This is one of the new paintings I'm working on. I thought I would post some photos as it progresses.

First, the basic underpainting to cover the canvas.

Then adding colour and detail a bit at a time to build the image. I'm working on the rocks in the foreground and will have it nearly finished before I go back to complete the water and sky.

I'll add more photos as I go along. I am working on 6 paintings at the same time, and I rotate through them so they progress simultaneously. When the foreground is all in, this one will be on the wall for a few days to dry while I work on bringing the others to a similar state. 

Stitching. Check!

The next step of the binding process is now completed!

Gluing spines and preparing covers next...

Printers' Fair

I have been overwhelmed (in a delighted way) by all the positive response to the news that the City of St. John's selected one of my images for the facade of the Civic Centre downtown. I am truly amazed and grateful to everyone who has liked and commented on the announcement!

(Press release here: http://www.stjohns.ca/media-release/convention-centre-facade-artwork-selected#.UnaKRpXRksU.facebook)

Sewing copies of Amelia and Reginald, gluing copies of Making Bread (not bombs) and printing, I'm getting ready for the next thing, the Book Arts Association NL's Printers' Fair on November 17th. The news is here:

Printers’ Fair

Artists and Craftspeople selling their wares:

Books! Broadsides! Prints! Cards!

Linocuts! Etchings! Lithographs! Letterpress!

Sunday, November 17^th, 2013

11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at The Rocket Room

(upstairs at Rocket Bakery, 272 Water Street)

Admission Free

Exhibitors:

John Andrews

Graham Blair

Caroline Clarke

Janet Davis

Lori Doody

Jud Haynes

Sonia Ho/ Alan Ho

Philippa Jones

Christine Koch

Duncan Major

Jennifer Morgan

Janet Peter

Krissie Worthman

Running the Goat Books and Broadsides

St. Michael’s Printshop

Urchin Green

Walking Bird Press

Hosted by The Book Arts Association of

Newfoundland and Labrador

It's hard to believe, but these are the collated signatures for 105 copies of Amelia and Reginald.

Whew!

I finally (3 weeks later than planned) finished the last illustration for Amelia and Reginald today. Several in the second batch of drawings didn't make good plates, so I had to rework them and send them back. Which left me further behind with the 2 baffling images, an Angel Choir, which Reginald is asked to imagine as he tries to wake Amelia from her comatic state, and Crossing the Alps in the style of 18th c. gentry, being carried in chairs.

I have taken them out and put them away several times, but finally thought of trying to incorporate music into the choir image. Something funereal? After looking through the hymnal and on line, I decided on Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, a melody anyone who reads music is likely to recognize, and another non-18th c. element for the pseudo-ness of the book (like Micky and Minnie on Amelia's bed). I also divided up the group to make the image more vertical to fill space at the end of the chapter, and changed their faces and poses a bit so they are not all playing instruments and they are all singing.

The final bugaboo was the image of A&R crossing the Alps, being carried as gentlefolk were. It's a double-wide illustration that will be folded and stitched in between signatures.

Now to finish printing and start assembling! Here's hoping everything else goes without bumps!

Chapter 1 image

Amelia and Reginald meet in St. James Park, the image for Chapter 1.

I went to Corner Brook last Sunday to make polymer plates with the help of David Morrish at Dead Cat Press. We went to work Monday morning, and by the end of the day the plates were made for all the completed drawings. Tuesday I worked on this drawing, and we made the plate Wednesday evening. I drove home on Wednesday with a pile of plates ready to print!

Spent Thursday and Friday getting ready for Open Studio this weekend, and this afternoon I printed 3 of the images onto the text pages, 110 or so copies of each. I'm hoping for an edition of 100...

Sketches

Back to working on the illustrations for Amelia and Reginald. Here is Reginald, despondent and  refusing to eat.

Where there is space at the ends of chapters, I am adding small illustrations to fill in. These are two sketches for Amelia's wet clothes that she takes off in a room at an inn, after surviving a shipwreck.

Neither of these is quite right, but none of the illustrations will be complex, detailed images. They are meant to suggest or be an echo rather than show minutiae...

The luggage is for the chapter following, when the servants arrive with A&R's luggage, and a new wig for Reginald.

I haven't worked on the illustrations for a week, and now see several things I want to change. It's always good to back off for a bit and come back to a project with fresh eyes.

