move on to painting. I'll be trying to finish a few more icebergs before I leave to visit my dad for the holidays.

The text is a prose poem about play, so I designed it to be read as a codex that unfolds into a game board. It has been four and a half years in the making, due to technical difficulties you don't want to know about. The text was set and letterpress printed at Running the Goat, the game board was screen printed at Living Planet in St. John's.

The boards are hinged in pairs, then the text pages are glued on. Then those boards are hinged in pairs, and the first sections of the game board are glued on. Last, the two four-board sections are hinged, and the last game board section glued on. Now that we have completed 20+ (the edition is 90), we have a system, and there's a little less paranoia about gluing something backwards or upside down. I still won't push it- better to stop when the focus wanes and not screw anything up!

If you want to know more about this project, see http://www.runningthegoat.com/notes.html

As for my method...

I work from photographs. I have tried keeping a sketchbook, doing working drawings and preliminary paintings on canvas, but those things don't work for me. My field photos (taken with my trusty Nikon FM2) record what I found interesting and serve to jar my memory. I draw loosely, directly on the canvas, with thinned paint and a brush, and in the process of mixing and applying paint the paintings take on a life of their own.

For this series, most of the iceberg photos are from my 20-year collection, mostly taken along the Avalon peninsula. The bird's-eye-views come from the archives at Provincial Aerospace, the company that does observation for Environment Canada and the offshore oil rigs. Friends who have photos have generously offered them to me, and I've found a few on the internet. The photos get cropped, reversed, changed in scale or colour in the painting process; sometimes an iceberg is moved to a different coast or sent to sea to make the painting work.

I love the bird's-eye views. Early in my career, I did a series of still life drawings and paintings from objects (often fruit on a plate or in a bowl) which were placed on the floor by my feet because I didn't have a table in my studio. Periodically I go back to that set-up. The slight feeling of vertigo, the out-of-kilter-ness of seeing something on the wall that should be down, is interesting to me.

Off to walk the dogs and greet the day!

Jumping in...

I set up this account in July, thinking summer would be the perfect time to ease myself into the world of blogging. I didn't anticipate the anxiety making the first post would create. I am seldom daunted by the presence of a blank canvas, but this blank rectangle on the computer screen had me stymied.

I have procrastinated very well for these past four months, and, now that November is here, I realize that if I don't just post SOMETHING I will NEVER start. So here I am!

I have been painting icebergs this year. They come from far away and no one is driving them. They are huge clumps of ice whose final transformation we sometimes get to see from shore, after they have travelled thousands of miles. Sometimes they appear in herds and float south along the shore like a parade of animals; sometimes I strain my eyes toward a tiny reflective speck on the distant horizon only to realize that it's just a transport ship.

Like the fog in Newfoundland, icebergs are an unpredictable and mysterious presence. Here are some of my efforts to date. I feel a bit adrift, as if I were sending a message in a bottle out into the ether. Anyone out there?