HDR – high dynamic range

photo of my studio work/play table by Bob Cornelis

Today my husband Bob said he felt like a “book widower”, meaning I’m always out in my studio glued to the computer working on this upcoming book Conversations with the Muse.  I guess that’s why I haven’t been “feeding” my blog as regularly lately as well.  I’ve kept him busy enough with doing all the imaging for the book too.  This one I particularly love because of all the texture.  Even my white wall has texture!  It is this new photographic technology called HDR, which I think lends a storybook quality to the scene.  I won’t show you what it does to human skin, at least not mine!  We’re talking prehistoric dinosaur.

Meanwhile I’m having so much fun writing and designing my first book.  I do sort of get glued to my chair.  The voice whispers “it’s time to make dinner Susan” but I don’t move.  An hour later I’m still there at my computer.  Does this make me a nerd?

ARTrails and synchronicity

It’s Sunday morning and I’m waiting for the next wave of art collectors to show up.  My husband Bob made his specialty, chocolate chip scones, so you may want to head over while they last.

People come to open studios to get their own creative gates opened up a bit wider, which often results in mine opening wider as well.  Especially when I get to observe the magic of synchronicity at work.

As in yesterday when I was talking to a Five Rythmns dance teacher about pairing  movement and art, and my partner in this plan, Mercy, walked in unexpectedly just as I mentioned her name.  Or later when I suddenly had an art therapist and two psychologists engaged in a lively conversation about art and healing.  And the two psychologists had just met up with each other in my studio (also unexpectedly) for the first time in 18 years!  There are more such stories and “coincidences” that pile up until one has to acknowledge that there’s a kind of energy vortex happening.

In the Muse groups we credit these occurances to the Muse(s) and leave it at that, as we sit there feeling a bit tingly.

the hazards of modeling

acrylic and pencil on w/c paper

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to be a figure model – and I don’t just mean the taking off ones clothes in front of a mixed group part.  What happens to one’s vanity when one is young and beautiful and someone does a sketch like the one above. . .and there is a wisp of a likeness there mixed with a liberal serving of ones mother or grandmother in it.  Or when one has a perfectly proportioned body and a painting like the next here results. . .

acrylic, ink on w/c paper

I’ll admit I was getting bored with the same old poses I’ve seen forever in figure groups.  I was feeling rebellious, as in, let’s do something bold and a bit nuts and see what happens.

acrylic and pencil

Maybe this one could be an add for a Bluetooth.  What do you think?

on the artrail

one wall of my studio open for ARTrails last weekend (and the one coming)

There’s always a few moments or more just prior to opening the door of the studio on the first Saturday of this yearly art event when I must wonder why we put ourselves through it year after year.  The framing and cleaning and clearing of the garden and signs and so on while normal life rythmns (like feeding the chickens) must also somehow continue.  But then when the people start to come there’s this flow of mutual appreciation which is so satisfying.

We artists like to be left alone with quantities of time to create our art.  But we all desperately need for that art to be seen and appreciated and of course bought and taken home.  A painting never feels quite finished until someone else has looked deeply into it for the first time and discovered something of themselves there.  I never paint with the aim of telling a particular story, but more because I have an insatiable curiosity about what images will come through me next.  And it’s always a bit surprising to me how others react to the finished work.  When people ask questions about a painting I find myself offering ideas that came to me that very moment, born of the interaction.

And then there’s the art collectors for whom certain paintings are so precious, like new friends they are taking home to cherish for years.

A few years ago when I was painting a lot of country scenes, I had a demonstration painting on my table, nearly finished.  It was baskets of pumpkins in the sunlight.  This couple saw the painting and recognized their very own pumpkin baskets and immediately bought it.  They were the owners of a family farm that for years had hosted harvest events for children on their picturesque, Rockwellian property.  I had been there picking out a pumpkin with my son’s grade school class, fallen under the spell of the place, and taken the picture of the baskets.

Fast forward several years to yesterday and the couple returned.  They announced that they were retiring and moving to a new property in the mountains where they wanted to hang more of my paintings.  They had saved a special fund for this purpose and proceeded to pick out two more country scenes that spoke to their hearts.  I received an invitation to visit them at their new home.

There are so many more stories from this past weekend I could tell.  But I just hope that next year, when I’m feeling stressed about getting ready for open studios, I can just take a moment and remember these stories. . .

If you didn’t make it last weekend, I hope you have us in your plans to visit next weekend, both days, 10-5.  Our studios are in Sebastopol, California.  Address and map here at the ARTrails website.

Good old Charlie Brown

Charlie Brown statue painted by me 3 years ago for RR Square, Santa Rosa, CA

Brings back memories.  Good ole Charlie Brown, the creation of our local hero Charles Schultz has been immortalized in more ways than you can imagine.  No fewer than 50 of these statues were painted by artists in a big airplane hangar that year.  Why am I showing it now?  Well, the little 5 ft. tall guy still stands there with his arm out on the street corner where he’s been for all these years now.  Innumerable pictures have been posed by his side with children and grandmothers alike.  I remember the crook in my neck and sore knees I got from the job, which took me 4 days! but also the satisfaction of watching people’s faces when they saw their familiar hero dressed up this way and big enough to relate to as a friend.  So please accept Charlie’s hand waving to you as a very personal and friendly greeting.

a nimbus surrounds my studio

A nimbus surrounds my studio, according to Carol Weibe, creator of two of my favorite blogs, one of which is Silverspringstudio , which is constantly spilling over with textile, paper, mixed media art and poetry and reviews on other artists.  It’s awfully hard for some of us to toot our own horn, but such a pleasure when another respected artist does.