From the Studio: illustrations

From the Studio: illustrations

illustrations

While I am slowly assembling the edition of Making Books (not bombs), I have turned to completing a project that has languished in the studio for MUCH too long.

My friend Rudolph Ellenbogen's pseudo-eighteenth-century love story, The True History of Amelia and Reginald, has been off and on the back burner since 2005 (ouch!) when my brain shorted out while trying to grasp the style of the time (think Hogarth) and simulate it in my drawings. Over the past 8 years, I have taken it out, reread the story, looked at background material, and done sketches, only to tear my hair, rend my clothing, and vow to hie myself to a monastery to avoid confronting the sad realization that I am doomed to failure for false pride.

I do love the story, and I do love my friend Rudolph and his lovely wife Alane, and having survived the struggle of creating Making Bread (not bombs), I feel up to taking a more equanimous view. I promised that the book would be finished in October, and to that end, I am keeping the drawings out in the dining room, where I can spread everything out on the table. I have sorted the illustrations and reference material into folders. To help keep myself focussed, I am going to add progress reports to my much-neglected blog. Below are the silhouettes for the frontispiece.

I will scan and post more soon...

Making Bread (not bombs)

Finally assembling Making Bread (not bombs), my book for Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here and Book Art-Object IV.

Five sections inkjet printed, laser cut and scored, then folded by hand and glued together, in a plain brown wrapper (Cave Paper) closed with linen twine.

You can see a video of the laser cutter at work on YouTube: http://youtu.be/3ms3G56xMJE

Moving

Having spent much of the last month moving out of the space I had occupied since 1994, I am slowly organizing so the house doesn't remain a holding area forever! With the help of a crane, a U-Haul truck, and two determined gentlemen, everything was moved. February is not the best time of year to be moving presses on salt-covered roads, but everything arrived in one piece. The last time the C&P was moved, we (meaning 2 friends and the 2 owners of the printshop who sold it- I watched and prayed) got it into and out of the truck from street level with a come along. I thought I would have heart failure watching that top-heavy thing sway as it was ratcheted up the ramp. The crane operator was fabulous, and the process of hooking up the presses and moving them was slow and graceful.

Two flat files and the Kensol are in the living room, there are boxes everywhere, and I have about 4 square feet of wall space for painting, but I can reorganize a bit at a time.

There is progress on the book front, but I will save that for another post!

Quiet Saturday morning.

The bread/bombs project was put on hold temporarily, as I learned on the afternoon of January 23rd that the building had been sold and I had to be out by February 15th.

I have spent the past two weeks packing, sorting, tossing, recycling as I am working on moving my printing shop (presses, type, guillotine, Kensol, and lots of paper) from the space I have occupied since 1994. I knew it was coming, but the thought of moving was so overwhelming I couldn't make much progress until I HAD to. I do always work better with a deadline!

the slow burn

This is the painting for the bomb side of Making Bread (not bombs). The brilliant Ray Fennely
photographed it in sections (the original is almost 7 feet long) and spliced the sections
back together.

Now I am dropping out text and cutting it apart again to fit the template for laser cutting the
sections, and I am beginning to see a pinprick of  light at the end of the tunnel!

The other explosion paintings may become book covers or pages for other books. Later.

I have almost completed a spreadsheet of countries of the world (234 of them) with names of their
traditional breads and time zones so they can be sorted. Maps of Mesopotamia and Iraq, and
snippets of text from various sources will tie up the package. The logistics of printing and laser
cutting, determined by the idiosyncrasies of the machines, have been, um, fascinating to work out.
The patient and jovial Ken Holden has helped me produce Corel Draw files that the laser cutter
will be happy with.

And so the project progresses at a slow burn.

(I'm hoping this week I'll finally be IN the tunnel!)

I have been working on wet-on-wet watercolors, trying to suggest an explosion without details. Something like this will be on the "bomb" side of the Making Bread (not bombs) I'm still (slowly, slowly) working on. The larger images (8" x 60" to 24" x 72") are being photographed and I'll put them up when I get the images!

Painting peppers

I have been painting fruit, especially pears and sometimes apples for a long, long time, and tend to return to them when I am stuck. This has been a year of clay feet for me, but I think I'm finally getting back into the groove. Lots of ideas, an embarrassing number of partially finished projects, but little completed work. Painting some new pieces for a group show at the Botanical Gardens has helped.

