A comfortable place to sit

Here is a comfortable place to sit on a warm winter's day. I finished this 10x10" painting of mum's living room this morning. I'm a HUGE fan of the late Australian artist Margaret Olley so I added one of her paintings in place of the more modern painting that is actually there. Tomorrow I'll be starting on my pet portraits. I'm looking forward to posting them daily from monday, stay tuned!

A Pet Portrait a Day!

This is Buddy. He's a social butterfly who loves going for morning walks to greet all his friends and sniff out the daily news behind every post and tree. He dreams of walks that never end and looks forward to long morning cuddles in bed on the weekends. In the evenings Buddy practices his fine acting skills, pretending to be fast asleep when it's time to go out in the cold for a pee before bed time.

This is my second attempt to paint Buddy. As I'm painting each day and getting used to the primed boards I'm slowly improving my technique so I had another go at Buddy on a larger board (10x10").

I'm setting myself up to improve my pet portraits and need your help. Starting next monday the goal is to paint a pet each day for the next four weeks (weekends off) so I need pets to paint!! Furry or feathered, big or small... If you'd like to help me along, check out the instructions below. There will be no obligation to buy your pet's painting when it's done but if you would like to then the first 5 to send their photos will have the opportunity to buy their paintings for just $75 including postage (within Australia). Afterwards they will be $100 each which is still at a discounted price. Pet portraits are a beautiful way to capture your pet's uniqueness or remember a pet that has passed away and also make a wonderful gift!


Instructions:

1. Email 2-3 photos of your pet (click here for email address). Provide clear, in focus photos of at least the head and shoulders of your pet, taken in natural light if possible. Please don't tightly crop!! I'll choose the photo that I think is best and crop it as needed to work well in the square format.

2. Include in the email a short bio of your pet with name, age, likes/dislikes, personality, quirks/charms... This will be posted to the blog along with your pets painting.

3. If you decide to buy your painting it will be 8x8" and come to you unframed. It will take a couple of weeks to dry completely so expect to wait a little before it arrives in the mail. Paintings are on archival, primed MDF boards using artist quality oil paints and satin varnished.

4. Within Australia all postage will be included. International postage will be a bit extra and I can quote you the price before you decide to go ahead.

5. Payment for paintings will be via PayPal. Signing up for a PayPal account is free, quick and easy. Ask me for more information if you're not sure.

I'm all fired up to paint pets so please get behind me to make this a successful challenge!!

Teddy

After painting the 8x8" of Buddy, I'm going to be painting each of Vicki's cats - I guess that will make it a 'triptych' (sounds very fancy). Since I didn't have the right sized boards ready I did this 6x6" practice of my cat Teddy. Very sadly I gave him away last year so I could return to Italy so this will be a nice reminder of him to have on my wall. I'm still trying to get used to painting on these boards. My soft mongoose brushes are working the best... I also got into it with the palette knife for a bit.

Exciting news! I bought www.marniehanlon.com which will redirect to my blog for the moment but feel free to try it just for fun. I'm learning as much as I can about the art of 'marketing one's art' from the Blog Talk radio show Artists Helping Artists. It's brilliant. If you are trying to make a living as an artist here is all the information they should be teaching in art schools in the form of weekly podcasts by an incredibly generous artist called Leslie Saeta and her monthly co-hosts. There are interviews with well known artists and how-to's on just about everything you need to know how to do!

Buddy

Today I did 2 small 'portraits' of my aunt's dog Buddy. They are both on primed MDF boards which are quite different from painting on canvas. The surface is a bit slippery and I found my softer nylon brushes worked better than the bristles which tend to just scrape the paint off. I might experiment with different brushes until I get the effect I like. I need a lot of practice but it was quite fun doing these little quick paintings after spending a whole week on one and trying to keep up the enthusiasm for it. The close-up with red background was from a photo Vicki gave me on an 8x8" panel. The other one is 6x6" from a photo I took of Buddy today. I told him to sit as I backed away with the camera in hand. He kept a close eye on me waiting for the command to be released from his task!

Canowindra Talls exhibition and other musings

Every year the River Bank Gallery in Canowindra (pronounced Ca-noun-dra) holds serveral exhibitions open to anyone to enter. The up coming one is called Talls and works of any subject can be submitted as long as they are painted on the 24x12" canvases provided by the gallery. Vicki and I discovered this cute little town and its wonderful gallery when we were travelling the countryside back in 2009. We met Catherine the gallery owner and talented resident artist David Isbester and were really taken by their enthusiasm and commitment to local artists. A couple of years ago I submitted 2 works for the Smalls exhibition and they both sold. This is my Talls entry. I'm calling it "The Happy Gathering". The format is quite tricky! I did colour studies for 3 different ideas before I thought I had something that might work. I'm still not sure that it does but it's more 'brush mileage' under the belt and another step towards Improvement which sometimes feels painfully slow.

