Johan Scherft, his amazing paper birds

You might remember that I had a spell of making felt birds. They were so labour intensive that I only did two of them. Here is one.

my felt coal tit

I love birds, we live in northern Holland and our bird feeder sees a good variety of songbirds visiting every winter. I wanted a way to have birds around me in my living space too. When looking on the web for models to paint or construct, I stumbled upon Johan Scherft’s videos of paper birds and was immediately sold!

He offers quite a few free models on his site and I started with those. My first attempt was a firecrest, it failed miserably but taught me the basic principles-  here is the second attempt. You can still see the seam where the head meets the body not quite perfectly, but gradually you get better at the glueing and fitting. This was a sweet but tiny model to begin with.

Firecrest paper bird model, all models designed and painted by J Scherft, and assembled by me

A word of caution, these are not projects to do with children, they are far too intricate, and they require a good dose of patience. The more I do, the better they work out, and the more appreciation I have for the exquisite rendering of the feathers, eyes, beaks etc. Not to mention how the whole birds are engineered, so that from a flat sheet of 80g paper, you end up with various parts- beak, head, tail cone, tail, which all fit together to form a perfect 3D model. Here is the firecrest sheet.

Cardinal under construction, this one is from the box available from Amazon 

Here is the big guy done. Cardinals mean Pittsburgh and my US home to me, they have a special place in my heart, especially since they are not native to Europe, and we never get to hear their beautiful melodic trills here. God I miss them. But the blackbird’s song come in a close second.

Here is an American Goldfinch, also from the paper birds box. It costs around 16 euros and includes a great instruction book, glue, and 4 models plus mounts for 4 different birds, so you can make 16 birds from it. I just perched this little guy on a twig for now.

There is a lot to love about these bird models, one thing is how he captures the personality of each bird. This is a nuthatch and his mount is a little paper log, his feet are spread in a characteristic pose, one ahead and one pointing back, you usually see them hanging upside down on the bark of a tree.

You might be wondering by now if doing these birds is addictive. Well, I’m on my 8th model now, what do you think? :-). Thing is that the crafting is very meditative. With a small sharp scissors, you cut out all the parts, then patiently glue the tabs and let them dry one by one. It can take hours to make one bird and a mount, but it is so rewarding.

Here is the wren.

Today I finished the humming bird, it is in honour of my mother, Monica, who loved hummingbirds.

Here he is hanging in my studio. This, by the way is the Big model (!!) The life sized one is tinier and is a whole new challenge in itself. Scherft kindly offers this one free to practice on first. (The tiny life sized one is free too). And for many of the birds he has excellent tutorials available on his site and on YouTube.

Here is a view of my board in the studio, gradually I’m gathering all these little bird beings around me.

Inspired? Here is Johan’s site, have fun! And thanks Johan.

 

 

 

 

Canals and edible gardens

 

These two images were a departure of sorts for me, they are based on some photos I took  in high summer last year. I don’t get inspired much by the idea of painting landscapes, it feels too limiting. But these two small format pieces on panel were done with a large brush to keep from getting caught up in details, and I like their freshness.

Every day I walk through these wide open Dutch skies and fields. There is a lot of water where we live, giving movement and direction to the flat, spread out landscape. I am constantly moved by the land here, how the light hits trees and fields, the changing colours throughout the day. It would be a natural painting subject if it weren’t milked ad infinitum by good and bad local painters. I have rarely found an ‘in’ to painting my surroundings because I like to use lots of colours and I need room for fantasy as well as reality.

Here is another realistic one from the same series:

 

This piece, done more recently, is more in line with what comes naturally to me. I love how the landscape elements creep into the still lifes, or is it the other way around? It is also large, 50 x 50 cm.

This one below was more successful to my eye, I knew more about where I wanted to go with it.

Pears and bottles   acrylic on canvas board

I love the small boat in the upper left corner, floating on a sewn sea with little red stitches. These pieces definitely have their own rhythm and structure if I step aside and follow where they want to go.