Since I haven't posted ANYTHING in a while, and I generally take photos of paintings in several stages, I thought a series of images of the sweet peppers I finished painting yesterday would make a nice post. They were on a white plate sitting on a red chair (one of my favorite backdrops).

The canvas is 12" x 12" and as you can see, I wipe my brushes off on the wall. I don't sketch, but just start painting from the objects. I take photos of the still-life for reference, because the produce often shrivels (or worse) before the painting is completed. This painting was finished from the photos...

And now on to the studio!

Book projects- two into one

I seem to be genetically incapable of working on one thing at a time, so I am researching and pondering 2 book projects and stretching canvases for new paintings, as other ideas dance like sugar plums in the back of my mind.

My commitment (last year) to make a book for Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here has been an exercise in what I don't want it to be, and I have spent a year thinking, reading, looking at other books, and being stymied. It wasn't until I signed up for another group project, Book-Art-Object, that a concept arose that seemed to fit, and, I hope, will merge the two commitments into one book.

The title I chose for BAO is Making Bread. I started thinking about Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization, the Fertile Crescent as the breadbasket, all information stuck in my head in 7th grade Geography class. And then, Baghdad as a focus of high culture and the irony of moving from heights of intellectual creativity to fear and fundamentalist intolerance. Now I am reading histories of bread and writing in my journal about having grown up in an intellectually curious extended family amid fear-instilling radio and television news reports of the Cold War, Viet Nam, and myriad civil wars, genocides, famines around the world. Man's unimaginable inhumanity to fellow man, but not in my neighborhood.

I started making bread in High School, as my Sunday morning meditative replacement for going to church, and as a way to connect with the millions of people who make bread around the planet (yes, I was an aspiring Hippy). I have added the subtitle (Not Bombs) to Making Bread to merge these ideas, and am trying different structures in sketches- soon to be working models. Hedi Kyle's flag book, with its interleaving fragments, seems most satisfying at this point, but everything could change before the book is actually editioned!

My creative process tends to develop through a sometimes painfully slow germination process, making lists, trying out and rejecting possibilities, and eventually having a sudden "Eureka!" moment when a path is revealed to me. And so, progress is being made, however slowly.

Show in Wesleyville

I will be showing work and teaching workshops in Wesleyville in early July. Here's the schedule:

Painting I with Tara Bryan
Friday & Saturday, July 8th & 9th 2011, 10am-5pm
$175 + HST, bring your own materials (or purchase them at the studio)
An introduction to oil painting, with the basics of mixing colours and creating a painting. We will discuss choosing a subject, composition, and different techniques of applying paint. Bring several photos you are interested in working from.

Painting II with Tara Bryan
Monday & Tuesday, July 11th & 12th 2011, 10am-5pm
$175 + HST, bring your own materials (or purchase them at the studio)
For people with some experience handling oil paints. We will focus on planning and completing a painting, discussing different techniques and mediums along the way. Bring several photos you are interested in working on, and any questions you have from previous paintings.

Drawing: Edges and Contrast with Tara Bryan
Wednesday, July 13th 2011, 10am-noon
$40 + HST, bring your own materials (or purchase them at the studio)
Using a variety of drawing tools, we will focus on different ways of looking and defining space to create realistic drawings on paper.
Sharpie pen, drawing pencils (a set is best, in a range from 5B to 5H), white eraser, and paper- newsprint, white drawing paper.

You can call or email to sign up for any or all classes, or for more information.
Janet Davis
Norton's Cove Studio Inc.
Located at Job Kean Shop, Brookfield
Mail to P. O. Box 223 Wesleyville, NL A0G 4R0
Telephone 709.536.2533 Fax 5795 Fax to email 5791
www.nortonscovestudio.com

Show's open!

The show "What passes for Spring" opened at Christina Parker Gallery on Saturday, May 15, and J. M. Sullivan's article about it was in The Telegram on Friday. You can see it at http://www.thetelegram.com/index.cfm?sid=340729&sc=85

These days, I am finishing up the paintings for a show at Christina Parker. These are smaller than the paintings at The Rooms, but still focus on icebergs, with a little fog thrown in for good measure! The painting above is 24" x 72" and is titled "Purple Haze". I don't want to give away the surprises before the show opens, but I may send along a few teasers between now and the 15th.