I've been painting for four and a half years now and I've definitely learned a lot in that time. But when the goal is to make a living and when I compare where I'm at with other artists that I love and admire, it's hard some days to fight off doubts and gloomy thoughts. I love Artists on Art, an online magazine (which I highly recommend if you're an artist. There are four issues a year and the cost is only US$14 a year). In the first issue was an article by Daniel Sprick which was encouraging for my impatience and helped me to see the big picture of an artist's journey:

It usually takes about ten years of intensive effort to achieve mastery in any domain, and in the arts it may require another ten years after that to begin to express anything that is truly one’s own. Artists must be patient and be true to themselves and trust their own tastes and their own habits of working and living, and be true to their own aesthetic preferences. Each individual has his or her own truth to tell, and with a mixture of sincere effort and good fortune it will be a meaningful one for others.

I'm staying with my mum for the next couple of months and I'm thrilled she's allowing me to paint in my bedroom! (it's all about drop sheets and towels - so far so good). The wonderful thing about my temporary studio is the south-facing aspect. The light is consistent for most of the day which makes a Big Difference compared to painting when the light is constantly shifting. I'm quietly thinking it's a bit sad I don't have a single south-facing room in my own house but maybe I'll become a pro at paintings called Interior with Sunlight.

From now on I won't be sending email notifications to those on my mailing list but if you would like to know when I've updated Marnie's Art, please pop your email into the box on the right that says 'follow this blog by email' and you'll (hopefully) not miss a thing! I haven't tried this system before so please let me know if you have any trouble with it. More soon...

Back to Oz

It may take a bit to get used to everyone speaking english and which side the passenger sits in the car, the lack of architectural wonders and the long distances between Things of Interest, but it's taken no time at all to readjust to the fresh air, eucalyptus trees full of lorikeets and kookaburras and the warm sunny winter days...

I'm back!! I know I've settled in somewhere when I've organised myself and surrounds enough to get painting. Relief! I've been up the road to do a quick plein air study (to warm up the brushes) and am currently working on an idea for this year's Talls exhibition at the gallery in Canowindra (near Orange NSW). All submissions are to be painted on a 24x12' canvas ordered from the gallery so they are all the same format. It will be an interesting exhibition and I'm looking forward to starting my painting when the canvas arrives...

So to fill you in on my final months in Italy... summer was very slow coming to Florence this year (and the rest of Europe by all accounts) so I despaired of having any warm weather before heading back for my fourth winter in a row (because of hemispheric changes). But after packing up my life, shipping off a box of my choicest items and farewelling the dear friends I have made, I headed south with the lovely Susan and her good friend Lillian (who's now my good friend too) and spent a week in the Bay of Naples soaking up the sun and enjoying a full week of splendid south Italian summer weather.

We rented an apartment in Vico Equense from where we could easily visit Naples, Pompei, Sorrento, Capri and Positano on the Amalfi Coast. Theoretically at least. In practice we found that random trains were cancelled because of unpaid workers striking (meaning over an hour waiting for the train at times) and although we had a marvellous view from our apartment, it came at the cost of lugging ourselves up a mean hill to get home every day... brilliant for the thighs no doubt but a bit of a strain after a hard day being a Tourist. No sympathy from an 80 year old local who'd lived there all her life and whose muscles were 'accustomed' to the hill!!

The highlights for me were definitely Pompei and Positano. Pompei was an endlessly fascinating step back in time by nearly 2000 years. We had an informative and entertaining guide called Fabio who added Italian vowels to the ending of eacha anda everya worda. He pointed out tiny details and nuances that we never would have noticed or thought to look for, like evidence of donkey parking and groves in cobblestones from the heavy iron wheels of chariots. A bakery where they found carbonised bread pieces and how stepping stones were used to cross the road without soiling one's feet in the general muck created by fountains and sewerage running freely through the streets. How I would love to time travel and see the city in it's day fully functioning and alive with the busyness of every day life.

We reached Positano via bus from Sorrento along the cliff-hanging roads hugging the stunning Amalfi coast. Stunning. The bus driver negotiated the curved and twisty road like one without fear of death and we stuck our noses to the windows like trusting little tourists and tried to capture some of the beauty on our snappy cameras in order to take it home with us. The bus stopped at the top of the town and the amble down the steep road to the centre was punctuated with the delight of the views on the left side and the pleasure of quaint little shops on the right. The streets were clean and colourful, the water clear turquoise, and the locals bright and friendly. It's hard to imagine a more beautiful place. No wonder it's a popular destination for weddings, honeymoons and beachside holidays. After our slow stroll down to sea level we stopped for a bite to eat and soaked up the carefree resort vibe and collectively marvelled at it all. We each managed to pick up a ceramic treasure or two on our amble back up the hill and the afternoon light over the cliffs and sea was something I've filed away in the 'best memories' section of my brain since the camera wasn't capable of doing it justice.

