Teenage tear jerkers, beautifully drawn

"You draw like a comic artist." My friend Pete compared his drawing to mine. We were on holiday, and had taken sketchbooks and pencils. Not that we were sketching the gorgeous seascape and cliffs we could see from our holiday cottage; no, we were copying photos of faces from magazines to improve our portrait sketching.

I looked at my drawing. Yes, I agreed with him. Pete's drawing was all soft lines, light and shade... too much shade really, his faces looked they were drawn at night! But mine... mine harked back to my days copying art from the girls' comic magazines I used to read when I was 11 or 12, namely Tammy and Pink, with defined lines.

I used to draw my own comic strips, laboriously imitating the eyes and faces of my preferred artists from those comics. I didn't learn until recent years that my favourite artist was called Juliana Buch (or Juliana Buch Trabal to give her her full name) and that she resides in Spain.

Try as I might my illustrations have never achieved the fluid lines of Juliana Buch's. Have a look at this sample of her work from Pink Magazine in the mid 70s.

Wow! Isn't that stunning? Wasted on a kids' mag. I always loved the way she drew hair. I loved the patterns on her clothing, her use of light and shadows. Really, all the illustrators on these magazines were world class, but in my books she, along with Jose Casanovas, is tops.

These British girls' comics and mags were a big influence on my drawing development and the storylines of my own comic strips. Each publication was a slightly different genre.

Tammy, which I subscribed to for nearly four years, specialised in tear-jerkers. Orphaned girls living with nasty relatives. Girls who were threatened with the death of a beloved pet unless they did what evil father/mother/step-parent/aunt/uncle/friend demanded. Girls desperate for a career in ballet or equitation who had to overcome terrible odds. Girls going through hell at boarding school. And let's not forget the odd ghost story. Or poor Molly Mills, the 1920s servant who suffered under the eagle eye and ears-on-stalks of butler Pickering. 

Honestly, some of the story lines wouldn't be allowed today in a modern children's magazine! But I loved them and so did all my friends who read them. My mother read Tammy each week after I'd finished and liked Molly Mills best.

Pink was aimed at a slightly older audience, young teens rather than girls of 10 to 12, and the many adverts for tampons and pads were clear evidence of that. The stories were a bit different too, with many of the lead characters teenagers or young women working for a living. Boyfriends - and the getting of - played bigger roles in the plots than in Tammy. There were still tearjerkers (those evil relatives keeping Our Heroine a virtual prisoner or slave) however. Pink was more of a magazine than a comic, filled with gossip about pop stars (David! And another David!  Michael! Jermaine! Noddy! All you'd want to know about them!). It merged with Music Star in the mid 70s to nobody's surprise.

It's a terrible pity these comics no longer exist. Tammy lasted until the mid 80s and I don't know what happened to Pink. There apparently isn't a market to produce them any more as girls have grown out of that type of storytelling, but I do wonder: look at the popularity of Manga and graphic novels with teens. The cost of commissioning artwork for them would push the price of a weekly mag through the roof anyway if nothing else. 

Having discovered a marvellous repository of Pink on the interweb, I have spent several hours this weekend in utter delight, squawking over the artwork and also the pop stars and the music of the day that I grew up with. 

I hope a Tammy archive will be set up by someone at some point. I did a stupid thing when I was in my twenties: I threw away that four years' worth of Tammy, gave it to a girl up the street and heaven knows what she did with it. I didn't really want to let it go but needed the storage space. I regretted it at the time and have regretted it over the years when I think of the gorgeous artwork in some of those stories.

It's enough to make me want to draw a comic strip again. Just for the hell of it and in memory of those graphic stories I loved as a girl. If I do...you'll find it here.

A painterly weekend to myself

I have deliciously sore muscles in my legs, back and arms from weeding my Mum's lawn on Saturday morning. She has a weeding device which is supposed to pull dandelions out easily without you having to bend down, but some of her dandies were too well-established so I was bending and pulling and yanking for an hour and a half in the spring sunshine, until I felt too sweaty, my hair dripping with salty sweat, and too thirsty too. I'm surprised my muscles aren't complaining more, but then I do try and do stretches most days (when I think of it).

Last weekend was a computer-free weekend aside from social media updates and chatting online with some friends. And oh boy, was it good!  G was away until last night so I had the luxury of a weekend to myself with my own company and no interruptions.

After I'd done the lawn I did some cleaning at Mum's house then came home and got stuck into more drawings. I had a scene in mind of the view from Mum's house, across the river to the great school which graces the top of the hill on the other side. It would be the view from my childhood, before the trees grew and obscured most of the building.

