time and distance

home now... five days on and it still feels more than a little odd to be here and not there 

wandering in to my studio a few times each day,  slowly unpacking the small box of supplies taken north, trying to familiarise myself with what was being worked on in the months preceding

it's so been so long, november really, since i've worked in this space... picking up where i left off seems rather difficult at the moment so instead i've spent some time flipping through sketchbooks and looking at work from the past year and a half or more

it's been an interesting walk down memory lane... 

a painting of old pilings from the shipyards in whitehorse on a letter from a friend who always uses the most beautiful and interesting papers to write on

wind-downed twigs found on the sidewalks that reminded of letter forms... trees have their own way with words

tissue paper collage 

plaster pushed through a floral stencil onto a painted background

small stitched samples... fragments chosen for texture and line

a preliminary sketch for a wedding card for our daughter

designing, making and using my own stamps for block-printing

painted snowy mountains

inking up pressed leaves and flowers and using them as stamps

collage... this is the piece that made me realise how much i love black

and this one from last September that looks surprisingly like something from my last post

through time and distance, the things that interested me then interest me still 

  now to decide whether to begin something new or continue with something from before... just these few photographs have given me ideas to work with in either vein

there's a hopeful fresh feeling in the air... and it's not just spring

snow day

this last week here has been spent doing the things not yet done... walking old neighbourhoods, visits with friends and painting with snow

still wanting backgrounds to work further into and using the graphite and gold paint I bought here, the quest was for something simple... paint dropped in to water and moving how and where it would followed by spatters of gold, sometimes mixed with the graphite paint, sometimes not

this next one with a bit of french ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, then the graphite and gold

when it dried I was reminded of the placer miners, scrabbling in the muck of their claims along the creeks - may just leave this one but a sketchy cabin could look pretty interesting on it... hmm

the last tissue paper collage i did got a wash of gold followed by the graphite - thinking about hitting the high points with something dark, perhaps charcoal here and there and then see where they'll take me next

the sketches on the work from the last post have begun and will hopefully be finished before i leave as well as the cabin i mentioned above

it's been a long slow progression with all the works done here but a most enjoyable one - no need to feel like things had to move along quickly... life slows down in the presence of little ones and that way of being seems to have found it's way into my work as well

i definitely want to "pack" that way of working to take home  with me

moving along

progression, on all fronts...

in my last week here, things have started to come together - it seems all this thinking time has been good after all

most of what i've learned is in reference to what i like, what i'm drawn to...

the old, weathered, linear, industrial, abstract, faded and worn

texture and line, strength in both

neutral colours but a splash of something bold now and again

a contrast of natural softness and industrial strength

these first images are crops of photos taken at the transportation museum on my birthday... crawling on the floor, trying to get some interesting angles... thankfully it was a quiet day but my actions did garner a few odd looks 

the side of a late 1920s truck

cast shadows on the floor

part of an aircraft engine

another angle

yesterday i got the idea to write verses from "the spell of the yukon" onto white tissue paper to collage with when i get home

at first my writing was fairly neat 

the tissue paper had a mind of it's own though and it was easier to give in to the nature of it,  letting the letters go where they may as the pen and the paper wished

(I learned that from the expressive calligraphy course with brody n. though this writing is in no way reflective of calligraphy)

this second column is a bit looser because of that

letting go even more

and yet more again...

that writing led me to my small "sketchbook of days" begun here in on my arrival in january

favourite lines and couplets from the same poem written lightly over several pages followed with a light wash of paint in the colours i am seeing here at the moment

three two-page spreads with varying transparency in the colour;  shown here is the lightest of the three

sketching on top of all of them is next - perhaps some mountains or hills, maybe skinny trees, winter branches...  when i get home i'll try this again with my light grey permanent pens as well as my dip pens using a more calligraphic style of writing... perhaps some fireweed pink colour added to the mix... or purple for the spring crocuses that will cover the hills after my departure... and the flowers themselves sketched on top... maybe a splash of gold paint

none of these thoughts are original - you can see versions of any or all of it all over the internet but they are new to me and a way of moving my thinking along in a delightful easy going way

adrift

the days go by and time here is winding down... just two weeks left before i head home and winter is only now starting to ease it's grip, the ice of the river breaking up in earnest

i've been feeling less inspired of late - ideas are percolating but without my art supplies here things are in limbo

there has been research on the river and work done on my collaged and painted backgrounds but that's about it

one thing i came across online was a hand-drawn map of the yukon river from the latter half of the 1800s

i do love old maps

i also stumbled on a video compiled by the national film board of canada - i couldn't access it through the film board but it is on youtube 

it was wonderful seeing the riverboats in action on the river after only seeing them either dry-docked or perched on the riverbank

watching it, i noticed imagery that seemed to echo my shipboard papers-in-making

the ice broke up on the river long before it did on the lakes so lines of lampblack (seen below) were laid out on the lake ice to encourage melting

 the sternwheelers also pushed barges up river in early spring,  using them as ice breakers on the lakes

and four parallel lines on the roof of the wheelhouse

here is a link to the video if you are interested, or search "In the Days of the Riverboats":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfSrm6NEJkA

below is the first ship board paper piece with many coats of watercolour and acrylic paint, sanded often between coats

the next two images are of the second piece - this one was done mostly with plain strips of paper from the book with a few pieces here and there with map markings - watercolour and gesso but no acrylic paint this time

the map markings don't show through very much though they do in real life though if you click on the images they will enlarge and you can see the detail better

the film and resulting still shots are quite grainy but i suppose that's understandable considering the footage is pre-1937, 86 years ago

and interestingly enough, today would have been my grandparents 86 wedding anniversary, married here in whitehorse on the evening of thursday march 25 in the old log church

i've felt somewhat adrift these past two months - home, yet not home but it's lovely to be toasting their memory in the place i remember them best

river stories

 painted skies this morning, burnished with gold

a sunrise so beautiful it could only be met in silence

a slight shift to the right, away from the golden light, the colours were muted yet intense... a contradiction, but nature follows her own rules

later, a walk along the river

slanted sunlight sparkled across the open water and snowy ice creating shadows contrast that made the break-up ice stand out clearly from the rest

near the end was the "Klondike", one of the last sternwheelers to make the trip from whitehorse to dawson and back again