The latest in the series:

Honey garden      acrylic on canvas board

 

There were lots of surprises here, it is quite large, 50 x 70 cm. The little boat has returned to a more prominent place. The beet is kind of archetypal and the spirals please me.(There are elements reminiscent of some of Bob Knox’s work. A fellow artist from Findhorn who taught me by example, just how fun art could be. If you google him you’ll probably come up with a lot of his beautiful New Yorker covers.)

Leading on from here, ‘Garden’ is my new theme, I think. I’m totally inspired by our community edible garden and the work of Fritz Haeg.

 

 

Back again

Well, I’m back. Words desert me when I try to say anything about the last 8 weeks. I came through a long and tough operation, and am recovering well, though more slowly than I would like.

My work mates in the municipal traffic project sent me a wonderful bouquet, but also a sweet card of a still life painting- by Matisse. I wasn’t familiar with this side of his work.

Matisse still life copy, acrylic on canvas board

It is such a little gem that it somehow reached through the pain and leftover narcotic stupor to remind me that I was more than my physical situation. And I got the energy to get my paints out so I could copy the still life. I love that, like the original, it is kind of crudely painted (used palet knife on the background), but still holds together.

My painting was already undergoing some fundamental changes. I wrote about those in the last post. One current influence is Flora Bowley’s, ‘Brave intuitive painting’. After some free experimenting according to her suggestions, I find that my  visual vocabulary demands a bit more structure than her layered free form approach. Still, I am learning a lot from trying some of her suggestions to free up the painting experience. Laying down a first layer, for instance, in cool colours, and painting on top with warm ones, letting areas of the underlayer show through. Also she encourages you to not get precious about what is already on the canvas, and to try new mark making on top of what you already have to push the painting in a new direction. Ruining the ‘good’ correct image to reveal more depth and expression.

That is what I’m in the process of doing with the painting here. It was inspired by a bunch of tulips wrapped in dark blue paper. But I felt the painting was a bit too pretty and confined by the realism.

Tulips in blue paper acrylic on canvas board

So I’ve been breaking it down by using the palette knife in places and obscuring some of the bright colours and hard definition of form. It is still in progress.

Tulips next stage acrylic on canvas board

One more thing I wanted to say about influences, I love the work of Jude Hill and am following a sewing, quilting, and appliqué course of hers online.  It is all about layering there as well.

Her approach speaks to me- she doesn’t plan a piece out to the last detail, she has a spontaneous, ‘wait and see what happens’ attitude. It is really refreshing and something I could use more of. Also, she posts her work in progress and you watch it transform and grow. I could do that more.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to see the patchwork and painting starting to influence each other before to long.

More on other new paintings next time.

Painting adventure

There is a lot of movement happening in my life, and it is reflected in my painting. I’m leaving old ways of seeing, and familiar approaches, and embarking on ‘The adventure of a lifetime’ (A plug for Coldplay’s new single YAY!!). The freedom I have in inventing when working in oil pastels has finally transferred to paint. I’m working in acrylics because I like layering and they dry fast.

I won’t take you on the complete journey, but this particular stream started months ago. I have mentioned that I do collages for relaxation and processing of any issues up for me. I always really like them, they surprise me and are fresh. So this one, with the painting by Alexey Kvaratskeheliya at center stage inspired me to try an oil pastel painting using the same kind of little shards of concentrated colour as Alexey K.

Which resulted in this piece:

Working with colour in this way feels very natural to me. (This piece is in our currently running show at Scherer design store. In a few days they will have our exhibit announced on the site.)

I wondered if I could work this way in paints, but it is different when you can reach for one of 121 concentrated oil pastel colours, or you have to mix them yourself and keep using clean brushes to apply them.

But one evening I took a little piece of cardboard, and intuitively began working in small colour areas. That freed me up to take another step- I took all the leftover colours on my palette and made a background on a previously painted canvas with the partly dried paint and palette knife:

Then I painted over it intending to work into the result below, but I like it so much I’m leaving it as is.

The next two happened around the same time:

Village acrylic on canvas

Thumb trees acrylic on canvas board

They are both painted in acrylic over previous paintings, taking cues from the background and at the same time evolving their own unique forms.

