MARTHA KELLY ART
  • HOME
  • PRINTS
  • WATERCOLORS
    • Memphis
    • Paris
    • England
    • France
    • Greece and Turkey
    • St. Louis
    • My Palette
  • OILS
  • BOOKS
  • SKETCHES
    • Quarantine Journal
    • Memphis
    • Overton Park
    • Mr. Darcy
    • Mr. Darcy's Odyssey
    • Musicians
    • Tea
    • Dutch travelogue
    • Shakertown travelogue
    • Sketching tools
  • LITURGICAL
    • Special Bulletin Sets
    • Bulletin Line Drawings
    • "The Garden"
  • BLOG
  • ABOUT
  • SHOP

Daily Walk Sketches

6/26/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I’ve been running around out here and not doing the studio work I had thought I might get done. I’m giving myself permission to have a bit of vacation, but I decided it would be a good chance to do a daily walk sketch, as a base level of art, and I would enjoy that as a vacation project. Elizabeth Alley turned me on to a great hashtag on Instagram called #walktosee. It’s largely British artists posting sketches from their regular walks. In Memphis, often I’m just out quickly with a door key, getting my walk in and getting Mr. Darcy home before it gets too hot. I’m also often already thinking about my current painting or print and focused on getting home to start work on them. Here it’s nice to think I’ll linger a little and sketch, and the weather is more temperate and encouraging for sketching.

So here are a first batch of sketches I’ve been doing this week in Concrete, Washington, and its environs. Above is at Rasar State Park, my sketching Mecca out here. It’s got everything — river, beach, stone beach, forest, and a gorgeous meadow with mountain views.
Picture
Picture
Plus a little buddy I found on my walk the other day. I tend to go for a big double spread of watercolor, but I’m hoping to also exercise some restraint, so some smaller spreads, maybe not cover everything with paint every single time. We’ll see how that goes...
Picture
0 Comments

Sabbath

6/23/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
I arrived out west on Tuesday evening, and I’ve done a few sketches, but largely I’ve been taking some time off work. I’ve been sleeping a lot, catching up with friends, and taking care of emotional business instead of career business. That’s always a bit hard for me, so I was happy to read this opinion article (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/opinion/summer-lying-fallow.html) in the New York Times on the importance of rest and renewal to the creative process, as well as life in general. So in that spirit, here are a few scenes from my usual daily walk out here in Concrete, Washington. The trail is an old railroad bed, up above the highway. It’s an easy way to walk out of town, wide and flat and almost unpopulated. I sometimes see another person or two, but not often.
0 Comments

Recent Water Oils

6/17/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I recently got professional photographs made of some completed paintings in the water series. They are so much better than the snapshots I take in my studio, which invariably have a good bit of glare. So here are a few of them to enjoy today, since I'm in family time mode with my sister here and also getting ready to travel again. There will be travel sketches soon from Washington.
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Memphis on the Mark

6/14/2019

1 Comment

 
I was a guest on Memphis on the Mark this week, which was great fun. I've known Mark Jones my whole life, since we both grew up at Idlewild Presbyterian here in Memphis. He's a film  maker with a number of movies (including Tennessee Queer, a small town family drama, which uses my house as one of its main sets) and several web series to his credit. His newest venture is an interview show with film makers, artists, and other creatives. I was thrilled to be on. We talked a lot about my printing presses and how they work, for those who are interested in that. And I found out that I talk with animation and apparently need to ask for a clip-on mike instead of a stick-on one. The stick-on one fell down my blouse quite early in the process and can be heard rustling throughout the interview. I'm not ready for prime time yet...
1 Comment

Tomatoes

6/12/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Today’s still life is tomatoes. I bought some lovely Cherokee purple ones at the market, and I had fun painting one in the sunflower painting over the weekend. Summer tomatoes are worth celebrating, so I decided they deserved their own painting. This is the lunchtime progress, so it’s not finished yet (I’m taking a long break and doing a blog post), but I had a tomato at lunch to match my painting, so I thought that might be fun to show.

The other thing was that I kept thinking about still lifes in general while I was painting. I put up a post about them yesterday, and this painting was feeling very generic to me as I started it, right up until I started painting details into the Bridgman pottery platter the tomatoes sit on.
Picture
So this still life, I very intentionally chose a platter by Melissa to use. I wanted that lightness shining out of the darkness, but I also wanted some of her distinctive work and pattern included. Craft has not always been appreciated on the level of art in this country, but it is equally beautiful and often more skillful. It began to feel like a painting that was more personally mine when I put in the handiwork of a friend. I’d like to include more pottery in my still lifes to come. My first was my new Shearwater teapot I brought back from Ocean Springs when I had work at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art. Including it, aside from celebrating its beauty, was a way for me to memorialize that moment in my career. I intend to keep my still lifes personal by using items I own, things that are important to me, and things made my people who are important to me. The vase in the sunflowers is one I inherited from my Mom, and it always makes me think of her.