I also tried a scene from Paris. I had taken a photo of a languid Parisian girl with a red-lipped, bored face toiling up the steps at Montmartre, and decided it would make a funky landscape with the buildings leaning in and out, and the curves of the handrail exaggerated.

I got stuck in.

My paintings didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped, so late in the afternoon I gave up and treated them as drafts. I was tired though - I draw/paint standing up and I'd been on my feet most of the day. After a hot bath I sank gratefully into bed at 9.30. This is the time that 20 years ago I'd be setting out for the evening - how times change!

On Sunday, after getting a couple of loads of washing out on the line and cleaning the house, I brought out the pastels again.

The second attempt at Mum's view was better, but I think I buggered up one of the jacaranda trees I'd placed in the foreground. Now I definitely know what I'm doing with that scene; one more attempt should see it as I intend it to be.

My sulky Parisian girl turned out better, too. On Saturday I'd painted her with too subdued a palette. This time I went mad on gold and oranges, taking the soft sandstone and hyping it up into summer colours. I'm much happier with the result.

These two paintings are both the same size: 9" x 5" (don't ask me what that is in centimetres, I can work it out... eventually!). This is specific as there is a class in an art show I have entered in the past in which all the entries must be that size. They can be any media or subject. This dates back to the Heidelberg School in the early 1900s who held an art show where all the paintings were that size.  The art show isn't until next May but heaven knows I need some practice!

I'm buoyed up as my nudey rudey and Parisian building both made it into the art show in the area I'm living in at the moment. I'll be going to the opening this Friday night. I'm stunned and delighted as I really didn't expect to make the cut, I'm so out of practice.

So now all I want to do is draw and paint. Work is an invasion when my fingers are itching to grab hold of a pastel!

G is home again so that intrudes on my creative space a bit, particularly in the evenings when it's my only real chance to paint during the week. But don't knock the muse, never knock the muse...

Nudey Rudey's off to the show

This morning I'll be dropping off two paintings to the local art show. The Paris landscape I painted several weeks ago, and...er... a nude. Of me.

Shit that sounds pretentious! As if I stood in front of a mirror painting myself and admiring my boobs or something.

But no, I set up a tasteful self-portrait in the apartment in which we stayed in Paris. In the living room was a sofa with a throw over the back which was a tapestry of a Gainsborough portrait. I lay on the sofa in the same pose as the naked lady in the tapestry, as a kind of joke.

I don't as a rule take nude photos of myself. I don't have the bod any more; although the extra curves are probably artist model materials these days! But I was surprised when I looked at the back of my camera afterwards. The photo was artistic, not slutty or sleazy. I knew at that point I'd try and make a painting/drawing of it.

The resulting painting - technically a drawing as it's oil pastels but the pastels are so thick on the paper it's just about a painting - is 6 inches by 6 inches. I might be willing to put a nudey rudey of me on paper but not on a large scale!

Here it is:

Not only is it my first nude but the first time I've painted or drawn a human as the key focus of a painting. I usually do landscapes and still life. Or my cats. I have a great portrait of Hamish MacFlea which is life-sized and captures him perfectly, but I haven't tried capturing the human soul.

Here's the one of Hamish, although it's not going in the show.

I painted this for myself and my Mum; it's not something that's going to sell anyway. I did this one about 7 years ago, when I decided to start drawing again after many years.

So here I am, feeling nervous about putting these two paintings in the show, hoping like hell they get selected for hanging, hoping they sell and hoping they don't as I'm rather attached to them (which is why I will never become a cat breeder, you can sense the Crazy Cat Lady aspect of it from here, can't you?). I doubt they will win any prizes as the competition will be super-fierce - it's a big show - but if I don't try, I'll never know. 

If the paintings don't get selected for the main show I have ticked the box to allow them to be selected for the Salon des Refuses, for paintings that didn't make the main cut. It may sound loserish, but it isn't. It gives them another chance at getting a gong and/or a sale. 

I'll know in a couple of weeks if they have been selected for either show, or whether I will be taking them home (and putting them in the Hunters Hill Art Show next year!)