This method of working really suits me. I work messily and spontaneously on an already painted canvas and things just happen.
Gee that Flora Bowley book mentioned in the last post must really work, I haven’t even read it yet and my work is undergoing a major reorientation! 🙂

All of the preceding are quite small format- around 30 x 30 cm. Then I retrieved one of the fairly free paintings from this summer where I was trying to lose form, and painted over it. The tree emerged, and I worked into it some, but not much. It captures the energy I need most to connect with now as I face major surgery tomorrow. Hopefully I can bring it into the hospital where I can see it.

Tree 1     acrylic on canvas board

Recent work

5 bottle still life, oils

This might look familiar to some of you, I’ve been working on a series of Rende’s photos of bottles in front of some of my still life paintings. I did 2 versions of this one, and the second is still in progress. This one tries to be true to the photo which I loved because of the contrast between the rich darks and glowing oranges. I took it with very little light in my studio, so it is hand held and out of focus (see the signature) . The bottles are quite clean and sharp in the original painting. I was especially happy with the right edge of the bowl seen through the blue bottle.

And now for something entirely different. I fell in love yet again with another of Ivon Hitchens’ paintings.

Original September Bouquet, Ivon Hitchens

So I spent some happy days copying it. My version is a bit livelier qua colour, I like them both. Also, my canvas was a different proportion so I had to fudge the layout a little.

Copy of Hitchens September bouquet, oils

I just can’t imagine sitting in front of a vase, container (?) of flowers on a wood floor and producing something as gauzy and vague as this. It is a bouquet, yet there are hardly any greens except those nice two fresh strokes on the left.

What that shape is in the lower right corner, I have no idea. I can’t get inside this guys head in any way. If you see some of his other work, you’ll see that form isn’t the main thing with him. But I still love his nonchalance and in some of his other still lifes, the addition of scribbly outlines as well as decorative colour patches.

Hitchens abstract

Hitchens abstract 2

(c) John Hitchens (son); Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

I’m getting up the nerve to do a painting of my own in his style; I’ve already done a preliminary watercolour study for it, but it is such an alien way of working for me. We’ll see.

My art today

This morning I woke up with a number of things I could do. I could work on my book. There was also a painting in progress on my easel after a small dry spell. And there were several small tasks I could do concerning two community projects I’m working on. So, avoiding all these worthy tasks, of course I started to collect materials to make a holder for nesting material for the birds in our garden. Obvious, huh?

Why, when I have been longing to get into working with my paints, do I often try to avoid it all day? Maybe it is still because I separate it from my professional life, I can’t see it as ‘work’, so try to get other things done first. Maybe it is the feeling of how when I’m into the painting, it kind of grabs me by the neck and won’t let go; and whether it is going well or stuck, simply demands all of my attention.

Or more likely, I think I love this stage of painting most- when the sketch is there, no commitments have been made, and everything is still possible.

Who knows? At least the birds will be happy this spring. I hung it near the bird feeder and so far they have only been sussing it out at a distance.

Making it was really fun though, so was the procrastination, so much so that I didn’t do anything much all day.

A few tips about providing nesting materials can be found here.

Nesting materials holder

 

New inspiration: Robert MacFarlane, The Wild places

3 barns (watercolour sticks)

From the wood I turned south and began walking out along the sea wall. Swallows scudded overhead in twos and threes, moving with fast wing flicks…Inland were vast fields, on which three or four black barns sailed like barges. To the seaward of the wall were the marshes, tinged purple.
-Robert MacFarlane, ‘The Wild Places’.

It has been awhile since I was this moved by a non-fiction writer. Moved in the way the best art moves us: to quote Lewis Hyde, from ‘The Gift’: A work of art that enters us to feed the soul lets us experience a gifted state, and depending on our own abilities, we respond by creating new work (it doesn’t have to be art,  but inspired by the artist we may find we can suddenly make sense of our own experience). The greatest art offers us fresh images that light up our imaginations and open up alternatives for our own lives.

The last time this happened I was in the middle of my career as an artist and calligrapher, and for years, I calligraphed one quote of Barry Lopez’s continually.  Here is a straightforward handling of this particular quote-

Interior landscape (pen and ink and mono print)

But I also used the text as a starting point for work dominated more by imagery than by letters.

