Paper and Threads

These are my morning journal pages from the second half of our beach week.  Each morning we would all go for an 8AM 2+ mile walk on the beach and the 3 wives collected things that we wanted to draw/paint while walking at the surfline.  These were our beach treasures.  The shells were not very plentiful this week, in comparison to just one week ago when we we there for July 4th holiday.

Morning 4:  We found one small dead fish, one children's plastic toy fish (blue) and one toy rubber flounder covered in sand in addition to several other types of tresures.  I sketched and painted these on one journal page as we set at the Cooper's Beach Snack Shack having coffee.

Morning 5:  I found a real assortment of things and put them all together as a still life with my empty coffee cup.

Morning 6:  I found a few shells and a beautiful long gull feather from one of the brown spotted gulls.  All week we used "google" to see if we could confirm that these large gulls were actually the young ones.  Anyone know?

Departure:  We kept a vase of fresh hydrangeas from the garden, in the kitchen, all week, and I finally decided that I needed to end my beach sketchbook pages with a painting of them.

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We are at the beach this week with friends - who we met in the 1960s.  There are early morning beach walks, afternoon pool swimming, and lovely dinners on the house patio.  Three of us sketch together, so we are creating visual journal pages and having great fun doing "labs" from Carla Sonheim's new book entitled Drawing Lab.

These are the visual journal pages from Mon-Wed.  Mon and Tues we went to the beach.  This morning we had a huge thunderstorm just as we were leaving and we spent the morning in the sunroom identifying bugs.

I'm taking photos of my journal instead of scanning the pages, so even the white bacground is slightly blue....

Posted by Shirley at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Our group met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, instead of in Central Park, because of the threat of inclement weather.  Our first drawing session was a major challenge - the Starn brothers bamboo structure on the Museum rooftop.  I decided to really limit my scope and to focus on the method that they used to connect the bamboo and creat a structure which supports many people on internal walkways. 

Our next drawing session was in the current exhibit called The American Woman - from the costume institute.  I already sketched some of the fashions in the exhibit on a previous visit and this time concentrated on the room called "The Heiress." 

Our 3rd and final sketch was in 19th C. European Paintings.  I am studying Cezanne's card players over a several year period and this time did a simple line drawing of one of the card players.  For more information about this project and my 2007, 2008, 2009 paintings, click here.

Posted by Shirley at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

We just returned from a Holiday weekend with our children and their children.  This is the first photo that we have of all 6 grandchildren this year - and I'm thrilled to have a new one.

I sketched every day in my summer watercolor journal - in which I try to paint something that will help me remember the day.  Here are 4 pages.

 Blue Mussel Shells:  I bought a wonderful laminated shell identification card which Callum calls "the map" and we tried to ID shells that I brought home from our beach walks. 

Our 3 and 4 year old grandsons made great progress "swimming" this weekend and spent lots of time going back and forth between their parents and the wall without floaties.  This is a pair of goggles that were abandoned on my chaise while I was watching them.

We waited for our car AC to have freon added and I was sitting next to this planter and flag - which looked especially forlorn after the holiday was over.

I take sea gull pictures each time we walk on the beach.  These are several drawings of one gull from those photos.

Posted by Shirley at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Our Central Park Meetup Group met at the Conservatory Garden again and it was beastly hot.  However, there were enough non-wilted flowers to paint.  They are not labelled and I have little practical knowledge of flowers - but I love drawing individual blooms.

There are two wonderful fountains in the Garden.  One of the fountain areas was the site for a lovely wedding.  The other fountain, the Three Dancing Maidens, was in bright sunlight.  But we discovered that we could dangle our feet into ice cold fountain water until the guards reprimanded us.  I drew this fountain twcie before (see here and here) and this time I decided to just draw one of the maidens.  I had just enough time before the guards came!

Following Meetup, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a special afternoon program on Picasso to go along with their huge current exhibit.  Francois Gilot gave a long and excellent lecture on her encounter with Picasso, She lived with him for 10 years and had two children with him.  Professor Michael Fitggerald presented detailed information about the first private American collectors of Picasso's paintings and the history of the Met vs MoMA and their Picasso acquisitions.  Then there was a wonderful French film (The Mystery of Picasso - 1955) in which Picasso drew on one side of a support and we the audience just saw the lines forming and colored inks being added.  It was mesmerizing. 

Posted by Shirley at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)