You can see pics and read a bit more commentary from our trip here

So my time in Italy is finished for now but my budding artist's journey is barely begun and I plan to keep a more regular account of my painting progress here so do stay tuned if you'd like to see what I'm getting on with. Thanks for reading and sharing this journey with me, more soon!

PS. I went to the NSW art gallery the other day and as always lingered over the Australian Impressionist section... there is an Arthur Streeton landscape there that I love called 'Still glides the stream and shall forever glide', which is a line from a poem by William Wordsworth:

'After-Thought'
I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away.--Vain sympathies!
For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;--be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.

Cobblestones and kookaburras

Greetings from Florence! The days are getting longer but as yet not exactly hotter. In fact today it is a wet and stormy 15 degrees. (Although I will admit it was a rather warm day when this photo was taken of me and Inga in Greve in Chianti). Non-the-less if the summer weather doesn't fully assert itself soon I'll be enveloped in a seemingly perpetual winter, since I'm returning to the southern hemisphere for good in just over 4 weeks time (four weeks! must be time to start counting the sleeps)...

What have I been up to since my last post?? Well, last term I struggled somewhat to keep up with everything and progressively saw myself falling behind at school. This term I dropped back to part time while I tried to sort out some health problems, which seem to have finally come into the light just of last week (anemia caused by endometriosis)... So it's been perfect going to school just for painting in the mornings with the afternoons off and I also joined the first years to continue on with still life which I'm enjoying immensely. I'm learning much with our new teacher and in the process of all the cuffuffle I've realised I want to focus my energies to still life, interiors and landscapes. I like these the best and since I'm not starting out my painting career at 20 I'm seeing a benefit to becoming really good at some things rather than ok at everything. So for now I'm putting figures and portraits aside and concentrating on what I love doing the most. Life is short!!



Some of the things I've done during the past 5 months that have whipped by since Christmas... I visited one of the oldest pharmacies in the world (opened in 1221); I saw my first river rat along the banks of the Arno after secretly thinking they might be an urban myth... they do exist; I learned to knit! (first project being a hotwater bottle cover, see pics); I moved from my much loved little apartment in Santo Spirito complete with stunning views to the south and right across the road from the Boboli Gardens to a BIG town-house out in the burbs with 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen, dining room, loungeroom, basement AND garden (I sincerely thought I'd miss my little flat but I haven't looked back - goodbye 'I can't turn around without knocking anything over', hello 'I'm getting my morning walk just going to the kitchen for breakfast') - I'm minding the house of some aussie friends while they are on sabbatical in Australia for 5 months; I experienced the yearly easter event of the 'burning of the cart' which was just as exciting and spectacular as the first time I went; I found out that Italian doctors are Most Excellent and Extremely Nice and I learned that it's a great thing to have travel insurance; I did some gardening (weeding mainly but also mowing - if you can call cutting the grass by hand with secateurs mowing... I wasn't up to wrestling the whipper snipper into action); I had lots of baths!; I had Inga's mum and dad stay in one of my Spare Rooms while they were in Florence visiting Inga, during which time I joined them on a day trip to Greve in Chianti (heart of Tuscan wine country) as well as (my personal highlight) Carrara where Michelangelo used to get his marble and Viareggio where everyone goes to the beach from Florence in summer; I found a brilliant podcast called Artists Helping Artists which I listen to while I'm working at home or knitting and which is filling my mind with great ideas and possibilities for working as an artist in the future; I had 8 church friends over for a lively and abundant lunch which I had been wanting to do forever but didn't have space in my old place (took me 3 days to recover from the effort though!); I played tourist and joined a tour of the Vasari Corridor with a focus on the art of women in Florence - entirely fascinating with a terrific guide and we each got a book about women artists and the campaign that's happening (thanks to 2 american women) to get all their artworks out of the storage rooms of museums all over Florence...



Being in Italy for 2 and a half years has been amazingly wonderful. I have a feeling I won't fully appreciate all that I've learned or all that I've become until I'm looking back on it from Australia. Living in a place for some time really gives you a chance to let it become a part of you, to take major artistic wonders for granted like a local, to make life long friendships with people from all over the world and just to walk over the same cobblestones as centuries of outstanding artists that have gone before you.

At the same time there are some things that I'm really looking forward to about being back in Australia (aside from family and friends which goes without saying): gum trees, fresh air (Florence air quality is the worst in Italy), lorikeets and kookaburras, the salty sea air and beautiful beaches, my church and being back in my own house again.

I'm presuming this will be my last post until I'm back in oz. I do plan to take up blogging more regularly when I'm back (and hopefully in a more energetic state of health) with the particular focus on what I'm working on painting-wise. So do stay tuned! Thanks for sharing this journey with me. I leave you with some photos here and a lovely quote I found somewhere...

An artist's every thought and all his energy must
be bestowed upon his work, and such time as he has
to spare were best spent among the meadows and
hedgerows, where under clear skies he can breathe
fresh air, which will do him far more good and help
him better in his inspired calling.
Albert Toft