Martha Kelly Art blog - MARTHA KELLY ART

MARTHA KELLY ART

Water Soluble Graphite

12/27/2018

I got some sticks of water soluble graphite on the advice of Ruth, who works at our marvelous local art store the Art Center. I’ve loved my tin of it, which I use with a brush, but I hadn’t tried the sticks. I love having an art store with local artists working who know and use the stock. I especially love not having to order and wait for days if I get a new project in my head. I had woken up with several new prints dancing around in there and went to buy the blocks so I could start right away. I’m working on them now, but in the meantime, here are the graphite sketches I’ve been doing. After all the packaging and marketing and reprinting of the holiday season, it’s good to get to do spontaneous art again. I’m so grateful for everyone who buys real art for presents. I absolutely couldn’t do what I do without you. But I’m also grateful to be past the push and with a little winter time to play with new ideas.

Speaking of presents, I got an email from Antiques Warehouse (a big, neighborhood antique mall that I love) that they were open on Christmas Eve. I went over there just for fun on my quiet holiday and found the mirror above. I’d hoped for one on a stand that I could use for self portraits, but this one was $8, nice looking, big enough to really see, and lightweight to move around in my various work spaces. A total win. I got it and the Royal Doulton teacup (bottom right) for my gifts to myself, and I’m enjoying both of them. I feel some more self portraits coming. I’ve missed doing figures lately.

Mixed Media

8/17/2018

I wrote my last post on the Impressionists in London exhibition as a general take on it. But I saved one crucial piece to talk about by itself. In a smaller side room, portraits the artists did of each other, was a fairly unassuming mixed media drawing (above) by William Orpen of a group of artists (Rodin, second from the left, being the main reconigizable one). I was totally enchanted with it. I love the misty, deftly light watercolor in the background, the mix of line and tone in the figures, and the quick ink lines that go over the graphite and lighter ink wash. I’ve been playing with my brush pens again lately, filled with Sumi ink in two different strengths, but I hadn’t thought to mix them with both watercolor and graphite. I also recently unearthed my water soluble graphite I found and had enjoyed a couple of years ago, but it’s easy for me to get enamoured of a new medium or technique and let older ones go. This spring and summer I was working in direct watercolor or with fountain pen and watercolor (a longtime favorite). This one piece got me wanting to work more in mixed media.

I was so inspired I did two pieces before I even got home. I started with one page in my smallest journal of the abstract sculpture by the Solferino metro station. This was what I had hoped. I kept the watercolor to a light wash and then mixed graphite and ink (the heavier tree branches) for the foreground. It was uncharacteristic restraint for me, and I was excited.

A few blocks later I stopped again and did this second piece in my bigger journal. The restraint didn’t go so well, and I ended up with much more watercolor than I had intended. It’s so hard for me not to cover the page in color. But I do like the depth of layering ink on top, and it’s hard to see here, but the graphite has a sparkly quality that also adds a richness. One place I was happy with the restraint was in the buildings on the right. They’re just sketched in with gray watercolor, no drawing of any kind first (all that direct watercolor practice was really good for me), and I was pleased with the contrast to the more full foreground. I’m not unhappy with this one, but it wasn’t what I was shooting for exactly. As can so easily happen.

Then that night I went back to self portraits. I used just the pencil and soluble graphite and the ink for the first one (no paint), but the next morning I did one where I laid in the initial “drawing” in just the flesh toned watercolor and then finished with graphite on top. No drawing, all brushwork, and I managed not to overwork it. It’s different than anything I’ve done, but I was really pleased with the outcome. Stay tuned for more watercolor and graphite mixes.

More Self Portraits

8/14/2018

These first two are direct watercolor, which means no drawing beforehand. You just dive in with paint. That’s tricky on faces, since I’m still feeling challenged on people in general and faces (and hands) in particular, but it’s a good exercise. I’ve also found that I can sometimes over work a piece if I take too long. I’ve been trying different expressions sometimes as well, and the smile above followed a frustrating 45 minute self portrait that got way too overworked and frozen on me. (See below.) I finally just started over and did the 10 minute version above, using the information I’d gleaned from the long one. It’s my favorite so far.

I’m on a kick of self portraits lately. Partly self portraits are the poor woman’s model session — available at any hour and free. And I’ve been thinking about figures all summer, so these are good practice. They feel a little self indulgent, but last year when I was here there was a David Hockney exhibit up at the Pompidou, and there was an entire room of self portraits. I think I remember that he did one every day for a while. It’s an interesting exercise, and I’ve been doing that lately as well, practicing various techniques in the process.

I’ve also been doing them with drawing first, as I did in the overworked one (where I was also trying to incorporate architecture again). I found a new ink that I’m in love with. It’s by J. Herbin, a company that has been making inks in Paris since the 17th Century. They have small bottles you can try as well as the big ones, and I got a small bottle of amber ink just to test. It’s perfect for figures. It’s light enough that if you mess up the drawing, you can just move the ink around with your paint, but it gives you a nice base to work into. In the places where the line remains, you have a nice texture added to the sketch. Here’s a preliminary drawing in just the ink. I took a shot before moving onto paint.

Here’s the finished piece. And finally one more done with ink first and then paint. I’m realizing that it’s often the eyes that get overworked. I start with a big brush and feel quite happy with how the sketch is going, but then I get persnickety around the eyes and lose all the nice looseness and expression. So today I did the second direct watercolor (with the pony tail) to try to counteract that tendency. Still there, but I’ll keep practicing.