The diminishing dollar

I had a rather disturbing meeting with my major client earlier this week. She heads a not for profit association for which I maintain the website, create graphic and DTP documents as needed, run the marketing campaigns and press releases, and some of the admin and events. I'm assisted by her sister who applied for a traineeship with us and was awarded the role. Now her sister is gradually taking on more and more of the work as her dollar rate is far less than mine.
This role pays me about $2500 a month and with my other design work tasks few and far between right now, it's my bread and butter.
My client has now asked me to review tasks and make sure her sister and I are not doubling up. She wants me to do less and her sister more. In addition, I can't claim hours that I spend at the functions this organisation runs, where essentially I help with meet and greet, take pics etc. That's a good five or six hours a month I've lost. Since I'm only getting $27/hour (and my usual rates for graphic and web design and marketing campaigns etc are $120/hour) my dollars are diminishing.
I suspect she wants to get me down to about $1500 a month on which I can't sustain myself given my company's bills, small though they are in relative terms - about $1200/month.
Thankfully G my husband is in a good job at the moment and we are now talking about income splitting to save him some tax and give me enough money to buy groceries and pay bills, particularly when he's away, which is quite often. I still want to be able to support myself and pay my share though, however it's getting increasingly harder. I'm earning the same money I earned 25 years ago. Ugh.
If I have to cut back my hours for this NFP organisation, I can be positive: it will give me more time to paint and write, even though that won't bring in an instant income, if any!!
I have started a CafePress shop with a couple of my designs and will add one a week - well, that's the plan. I am trying to sell on Zazzle too but am having trouble uploading and getting stuff into my shop there. I will also be putting designs on Dreamstime image library and getting paid every time someone downloads one. I don't expect to earn a six figure income from this lot, but frankly anything would help right now.
And I have to plot then write a novel. I have some material for it already, based on jokey newsletters/magazines I used to create and mail to my friends in the early 90s, those pre-internet days. Now I just have to weave a story around those and create fictional characters or rather fictional versions of ourselves, and make their lives somewhat more interesting!
I was in a reasonably depressed state yesterday thinking about my lack of funds, and feeling sick at the thought of having to look for part time work outside the house to make my ends meet. More than anything I need to be successful with my own creative enterprises, not work for someone else and be worrying about whether I'm meeting KPIs and having to deal with people in my space and the subsequent interruptions that are a part of office life.
G wants me to write and is willing to help me financially with that, so I suspect that writing, drawing, painting and graphic art will be taking a bigger part of my week for the next twelve months as I really concentrate on building an income stream out of it. I'm lucky I have someone so supportive. I do hate asking him for money though; it's against my nature.
Herbert, a plea: let me be successful. Send people my way to buy the goodies my artwork will be on. Most of all, send me a bloody plot!

When you just need fifty shades of grey.

Bonkbusters leave me cold. If I read a sex-and-shopping novel I find the shopping more interesting than the sex. In fact reading any novel I'm likely to skim over the sex bits, muttering, "Oh, get on with the plot!"

So I'm not likely to grab a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, the mummy porn book with record-breaking sales that has been described by the unkind as having the plot and literary style of Twilight with S&M thrown in. Needless to say I didn't read Twilight either. I had two reviews of it, one from a friend's vacuous teenage daughter who had re-read her copy so often it had fallen apart and could only bubble with incoherent delight and a lot of 'like's about the characters, and a snort of disgust from my intellectual stepson who said it was a poorly-written bit of fluff that set women's lib back fifty years.

But I do have a need for fifty shades of grey.

Or at least more than five.

I'm getting back into painting and drawing, and treated myself to a set of oil pastels last Monday. I've been using soft pastels and after chatting with some artist friends decided to give oil pastels a try. Soft pastels are great fun, amazingly messy, vividly coloured, but they do tend to smudge at the slightest touch and need fixatives. Too much fixative changes their colours, which is exceedingly annoying. Having just got back from holiday and into drawing scenes from Paris with soft pastels, my first few efforts, while not fab as I'm out of practice, were ruined by fixatives.

So. The oils. Great. They only smudge when you want them to. Realistically they don't need fixatives either, which is a huge bonus. But in drawing urban scenes, I found one thing lacking. A pale enough grey. I'd taken the precaution of buying extra greys as well as the set of 48, knowing I would need them. But it's hard to find one that's just a smudge darker than white, that colour that is just perfect for highlights, for sunshine falling on asphalt.

The beauty of oil pastels is that they blend like oil paints, you can smudge and blend and coerce, and use turpentine on them too if you want to meld and blur and blend. So yes, I could blend white with a darker grey, and did. But still... there is that particular pale shade I'm still searching for and that doesn't appear to exist across the major, well-made brands of pastel.

That aside, the first drawing I did with my oil pastels surprised me. I did it in three hours on Monday night (I am an impatient git), and was delighted at the workability of the pastels themselves. I am using Caran D'Ache pastels as research told me they are the softest and easiest to blend; their range of 96 colours is pretty good too.

Suddenly I got my groove back. My drawing turned out as I intended it to in terms of colour, composition and crispness. I'm happy with this.

And now you can see why I need fifty shades of grey!

Painting the new year in. I hope.