Arctic sunlight (collage, and mixed media on paper) sold

And I also did a series of collages, I think from the same book by Lopez, ‘Crossing open ground’.

Black throated sparrow (collage, pen and ink)

So anyway, what I’m getting at, is that for the first time in years, I feel inspired by MacFarlane’s writing and sensibility to start to combine letters with my imagery again.

Anyone who loves walking, nature, history of place, or good great writing should read this author. He sets out on these walks which take him and the reader to surprising places, both literally and internally. He’s exploring the theme of how landscape acts on us and we on it, and how outer landscape is formative for one’s inner psychic landscape. His experience resonates in a deep place with me, though I’m not drawn to emulating some of his other adventures – sleeping out on mountains and moors, by the sea and in dunes- sometimes in the winter!

I’ll leave you with some more of his words- here he is speaking about how being connected through technology has replaced and so robbed us of direct physical contact with the natural world:

We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world- its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits- as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination.

The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird’s sharp foot on one’s outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt.

There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds , or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one’s upturned palm.

 

Oh just go ahead and copy!

Hitchens stillife, first sketch in watercolour crayon

What gets me painting is a tingling sensation, a momentary lifting of the heart when struck by something visual- a slant of light, two colours juxtaposed, the beautiful rounded form of fruit nestled in a bowl.
Though there has certainly been enough visual inspiration around, the drive to paint it has gone underground.

So I keep alert for that pinging, when my souls’ sounding has hit on treasure. Recently that has been happening with the work of other artists, so I follow where it leads.

First it was to the Isaac Israels portrait I did a few months ago. I just wanted to have the painting, not having 115,000 euros to buy it, I copied it and learned a lot by doing so.

Now I’m fired up by the more realistic work of Ivon Hitchens who worked in the middle of the last century. His abstracts are interesting, but it is the still lifes I gravitated towards. I saw my first one in ‘Flow’ magazine here in Holland (see below)  and have had it up in the studio for awhile.

Flowers, oil on canvas, Ivon Hitchens

I’m attracted to artists who somehow capture and release form simultaneously. I feel myself moving in that direction, and have been working that way in oil pastels for ages, but as soon as I pick up a brush things start having to be ‘right’. It is fine as a learning stage for these past 4 1/2 years of concentrated work on my painting, but slowly, I’m pulling out of that restriction and trying to find my own vocabulary.

So I really liked one of Hitchens’ still lifes, and made a spontaneous sketch of it with watercolour sticks (see opening image on this post). I bought some Caran d’ache ones in France and they are luscious.

Photo source

 

 

 

 

You draw with them and then go over your strokes with a brush and they dissolve into watercolour washes. I chose this medium because it was inexact and sketchy and would help me approach the feel of the original Hitchens painting below.

Still life by Ivon Hitchens

Then, after that preparatory watercolour crayon work, I did my own oil version below.

My copy of the Hitchens in oils

I love his greys, his greyed down greens, and the lovely warm orange pot. I also was charmed by the wonderful blue grey shadow shape running along the bottoms of those 3 white cups and the lighter grey negative shape it makes.

It was so nice to do, such a change from my usual way of working. So free and sketchy and painterly.

My next painting is also a copy. Giving myself permission to copy my favourite paintings is an unexpected gift. It gives me a chance to immerse myself in the world of some of my favourite artists, and to paint as if I were they. It takes away that yearning when I see a painting I wish I’d done, just to do it even though it is someone else’s style and discovery!! I know this is an important phase for me, opening possibilities in technique and content, so I’m going with it. It is also a lot of fun.

Fritz Haeg, arts at the heart of life

Colourful corner

My writing time has been going into my book. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy making things with my hands as well as my head. Above is my favourite corner in the studio right now. And below, the wall above my work table showing some abstract acrylic paintings I’ve been working on, and a collection of crocheted mandalas mostly done for their colour combinations.

Wall above worktable

The rag rug has a story directly related to my book in progress.

The book is about the changes I’ve experienced and observed in the arts in the 40 years of my visual arts career. One thread is about my personal journey away from the life of an exhibiting artist and graphic designer towards a more socially engaged art. The second thread is about the role of the arts in times of transition and how the arts are changing to meet the needs of society now.