Solo nature day at Limantour

watercolor, Sharpee pen, sand collage on soft press Fabriano paper

In the spirit of my new year’s resolution to spend one day a month on a day-long, lone nature hike I set down the path to Limantour Beach at Point Reyes Park in Marin County, California.  With all the tasks I left undone at home, it seemed incredibly self indulgent.  So for the two mile walk down the canyon to the beach I kept asking myself “Now why am I doing this?”  And here’s the answers that came:

*to experience the visual and other sensual thrills of nature

*to really exert myself for exercise and to feel my own strength and solidity

*to experience the mental freedom that comes after a time of allowing my mind to drift through a morass of inessential, boring preoccupations and silly fears until they “run out”.

*to make note of ideas that quietly arrive and whisper novelties on the wind or in the trickles of sweat or movement of animals.

*renewal of spirit, plain and simple.

The sun was out, the lupine were in bloom and filling the air with heady fragrance, and the beach was miles and miles and practically all to myself.  I simply couldn’t take it all on to sketch, so I sat down with some seaweeds that reminded me of the aboriginal shaman man in the movie Australia I’d seen the night before.

On the way back up the trail my mind started chewing on an old bone of an issue that’s bugging me and a gopher popped its head up, stopping me dead in my tracks.  While he was sizing me up, I was thinking about how a gopher solves problems like the one I was stewing about.  I realized he probably figured I was his only problem, and easy enough to deal with by covering up his entrance and retreating into his tunnel.  Very sage advise, I thought, and continued on to save him the bother.

Back at the top of the trail I sought out the cool of the Lagunitas creek bed to eat a late lunch of brie and crackers and hot tea.  Sitting right next to a drain pipe under a small bridge I started this sketch and was soon visited by a young buck and doe on the opposite side.  They considered me for quite a while, with many dippings and anglings of the the head.  I suppose it would have been etiquette to get up and leave so they could continue on through the pipe to wherever they were headed.  But instead I sat as motionless as possible, mentally inviting them to come on through anyway and quietly snapping pictures with my little camera (I sketched the buck in after I got home and looked at my pictures! the rest was done on the spot).

I took a different sketchbook along and it worked quite well.  I inserted several signatures of this lovely soft Fabriano watercolor paper into my journal book made by Elis Cooke and wrote my journal entry and notes on other sections with writing paper in the same book.  Nice to have it all together and the hard cover provides a kind of backboard which creates stability.  Elis has thought all this through and incorporated these useful features in her books.  Here’s what it looks like:

and open. . .

scratch the surface of any life

inks, image transfer, feathers, egg shells, collage, stamping

scratch the surface of any life

you’ll find bits of cracked egg pieces

calcium to fortify the bones

for the onslaught of slings and arrows

arriving unbidden and unwelcome

life is cracked

you and I are cracked

wide open again and again

else we could not be born

and the boredom of sameness could not be borne

our cousins the fowl know

an egg must get cracked to make a tasty omelette

how is it that we forget,

hang on to the rose

that begins to die

even as we watch it bloom?

-Susan Cornelis, 6/5/09

Making lemonade from lemons, etc.

I guess you know the expression, “Learn to make lemonade from lemons” meaning make the most of those experiences which at first seem less than optimal.  Sometimes I think this is one of the things sketchbooking is all about, especially when we’re out in the wilds of nature and culture.  Like Saturday, when I had a bunch of eager students watching me paint on the street corner and my water kept spilling and flooding my palette.  Like some little demon got inside my palette and made my putty unsticky suddenly.  Well finally I just gave up trying to finish – but that experience will end up being what that particular sketch is all about – far more interesting to me than some perfect representation.  Well – here it is – finished a bit at home.

watercolor, Sharpee pen in Arches Travel Book

One of Saturday’s students, Paula Jarvis, sent me this sketch she did at our lunch restaurant session.  Pretty cool, huh?!

by Paul Jarvis

And another student, Elizabeth Merriman, has continued to share what she learned in my Travel Sketchbooking workshop, making it sound and look so good I hardly recognize it.  Thank you Elizabeth.  Here’s her sketch of the sketch board idea, which I learned from another sketchbooker, and which I shared (and should have used myself, then I wouldn’t have kept spilling my water down my leg!)

by Elizabeth Merriman from her blog

wearing the face of nature

Acrylic, collage, image transfer, ink on watercolor paper, 10 X 11″

Wearing the face of nature

Alien florist standing in the midst of her creation.
Wears it on her head like a crown,
Feels its leaves tickling her legs
Winding, encasing her in dark sticky tendrils.
She’s not sure how she got there
Or where her facial features went

They’re lost in some previous appearance
A more specific one, more sharp edged and role laden
Wearing clothes freshly washed from her closet
And hair combed the usual way
With bangs and eyeliner and comfortable sandals.

But now she stands here, feet buried in soil
Wearing the face of nature as her own.

May 11, 2009