I do know that it’s a little odd to come to Paris and paint myself, but there’s a lovely huge bathroom counter and great directional light and a largish mirror (none of which I have in my midtown, old fashioned home), so it’s an inviting place for self portraits. It’s also my 6th year here, and I feel like I’ve kind of exhausted, for now, what I’d really like to say about this place in watercolor. I brought oil pastels to try, but as much as I want to like them, I’m really not enjoying working in them. Plus Paris is also my time for self examination, and that is always literal for me, going hand in hand with self portraits as I think and plan for the year ahead. All of which adds up to a number of self portraits.

Apartment Sketches

8/6/2018

I’m having a quiet day today. It’s hot, the Orsay is closed, and I’m on vacation. So lots of sewing on my next to last quilt block going on, and a couple of around the house sketches. I found this new teapot at a pop up street flea market yesterday, and careful readers of my blog will know how much I adore drawing teapots. I’m also on a self portrait jag, so here’s one more of those. I was trying to get a little more facial expression. I remember the artist who did pastel portraits of my sister and me as kids alway said that “a portrait is a picture with something funny with the mouth.” Nothing could more encapsulate my attempts to branch out into figurative work.

Architectural Details

8/5/2018

One of the things I love about Paris is that it is created for beauty. The details on so many of the buildings are exquisite and fascinating. I began to have an idea about them and spent walk home from the Orsay sketching a good number of them (which tripled my time home, but it was so worth it.

I am always amazed in the Orsay by the Surrealists. I love their feel of otherworldliness that is so different from my own art. I keep thinking about their distinctive visual vocabulary (Redon with his floating flowers, Van Gogh’s portrait with the stars behind it), and I would love to achieve that feel in my own work without knowing exactly how to do it that doesn’t feel completely derivative. I saw an Andrew Wyeth exhibition recently, and he’s such a hardcore realist, but he had one amazing landscape with feathers floating across the picture plane in the foreground. It was perfect for who he was as a painter. As I’ve been looking at these details, I’m daydreaming about using them in conjunction with figures. I did the first self portrait on the right, and (aside from the deer in the headlights look — faces are still hard for me), it had something of that Medieval sense of pattern and symbolic space that I was hoping for. The second has more realistic space in it, but with the added Art Deco details I sketched on various buildings. I’m going to keep playing with this for a bit and see what happens.

Self Portraits

7/30/2018

I know I’m in Paris and haven’t actually SKETCHED Paris yet. I’ll definitely get there. But the figure sessions recently have me thinking about drawing people (as do my recent figurative paintings), and it’s been market weekend, where I hang out with musicians and draw them. Today, with all that momentum going, I did a few self portraits. This is actually pretty common for me in Paris. I have lots of time here to walk and think about the world, and somehow self portraits always spring out of self examination for me. So, for whatever reason, I did three today. Two largish facial drawings (definitely new territory for me) after one mostly full body one with a face I was really unhappy with. So I decided to dive more deeply.

This evening, after visiting with a marvelous artist friend of mine, I walked over to Luxembourg gardens and drew yet more people. I’m really enjoying these brush pens filled with ink. But I’ll post those in the morning, in the hopes that these blog pages will load better if they’re not totally weighed down with multiple pictures. Also, it’s past 8:30, and I’m on (nominal) vacation, so I think I’ll go read a book.

Banjo girl print underway

12/28/2017

One of the great things about Christmas being over is that now I once more have time to make art for myself. I love commissions, but I have a backlog of ideas that I am now champing at the bit to get to. Steady readers of this blog will remember this block from back in October. I had meant it to be a single, black and white (or brown and white) image, but I began to wonder about putting color behind it. I've carved a second block, and yesterday was its first test run. I have to fix places where the color drops down into the figure, and I'm doing a bit more refinement as I go, but it's close to what I want. The orange definitely amplifies the 70's vibe it already had, but I'm a child of the 70's, so that works for me. I'm hoping it conveys the joy I feel when I play music.

Paris Self-portrait

9/27/2017

I always seems to do self portraits in Paris. I walk a lot on my own and think, and self portraits seem to be an instinctive part of my self examination process. I did several watercolor ones while I was there, but I had the idea for this one near the end of the trip and took a few photos to help me do it in oils when I got home. My November show is called "Skyward" (a collaboration with Melissa Bridgman), and I decided it would be neat to have a figural piece or two as well as just landscapes. I've been enjoying oils on paper tremendously since I got home.

I took some photos as I painted, as I have been remembering to do lately, so here's the behind the scenes peek.

Painting up north

8/30/2017

I spent a week up north in the first apartment I ever came to here with my usual cat sitting gig. It was great to be back in that neighborhood again, and I did a bit of painting to celebrate that time. A couple of more self portraits (including a slightly meta sketch at right of the one above plus my Paris teapot and a second hand rose my friend Rene gave me that had been left in his tip box while he busked. Amazingly it perked up when I got it home and in water. I also painted the view out the window and Dusty, the resident cat.

Dusty is a pretty active cat, so I could only manage a brief kind of gesture sketch. She's got many more lovely stripes than I managed to capture, but I'm also trying not to overwork pieces here. I get too caught up in details sometimes, and drawings lose their energy. I'm trying to use my Paris sketches as a time of correction back in the other direction, even if some of them end up very impressionistic indeed.

Another Self Portrait

8/23/2017

My self portraits last year began with one in this window, and I really wanted to do one for this year as well. It's a stunning place that I love spending time in. It's also a nice book end to the series that began last year. I don't have another one in mind, though more may appear as I go through the trip. At the moment, though, I'm back to working on the Mr. Darcy book, which feels great. I also have friends visiting, so I'll be spending a bit less time making art and a little more time on vacation this week.