Quantum Marketplace

I've been struggling with this sketch for a couple days.  The pigment spill exercise is from a Mother's Day visit with my daughter, where we sat outside on the lawn and worked our respective creativity.  She did her magic with silver, and I distractedly dribbled paint on wet paper.  Somehow the colors didn't work as well as I would've liked (perhaps they dried too quickly in the warm air), but that disappointment only gives me permission to play freely with it, then.  After all, it's already messed up, isn't it?  

I had a couple photos from a few years ago, when Jim and I visited Seattle for the day.  We'd wandered around the Pike Place Market and I took a couple shots of a fruit vendor offering slices of perhaps mango to passersby (not sure, I didn't take one).  I've been itching to use the figure in some sketch, so the sumptuous fruit displays made a great perspective lead-in, focusing on him.  I thought I'd just weave the scene around and in between the pigment blooms, eventually creating a Twilight Zone-ish bleed-through between realities.  Though the sketch is busier and more visually confusing than I prefer, I love the way it looks like reality rips and boils away amongst the seemingly normal marketplace activity.  Especially the dissolving of the fruit table on the lower right.

Curbside Horticulture, 5th Avenue

The colors and vibrancy of vegetation this Spring is eye-popping.  How could anyone not be out sketching, painting or photographing? I accompanied Jim to his physical therapy appointment for his vertigo problem, at the clinic in town.  Sitting in the waiting room, I had a clear view out the big windows, my little watercolor palette, a water brush and a little square of watercolor paper nearby in my kit.  They practically crawled out and shoved themselves into my hands.  

Next Winter, along about January, I'll pull this out and remember the glow of sun through the tulips and new leaves.  Purple shadows spilling across pavement.

A Little Devotional Humor

Digging through a dusty old box with brochures and old photos from the '90s, I pulled out this snapshot that Neil, my previous husband, had done of three clay monk sculptures I had finished painting.  They were drying outside, getting ready to be shipped to my fave gallery (Trios in Solana Beach, CA), nearly twenty years ago.  I still love the way they seemed to be sharing a quiet joke between them.  I wonder where all those sweet little dudes are now.  Sometimes I really miss them.

Doodle Bug

Once upon a time, decades ago, I used to play around in my sketchbook with fantasy bugs.  Last night I was trying out different ways of using my new rubber texture sheets (designed for silver clay impressions [cool tools], but repurposed for printing nicely), using a page from my pigment spill experiments that I wasn't as thrilled with.  I am liking the result, but it wasn't congealing in my mind as a "thing".  So this morning I poured a hot cup of tea, curled up and stared at the page. One of the print patterns began to look like a beetle's back.  Do you see it too?

Port Gamble's Fave Wedding Spot

This was the first sketch of the day on Saturday, Port Gamble Sketchout.  I ended up making it my own, didn't want a greeting card image, so I liberated the clouds.

A Proper Sketchout In Port Gamble

A number of us in our Pacific Northwest Sketchers group gathered in Port Gamble yesterday to hang out, enjoy each other's company, eat, and sketch.  This was actually my second sketch of the day.  After lunch I wandered up the hill to the cemetery.  These three stones seemed like a stage setting for a play I arrived 128 years too late to see.  

Morning Light, Texture Study

Often when I am seized with an idea, the world needs to clear a path to my materials, fast.  I am Wile E. Coyote, scorching a Light Speed trail to the horizon, in pursuit of those implements that will support that vision the fastest.  Often with disastrous results; chairs tipped over, bruises on shins, cats run for cover, jars of pens and brushes scattered.  I don't even stop to pick up my common sense on the way.

I've been entertaining vague ideas of incorporating stamping and textural stencil work into some of my illustrations and paintings this last week, and this afternoon the "thing" popped clearly into my head.  No purchase necessary, I would go raid the sculpture studio (again) for the rubber texture molds I've created in multiples for my Precious Metal Clay jewelry a few years ago.  Some of the flatter ones will make great stamps!  Leaves, fabric, orange skin, carved cross-hatching, etc.

Funny thing, though.  Often the engineering side of my brain forgot to email the creative side that we'd be meeting at the drafting table with paints and inks.  I showed up with tools, but no mental image.  All I saw in my mind was a series of wedges, green and gold, that stretched to the horizon.  So I invented, quickly, a sketch that could incorporate it.  After I stamped textures on the paper impatiently.  Maybe in my next lifetime, all those parts and pieces of creativity will play nicely together.