(interestingly, the freight on the very last run to dawson each year before freeze-up was 100% liquor!)

thinking ahead to work i'm planning had me looking closely at the architectural elements and converting the images to "noir"  to highlight them further

(noir is a little more intense than black & white)

close-ups of the ship boards revealed interesting textures where the paint was peeling

another of the backgrounds that has been in the works - this one is long, thin strips of river map drawings taken from my yukon river book, glued down with matte medium

next up is watercolour paint and gesso, tomorrow i'll sand it and do another coat of gesso and then see how it looks - aiming for a background evocative of the sides of the boats

i'm enjoying working on these backgrounds though it's a bit of a slow, drawn out process so in the meanwhile i've been keeping on with some small collages - below is one where i put together two strips of torn watercolour paper for a sky, an off-cut from an image in the book for the land and a torn piece of scrim that had gesso and dark watercolour paint for snow

these little compositions don't come easily for me but once in a while i get a gem

three more weeks here before i head home and so much to see and do before then

gathering

several posts back i wrote of wanting to capture and record the various colour palettes, snippets of cloth and thread, and notes about materials i am drawn to, things i use in my work and writings that resonate

a kind of commonplace book on making

 a start has finally been made on it after months of searching for just the right book to keep it all in

can't say i found the right book... the one originally intended turned out not to be practical and so the quest began 

other than the white pages everything else about this one is wrong but the urge to begin was to strong and this was all that was available so here i go

the front pages (endpapers) were a strange shade of lilac so i covered one with a strip map of the yukon river, beginning at marsh lake

the title page has a small collage made from a wildflower pressed last year that was in rather poor shape so i covered it with gesso and quite liked the look of it

no title yet, still pondering that

yesterday i worked on the first colour palette page... using scraps of the papers from my work here

it's a subtle one, lots of whites and creams, beige, a greyed lilac, smoky blue, green/brown and brown/black... the colours that surround me here everyday

i'm glad to have finally begun and keen to see how it goes, hoping it's something that can be easily kept up

sifting through the scraps of paper, shuffling them from here to there, had me thinking of collages and the dozens of flowers pressed last summer

 small collages that take me back to those beautiful summer days

two 2" squares per page of a double-page spread

first, a water-soluble graphite pencil in midnight black, followed by fragments from the black & white images of the klondike... then torn bits of art papers and magazines 

once that dried marks were added with a black pigment marker and then a light wash here and there using a slate-green water soluble graphite pencil

lastly, re-tracing the outline with the black marker

some torn edges, some cut... trying not to be predictable

 working on four at once kept it lively, not letting me to get too caught up with any one in particular

my scrap paper pile is finally dwindling but there are a few more of these in me yet

it's such a great way of capturing what inspires whilst at the same time offering yet more to think about

limitations

working away at things every day is beginning to yield results

doing something always starts with shuffling pieces of fabric or paper around, layering, looking, thinking and then shuffling it all around again but eventually something captures my attention and things start to happen

last week there was a hankering to make a painted background reminiscent of the snowy mountains you see in every direction

torn tissue paper on watercolour paper - no brush for gluing so i used my fingers which resulted in a rougher texture as the edges of the delicate tissue paper rolled and bunched under the pressure

no parchment paper to protect it whilst being weighed down for drying so cling wrap was used instead which, when pulled away a day later, left behind areas with sheen - some kind of transfer occurred but the cling wrap itself is intact so not sure exactly what happened but the effect was beautiful

french ultramarine and burnt sienna watercolour made a nice grey though it did separate a bit as it dried - at first i was disappointed but eventually decided it was actually a nice effect

this has since been cut for a variety of things, one of which has been to use as mounting backgrounds for some of my pressed flowers

the first trial on khadi paper with an image from the book on the yukon river and then a piece of the painted paper with pressed wild flax

and the same idea but on a larger scale

this next one is hard to see and is still in progress... rectangles of text cut from the same book glued to watercolour paper (again with matte medium), a splotchy layer of titan buff watercolour, black pigment-marker lines between the rectangles and then a coat of zinc white acrylic

if you click on it you should see a larger image where the details will show better - this is a slow, make-it-up-as-you-go process so it will be mid-week before it's done (guessing!)

as soon as I started on this the thought of making one using long strips taken from the river maps in the book would be a nod to the riverboats that were the mainstay of travel in the yukon and would be an interesting background to work with so a sample size trial of that has already begun

then came a quick mark-making session spurred by the sight of little birds flitting about the other day

not a great image for it was very cold and blowing snow - this small tree (4 feet high) was filled with about 20 of these little birds that would all fly out and then back, over and over again

and finally, continuing with the quick sketches - this one using the same wild flax from last summer

when the drawing was finished I had a hankering to glue the flower itself on the page so I did although the thought didn't occur to me until I had already removed the small clump of buds on the left side of the drawing (they were used in one the pieces shown above)

so a busy week

it's been interesting working with limited supplies, the having to make do, but i'm beginning to think the real benefit is coming from the limitation of time... there's no settling down to try an idea as it occurs, nor to work on things to any extent in one sitting which leaves a lot of time to consider what it is i'm thinking and doing, what might come next, how it might all fit together

time to let the ideas really settle and develop rather than just rushing along because i can