Back to work now (and I’ll get a better shot of this painting when I finish it), but the final photo is lunch, the one Cherokee purple in the house that is not currently posing for me. This time it’s on a plate by Perry Munn potters, the friends I visited in Arkansas last week who are also the resident potters at the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View.
Picture
Kudos to Melissa Bridgman for loaning the platter out to me for this. I have a lot of her work, but nothing the shape I was envisioning.

I love Dutch still lifes, as I wrote about yesterday, but they tended to show off the wealth of their patrons by painting fine china, ornate goblets, and other fancy and expensive objects. What I want to do in my still lifes is to show the beauty of daily life. I hope people will slow down and admire the sheen of a tomato before eating it or remember to get themselves flowers at the market once in a while. And one of my daily happinesses is using handmade things in my regular life. I’m friends with lots of potters, and I love to use the plates, bowls, and teapots they have made.
Picture
0 Comments

Sunflowers

6/11/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I’m back to market still lifes this week. It’s an pleasurable and easy way to get the paint flowing when I’m feeling stuck on another project, and I do enjoy the feeling of continuity with still life painters through the centuries. Pieter Claesz is one of my favorites, and several early women painters were flower and still life painters, Rachel Ruysch and Clara Peeters among others. It was a genre women that was “acceptable” or women to do at the time, and they did it beautifully. And made lasting names for themselves, which is amazing given the patriarchal society they were born into. I also think it’s a gift to the world to simply paint beauty occasionally and remind people of the joy in the everyday things that surround them. Still lifes often get marginalized in the same way as genre fiction, but I’ve always been drawn to them, both in viewing and execution.

This week it was sunflowers, which I discovered are harder than they look. I’d done some years ago, but in a very simplified way. I’m drawn to the size and robust presence they have. I started off a little fussy with them, but then the tomato and carrots went in largely one pass. While I painted the flowers likely ten times. So it goes.

Picture
Picture
You can see the chalk marks I use for my initial drawing in the early views. I used NuPastel either light yellow or light gray to lay the shapes down where I want them before diving in with paint. Nothing very detailed, but a road map.

The end of the first day below on the left. I was largely happy with it, though I ran out of steam before I finished the second set of hydrangeas. There had been a different flower there that I wasn’t happy with, so I did a little rearranging near the end of the day to bring another hydrangea blossom around to the visible side. The next day I finished that and also decided the sunflowers were a bit fussy, so I simplified them down a bit. I think it’s finished now. The background is pretty uniformly dark, but it’s hard to get a snapshot without glare. The dark background feels to me particularly in an almost apostolic line with the Dutch painters of the past, and it really makes the lighter objects in the foreground pop. Feeling happy with this one is making me reconsider the previous still lifes in this series. A follow up blog post will show you work I did on one of those.
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Artist Friends

6/6/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I absolutely loved staying with Judi Munn and John Perry of Perry Munn Pottery this past week. It's great to have creative friends with interesting homes (their handmade dining room chairs are gorgeous) who can talk art and shows and living a self-directed, creative life.

It was great going out and sketching with Judi after the show. Here are a couple more sketches from that, to right and below. On top I drew Judi sketching at the Ozark Folk Center toward the end of our workshop. I'm trying to get myself out of my reflexive use of watercolor and mix up my sketchbook with different inks a little more.

Judi and I were racing a storm while we sketched, which you can see a bit from the clouds below. I'd been eyeing this tree and got a very quick sketch in my journal before we had to bail. Sometimes, especially with good days and special places, I want something in my small art journal instead of just larger watercolors in a random sketchbook. It's nice to have that record of a well spent day.
Picture
Picture
The final reason to love visiting art friends is that (especially when they're generous to a fault), you end up taking a bit of beauty home with you. I totally fell for Judi's bunny (I've got a thing for bunnies anyway), which was in the room I stayed in. She caught his expression perfectly, and I loved the green background. He's now living just beside my bed where I see him every night and every morning, and he makes me smile. I also came home with a gorgeous, wood fired teacup of John's. The photo is too dark to show off its full beauty, but there are flashes of blue inside and out from the ash, and it fits my hand so well. I do love this photo of tea on their deck. They live up a forestry road, and it was the perfect getaway. I'm so grateful for this job where I get to do things I love surrounded by the best people.
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Arkansas Workshop

