Martha Kelly Art blog - MARTHA KELLY ART

MARTHA KELLY ART

Book Work

8/27/2020

I’ve been slowly scanning, editing, and placing images on pages with the right (hopefully!) margins for publishing. It’s a painstaking but still kind of satisfying process, but it also means I don’t have much new work to show here. I’ve got two more pages to finish, this map for the history section of the park at the back and the title page. Everything else is fully painted. I’m hoping to send this off to the printer and have a proof ready when I get home. Then I can see how things look, make necessary changes, figure out the pricing and ISBN number, and get them ordered for the fall. It feels good to be this close.

This week was National Dog Day, so I posted “D” on facebook to celebrate. I couldn’t make this book without having Mr. Darcy in it. He’s my regular forest companion.

Beach Day

8/21/2020

It's been so crazy this trip I hadn't gotten to my favorite spot once. I fixed that this week and took a sunny day to go with a picnic, my sketching things, and my book to a small stone beach at the confluence of two rivers. I sat in the shade and did two two-page spreads, I read a while, and then I just sat on a rock out in the river and drank in a little sunlight. It felt wonderful. I think I may get a print out of the vertical sketch too. I hadn't meant to do a second page, but when I looked up as I was packing away the sketching things, the clouds were amazing, so I kept going.

I'm taking a ton of photos of Mr. Darcy right now. He is both my muse and my heart, and I enjoyed taking some more that day. Below is my recent favorite (I'm also pondering a print), plus some other photos of the day. We took a short forest hike on the way home, and I found an encouraging message on a trail post. I'm grateful for the pull together spirit I find a lot of places these days.

Journal spreads

8/18/2020

I've done some sketching today, which felt really good. Mr. Darcy is doing well, and we went to the gorgeous forested state park nearby to walk before he starts his new round of chemo. I did the vertical spread as well as a tiny bit of truck (see bottom) to fill up the other day's bicycle page.

Then when I got home, the clouds were absolutely gorgeous, so I settled in the lawn to paint. I hadn't meant to do Alice at first, looking mostly at the clouds, but then, there she was, and I've enjoyed drawing her along the way this trip. So here we are at the far point of our trip, the destination, before heading back toward home.

I know I posted the barn yesterday, but I wanted to get the full page spread here as well. I had intended something more domestic, but this is what happened instead. Often it's just the next thing that catches my eye.

Favorite Barn

8/16/2020

I got on my bike seriously for the first time out here and did 13 miles on a gravel trail the other day. It felt good to get going again, and I took a break to paint this barn, which is one I always admire when I go past. I've painted it several times, never quite getting what I'd hoped. This one may be the closest I've managed. A horse came over to watch as I sketched. I keep meaning to finish that page and scan the whole thing, but other stuff keeps happening, so here it is for now. I’ll post the whole thing whenever I get it done.

First Proofs

8/16/2020

I’m doing some proofing today, away from my regular set up. I wanted to see how the rv and lettering were going on the Explore print, so I just proofed the bottom half or so. It’s a tall skinny print, and I haven’t gotten to the top part yet. There will also be a color block behind it, but my lining-things-up-and-keeping-them-straight stuff (“registration” is the technical printmaking term) is all back in Memphis, so I may just wait on that part till I get home. This one is also quite tall, 24”, so the press would be helpful as well.

I did try a double layer for this second print, much smaller, so it felt less hard to manage, but the make-shift set up I tried moved on me. You can see that the one on the left especially moved as I printed. It gave me some helpful information anyway, but I may wait till home to do much more work on this one. I’m trying to decide if I need two blocks for the two blues (and you can see that if I do, they need to be curved a bit at the join), or if one block rolled carefully will be just as easy. I want the round light to be larger in the final version, but it’s always easy to take more away, and you can’t put it back, so I started conservatively. It’s the dock light across the lake from me at my first camping stop in Missouri. It’s nice to take your muse on the road once in a while and get some new views. The RV print is our campsite in Idaho a few days later.

Dog love

8/13/2020

It’s been a hard couple of weeks. My beloved muse Mr. Darcy has lymphoma. I’ve been working a bit on the prints but mostly doing vet visits and taking extra care of him. I think we’ve figured out a treatment that should give him another year or two, which (since he’s a big dog and 10 years old) is all I had realistically hoped to get with him anyway. It’s not nearly as hard on dogs as on people, and if he can stay happy and feeling good, I’d love the extra time. We’ve had to figure out different hip medicine for his arthritis, and that’s been hard too. But he looked frisky and much like himself last night, so I think we’re on the right path. I’ve been picking up lots of heart shaped stones as I walk that feel like talismans somehow. I know it’s magical thinking, but I still find myself holding them as I walk. So this page is a pretty good encapsulation of my last couple of weeks.

In other news, I’ve been thinking about the forest ABC book again after taking a break when I got here. It’s good work I can do downstairs with Mr. Darcy, and I wrote out an author’s page yesterday. Now I’ll have to erase the pencil work, scan it, and clean it up nicely. I still need a title page, but otherwise it’s going to be cleaning up and adjusting scans and putting the images on exactly the right size page with a small extra margin for the gutter. It’s getting close.

Slow work

8/7/2020

I’ve been doing a lot of slow print work lately with not so much to show yet, and I’ve been putting energy into that instead of sketching. Today I took my smaller sketchbook out on my walk with me, though, and it felt good to get reacquainted. I used two colors of ink (a dark gray brown and a green) plus watercolor.

Today I also got my “Explore” print fully drawn out and traced. Tomorrow I’ll transfer from the tracing paper to the two blocks, green and black. I’m slowly carving on the reflecting trees as well, and I should be ready to proof that one soon, though it’s quite large to be working just on a table top with a wooden spoon. I’ll have to see how far I get with that one away from my press.

Tough Week

8/2/2020

It's been a tough week with various large griefs around here and among people I care about. I've been carving on my new block, the 18x24" one, while watching some escapist BBC mysteries, but it's big enough to be going very slowly, so there's nothing really to share yet. I'm grateful for that meditative work, and I'm grateful for sketching, where I can turn bits of daily life into color and pattern and be-here-nowness. I'm also grateful that this was the week when strawberry rhubarb pie showed up at the local grocery. Rhubarb doesn't grow in Memphis, and that's a treat I really look forward to coming out here. It hasn't been available, and then yesterday it was. Baked goods, stones with strong life lines, walks in great beauty, and tea have all been balms this week. So there they are for my journal this weekend.