In the course of the writing and research, I’ve stumbled upon several wonderful examples of artists practising the new arts. Some are old heroes like Lily Yeh, but others are new to me and have in their own ways, ignited my imagination.

One of these people is Fritz Haeg whose work I came across when researching new art trainings and landed at the Mildred’s Lane site. Haeg trained as an architect but early on became deeply involved in questions of how we live, and how we create ‘home’ with what is around us.

This is short video is a good intro to his work. I was inspired by his huge rugs, finger crocheted from used clothes and textiles. They are 30m across, tour some of the major museums, and have been added to by people at each location. These warm objects invite sitting, reclining and meeting in an often otherwise sterile modern museum environment. People are invited to bring other home crafts related to food and gardening- what is growing in the garden that day, flowers found outside, preserved fruits, dried herbs. All are displayed on the rug, forming an intimate environment and what Haeg calls a ceremony in domestic living.

His other projects are as compelling- Edible estates was about turning unproductive suburban lawns into edible gardens and community meeting places. That is for another post.

Haeg says that his art is about creating at least part of an ideal life he doesn’t have (and which doesn’t exist in our society) yet. For me, and I think for him, too, that has to do with more nature in our daily lives, being closer to our food sources, and belonging to a close knit community.

I identify with this, and must say that by making a smaller version of his rag rugs myself, I feel like that ideal life is just a bit closer. Sitting on the floor of my studio, ripping strips of cloth to weave into my rag rug, I feel connected to his work in active way. And of course my friends and acquaintances are exposed to this as well so the inspiration keeps rippling outward.

Close up of cotton yarns and rag rug

Lucie, our fox terrier went immediately to my smaller crocheted rag rug in progress.

Lucie on rag rug in progress

She looks innocent doesn’t she, but she occasionally has continence problems and when she got up, the rug was soaked through. Luckily it survived machine washing and drying. So now we know that.

And she’s not allowed on them any more.

Here is a detail of the crocheted one a few steps further along. They are so much fun to do. See Fritz’s tutorial to make your own. (The one shown below is not in the tutorial, but is just a simple crocheted spiral using narrow strips of cloth instead of yarn. It is really easy.)

Small crocheted rag rug

Isaac Israel’s pensive purple lady

Woman in front of van Gogh’s sunflowers, by Isaac Israels

I first came across this painting several years ago in a magazine. Attracted by its simplicity and the freedom of the brushwork, I cut it out and put it up where I could see it daily. It has migrated from downstairs where I once had my little shop, to upstairs in my studio, and has survived any number of cullings and rearrangements.

At first,  I wasn’t that crazy about the subject matter, (although it was fascinating to find out recently that Israels had borrowed several of van Gogh’s sunflower paintings to study them, and had used them as backgrounds for several of his paintings beside this one). But it has grown on me to such an extent that I’m making a copy of it to learn as much as I can by reproducing it.

Slightly frustrated by having only a magazine photograph and a web image to refer to, I was longing to see the original.  It is in Holland at a well- known auctioneer, but at the moment it is too long a trip to make for one painting. Instead, I went to visit the Groninger Museum’s collection  in the hopes that I could find a similar painter from the same period to study.

I was delighted beyond words to actually find an Israels in the current display of part of the Groninger musem’s permanent collection. It seemed so coincidental, but I’m almost ashamed to admit, not being a great art history scholar, that I hadn’t realised that Israels was Dutch and a respected figure in the Amsterdam Impressionists group. The painting was a rather drab portrait of Aletta Jacobs, a well known Dutch doctor and feminist, but it was a prayer answered to be able to get up close and see the real colours and actual brushstrokes.

Copying a painting, for me, can be a spiritual experience of actually inhabiting the soul of the artist. By trying to reproduce the essence of the painting, you have to get inside the painter’s head and metaphorically strip layer by layer of time and pigment down to the beginnings, where he set it up, adjusted the light, and made the first sketch.

With Israels, this has been relatively easy. His work is so honest and transparent and somehow close to my own sensibility, not necessarily in technique but in intent,  it is fairly easy to imitate his technique. I’ll be showing the whole process soon.