6/6/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I’m being able to revisit various special places this spring. I used to go to Mountain View and Calico Rock in the Arkansas Ozarks pretty frequently, but it’s been a good while since I got over there. My potter friend Judi Munn (she and her husband are the resident potters at the Ozark Folk Center) is also in an art guild there, and she invited me to teach a sketching workshop. I loaded up an array of materials, a stack of inspirational books, another stack of my own journals, and I spent the day with a crew of lovely and dedicated artists. We had a great time, and they were so welcoming of me. I love getting to go talk about doing what I love and all the different fun things you can use to sketch. Then Judi and I ended up going to City Rock Bluff outside Calico Rock to sketch. I used to paint here regularly, but it had been several years. It felt so good to step out onto that broad bluff and again and look down on a beautiful world. And it was the perfect, quiet end of the day. Below is Judi sketching the view.
Picture
0 Comments

Tower Grove Park revisited

6/1/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I got to revisit Tower Grove Park last weekend for the first time in several years. It's always a muse for me, one of my deeply happy places, and I was delighted to have a full afternoon to wander with my sketchbook. I've painted the Chinese pavilion before, and this time I'm at least contemplating a print of it. The park has two gorgeous trees I love at two opposite ends. I checked on my my favorite sycamore in the bird sanctuary. She is old and has deep pockets, but she's a beautifully hospitable tree. The first one I ever fell in love with in a must-touch, spend-time-with-her kind of way.
Picture
At the other end of the park is a copper beech I've sketched and painted many times. More traditionally photogenic, with whorls and spirals all over the trunk. I did a larger watercolor of this one, fighting gnats, but so worth it.
Picture
It was good to revisit old haunts. I hit Ted Drewes frozen custard, of COURSE, and I saw a lot of friends dancing. A marvelous weekend.

0 Comments

Dixon

6/1/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Memphis Urban Sketchers met at Dixon today, since our show is still up there. It was a perfect morning for painting outside, and I'd been meaning to get back out with my gouache and see how I could do outside, after those magnolia studies went well a few days ago. I'm working much smaller in gouache than I did a couple of years ago when I tried it the first time. I need some smaller brushes for it -- my regular watercolor brushes are too soft for the stiffer paint. But I had fun playing and feel like I'm on the track to somewhere.

I couldn't resist Ceres (at right). I always seem to paint her when I go there, but it's a much different image than my usual, more clear, watercolors.


Picture
After doing two in gouache, there wasn't much time, so I did one fast, small watercolor just to have the day in my journal as well. I was missing line and wanted to play with my green ink a little too. The two gouaches are on freestanding Kraft brown paper. It's always fun to sketch Elizabeth in her nifty sketching hat.
Picture
0 Comments
    Picture

       online store


    Martha Kelly is an artist and illustrator who lives and works in Memphis, Tennessee.


    Get studio email updates from Gideon and me.
    Submit

    To subscribe to this blog, by email:

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner



    Categories

    All
    Artist In Residence
    Art Workshops
    Calendar
    Chalk Line Books
    Commissions
    Country Workshops
    Daily News
    Dixon
    Dogs
    Exhibition
    Food Sketches
    Fountain Pen
    Fountain-pen
    Gouache
    Graphic Essay
    Graphite
    Illustration
    Letterpress
    Liturgical
    Markers
    Memphis Theological Seminary
    Memphis Urban Sketchers
    Museum Sketching
    Musicians
    Oils
    Open House
    Overton Park
    Paris
    Pastels
    Pen And Wash
    Pink Palace Crafts Fair
    PNW
    Prints
    Publications
    Radio
    Self Portrait
    Still Life
    Tea
    Television
    Travel
    Trees
    Urban Sketching
    Video
    WAMA
    Watercolor
    Watercolor Crayons
    Wedding



    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    November 2010
    October 2010
    June 2010
    April 2010
    January 2010

  • HOME
  • PRINTS
  • WATERCOLORS
    • Memphis
    • Paris
    • England
    • France
    • Greece and Turkey
    • St. Louis
    • My Palette
  • OILS
  • BOOKS
  • SKETCHES
    • Quarantine Journal
    • Memphis
    • Overton Park
    • Mr. Darcy
    • Mr. Darcy's Odyssey
    • Musicians
    • Tea
    • Dutch travelogue
    • Shakertown travelogue
    • Sketching tools
  • LITURGICAL
    • Special Bulletin Sets
    • Bulletin Line Drawings
    • "The Garden"
  • BLOG
  • ABOUT
  • SHOP