What a looong year it has been - but how quickly it has gone by! Looong in the sense that we haven't really taken any holidays this year. We have had a long weekend in Adelaide, all of three days, and another in Melbourne almost a year ago. Aside from that our fingers have been glued to the computer keyboards, but now we both have a break coming up.

This Christmas I'm determined to start drawing and painting again. You know, the stuff you do by hand, where you get pastel dust on everything and the dining table becomes a makeshift studio. I have been drawing on my iPad a lot this year and while it's been fun it also makes me lazy. If I make a mistake I can erase it, or undo it. Putting pen to paper (or pastel or paint to paper) is more unforgiving.

I stopped at my favourite art supply shop last week and as usual succumbed to a technique book, this one on drawing successful drapery, something I haven't mastered as well as I'd like.

Six years ago I was painting daily. I was invigorated, up sometimes until midnight during the week, when all was quiet and I the only one awake. I was very prolific, and these are some of my favourite images from that time.

This is the one I'm most proud of. It won a Highly Commended at an art show. I called it Carry On Up The Vineyards.

This is me in 'realistic' mode - Gladesville Bridge at sunset. I cheated and painted from one of my own photos. It really was that colour. Deep sunset pinks and peaches.

Probably the first image I painted when I decided to try out pastels. My style is funky/modern usually. This is a whimsical image of the cat I had in my life then, Hamish MacFlea.

Contemplating the Yarts

A weekend in Canberra in early summer - crisp nights, bright sunny smogless days. Lovely! Despite Canberra having a reputation as a soulless place a town is really the people you know in it, and we have good friends there which makes Canberra for us an enjoyable and interesting place to visit. We stayed with one of them on Saturday night, as we'd been promising to catch up with he and his wife for ages.

It's been a bit of an arty week for us - Picasso on Wednesday, and on Saturday we visited the Canberra Glassworks and watched glassblowers making - or in one case breaking - glass ornaments and paperweights. I hadn't been to the Glassworks before; it's in Kingston, next to the markets, another favourite haunt of mine when I'm in town at the weekends.

Sunday morning we all looked at each other: what to do, what to do?  We hadn't brought decent walking/hiking shoes with us so a march up the hill behind our friend James' house wasn't in order. It's apparently quite a nice bush walk but our shoes weren't made for scrambling over rocks.

The boys muttered something about the War Memorial but given they have both had time serving their countries it's the kind of place they'll spend hours at, talking at length about each item. (My husband spent 3 years as in the Territorial Army in the UK and you'd think it was a lifetime's service. He bangs on about it like Gavin in the UK sitcom The Office. James spent almost 30 years in the RAN and Royal Navy and cynical doesn't begin to describe him.) I visited the War Memorial with t'Other Half last year and enjoyed it, as it does have some fantastic and heartbreaking exhibits, but that two hours was enough to last me for, oh, five years, say.

We all decided finally on the National Gallery. We hadn't been there since March last year and I always enjoy the ground floor, with its paintings that range from impressionist through fauvism to post-impressionist, pop art and modern. It's free, too.

But I hadn't really truly factored in James. James is great, but he's very opinionated, and a lot of those opinions are negative, or at least negative balanced by what he'd do to set the ACT/Australia/The World to rights.

James and Modern Art don't mix.

I began to see it was a mistake once we'd wandered through the fauves and found our way to postimpressionist. There were Picasso and Braque drawings side by side, from their cubism phases. "This is shit," James declared quietly, and moved on.

Nexus II by Morris Louis, painted in 1959. According to the NGA,  "'Nexus' means connection or link. The painting, made in 1959, marks the transition between two series of important paintings by Morris Louis, who created a new style of Abstract Expressionism in the last five years of his short life". According to James, 'shit'. You decide.

"This is shit," was applied by James to almost every painting after that. His response to Blue Poles was unprintable.

But I had to agree with him on some of it. We all pondered, whilst looking at a diptych of two huge white canvases with nothing on them except a carefully painted narrow black and green border around the edges, who was being taken for a ride. The canvases were titled "Untitled" by Jo Baer. Apparently it is a classic example of 1960s minimalist art. The Government had kindly purchased this work on the taxpayers' behalf, undoubtedly guided by a very expert critic.

The art world is full of bluff, fluff and wankerism. Who decides that a blank canvas with a thin border is art? Expensive art, more to the point. Are we all being conned?

To view the diptych we had to carefully avoid treading on an installation on the floor. A 2 metre by 2 metre white painted board with a dollop of brown foam on top. It looked like something my dog Rosie would shit out if I feed her something a bit too rich for her digestion. Unsurprisingly it too was 'untitled'.

