The Art of It

    As soon as this painting has been varnished it will be off to its new happy home. 600x460mm Oil on stretched canvas

I am having such fun.  Many thanks to my daughter, Tracey, for all the modeling! Simply Crimson - oil on canvas

Many months have passed with no blogging!!! 2010 has so far not been too kind to us but things are beginning to change - in August, we are going to be grandparents!!! Unfortunately my son is in Johannesburg but we will just have to make a trip up there as they don't come to Cape Town very often. Back to my painting - we started off the year painting at an Eco village in Pinelands called Oude Molen. This is a side view of the little restaurant. To the right is a big veg garden which supplied us with beautiful tasty fresh veg for the duration of our stay at a very reasonable price. I also bought some horse manure for my compost heap.

The last three weeks has been spent bending the brain! Margie, that was the most challenging painting I have ever done and I have learned so much. It was well worth the hours of work. The first step in the project was to paint a mono tone painting, anything we liked. I had already started to paint the centre when I remembered to photograph it. Then we had to divide the painting up into segments. Most people did squares. Yours truly decided to do circles which became slightly distorted as they went out, sort of like looking through a porthole. Then we had to paint each segment using just two colours plus white, matching values for the differing tones. Each segment was to be a different colour combination. If anyone has been to the Sixty Minute Artist lately you will know how he has been concentrating on tone and value. Very challenging and difficult to get right. I landed up repainting four of the circles as the colours where just too way out. Now to photo...

Finished at last! All 25 squares! What a huge learning curve! I worked in each square with only two colours plus white and have been amazed at the mixes, especially the beautiful greys one can get. I have also confirmed what my favourite colours are.

Noordhoek - Oil on canvas I have joined a new class with Margie Johnson - everyone in Cape Town knows her and has been to her classes! I thought that with the change from acrylics to oils I should go to one of the top teachers and boy oh boy am I learning fast!!! I am loving oils!!! I have discovered, though, that I really can't handle the smell of turps, even genuine turps makes me physically ill! I'm using white spirits and that seems to be working well. Heaven only knows how I am going to store this lot as it can take up to a year for oils to dry!!!! What an adventure!!!