I'm guessing there are people who know a lot more about art than I do who will rave about the Gallery's acquisition of these pieces and explain why they are so important in the world of The Yarts. I'd like to meet them so they can enlighten me and I too can gasp in delight and nod knowingly, and look sadly on people like James who call these works shit. But could it be a case of The Emperor's New Clothes?

We had a moment of levity with Yoko Ono's arse though. Or arses. There's a massive - and I do mean massive - image by Yoko which consists of photos of somebody's bare bum repeated over and over. It's called Bottoms. My husband peered a bit too closely at it trying to ascertain if it was the same arse repeated or a number of arses in the same pose, and his face, close to the arses, triggered the alarm.

He apologised to the nearby guard, and I came out with one of those one-liners you always long for just at the right time. 'Come away from there, it's not scratch and sniff!'

His roar of laughter must have echoed into the next three galleries.

After that we went upstairs, James was soothed by more traditional stuff and I was still pondering who would find real appreciation in the white canvases and the dog shit in one hundred year's time. I guess the public pondered the same about Van Gogh, Picasso, Klimt and Matisse when they first started showing their work and experimenting. Those outside the world of art and artists, the conventional people like my grandparents or great grandparents would have shaken their heads and muttered, 'Ooh, give me a nice Rembrandt any day. Nobody's going to appreciate YOUR work.'

Oh heck. I'm starting to sound like James!

Sneaking a day with Picasso

When I told my Mum I was taking a day off and heading to the Picasso exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, she was less than impressed.

"Don't like Picasso. Those weird paintings he did ... he must have been on drugs."

Mum is 86. She has led a very conservative life and her taste in art runs to the chocolate box and/or realism. She likes landscapes to look like landscapes, people to look like people. The Impressionists are about as avant-garde as her tastes go. She enjoyed the Renoir exhibition we went to years ago, but doesn't share my love for Matisse or Van Gogh. Picasso - well, she wouldn't waste her money.

My husband and I spent rather than wasted ours yesterday on ten rooms full of paintings and sculptures that covered Picasso's life from around 1905 to 1972, and loved it.

While Mum might snort that Picasso's work was weird scribbles, the guy was a fantastic draughtsman. He could draw beautifully, and if he chose to paint cubist men with guitars, or women with eyes in strange places (Mum's ultimate detestation of his work), he did it because he knew what he wanted to achieve and set about achieving it.

This post isn't going to be a critique of Picasso's work; I'm no art critic or expert. But I'd like to share some paintings that I loved.

Firstly, The Bathers, painted in 1918. Annoyingly the postcards you can buy at the gallery don't do the depth of colour in this painting justice; reproduced, the colours are muted. The purple bathing suit on the right in real life is a knockout magenta. The entire painting is full of jewel-like colours and very delicate detail. It's only small, 27x22cm. You can see every eyelash on the woman on the left. If the figures are captured in oddly distorted poses, so what? There's movement and grace and colour and an timelessness about this for me. 

The Reader, painted in 1932. Sort of reminds me of me, sat there with a book on her lap :-). A friend refers to me in her blog as The Reader, so I couldn't resist popping this image in. I do genuinely like it in its own right, too. Again in real life the colours are more bolshy. The lilac skin of the Reader is much brighter, the green on the chair greener. Could I live with this in my house? Oh yes. Yes. The subject of this portrait is Marie-Therese Walter, a young woman with whom Picasso was having a clandestine affair.

Large still-life on a pedestal table was painted in 1931 and is so vibrant in the flesh, so to speak, you just want to gaze and gaze at it. If the colours are similar to that of The Reader - that superb lilac which I just love jumps out from both paintings, linking them - it's because Picasso used this as a "disguised portrait" of Marie-Therese Walter. Again, that clandestine stuff. 

This is Two Women running on the beach (the race), painted in 1922.  Another small jewel of a painting, 35x41cm, with knockout colours, lovely forms and a timelessness about it. That head thrown back on the woman on the left is a very similar pose to that in The Bathers, and again the detail in her face is just beautiful.  I love the contrast between the delicate brushwork on the woman's face, the little cross-hatching on both bodies, and the lack of detail in the sky and rocks, as if this is a photo and the running women are captured at 1/1000 of a second with the rest all a bit of a blur. 

Lastly, A Portrait of Dora Maar. Picasso's mistress in the 1930s. This one's all hard angles and pointy shapes - I wonder what that says about their relationship? 

So that was my day - a sense of freedom, of escaping from clients, computers and phones for a day; an uplifting visit to see some fabulous paintings and being inspired by such a creative mind. 

I told my Mum it was fantastic. She still doesn't believe me.