Golly, what a cold and crunchy January this is turning out to be.
January just happens to be my birthday month (the 28th to be precise) and that’s one of the few good things I can say about the month without sounding like a cranky old guy who ran out of meds. It’s not that I hate the short days, the cold winds, the ice and rotten weather, the endless innings of football and seeing beautiful women dressed up like Eskimos right now. I can tolerate all that knowing that the winter season is all part of the grand and glorious cycle that makes the other three seasons possible. But January is just so……. January. It’s that oddball and enigmatic month of the year which science nor mankind has yet to find any use for. Januarys are about as much fun as spending your vacation holiday locked up in the gulag. Not much to do to pass the time except dream of better days and all the fun stuff you’ll surely be doing when the month is over.
Despite the January doldrums I’ve been busy or at least trying to be. That ice storm that spanked us a while back left piles of sticks and limbs, some of which were of considerable size, in my yard and our neighbors as well. Our next door neighbor, Mike, planted a row of white pines on the property line shortly after he and his family moved here forty sixish years ago. No one else was really up to the task of cleaning the gosh awful mess which left the whole job to me. Fortunately I can still throw an ax around and put in a full day of work but doing so takes a bigger toll on my body than it would have in the past. Two solid days of hard labor and then a couple more half days was what it took for me to chop and haul off that brush, not to mention spiffy up the yard afterwards. I felt like I took a beat down after all that and was waddling around like an old man for a week afterwards. I was already toying with the idea of getting a membership to the Y or perhaps another gym before all this happened and now I’m more convinced than ever that I really need to get back in shape again before my body turns to silly putty.
The annual Roanoke Regional Writer’s Conference took place a couple Saturdays ago at Hollins college for writers great and small as well as aspiring writers like myself. I missed it last year and didn’t want to miss it again two years in a row but almost did due to procrastinating to the last minute and catching one of the final slots right before it sold out. I’m glad I made the effort as rubbing shoulders with all that creativity and intelligence sure pumps up my own creative imagination like nothing else I know. Meeting creative spirits and hearing them talk about their passion projects is downright inspiring and gives me hope for my own creative endeavors. And I’ve got a few of those!
The Writer’s Conference kicked off with an opening event on Friday night which I pictured here in this pencil sketch. The guest speaker for the evening was Nelson Harris, a well-known and respected local historian who gave a wonderful lecture on the lesser known episodes from Roanoke’s past. What bits and pieces I caught sounded pretty darn amazing and I kinda wished I had listened more closely but, as you can see, I spent the bulk of his lecture time putting my energies into sketching out the view in Hollins auditorium. Hollins has this rather oddly designed auditorium which is cylindrical in shape and not all that big given a college of Hollins size. The slope from the top entry down to the main seating is rather steep which could be a problem for some. But I had a good view and it was too good to pass up so I let my pencils cut loose and cut loose they did.
Earlier this month when the weather was only fit for penguins and polar bears, I spotted this lone dandelion in full bloom. It was the first flower blossom of the year and I suppose that’s a good omen, right?! Way too early for flowers but it was blooming for reasons the Lord only knows why. Guess it had a case of spring fever too which inspired me to knock off work and go grab my camera to take a picture of it. From that picture I made this splashy watercolor which I enjoyed painting about as much as I enjoyed catching sight of this wonder in the first place. Getting my paintings to look real, or even resemble reality in any shape or form, is the ongoing challenge when painting in watercolors unless you’re really, really good. But I think I can make a passable attempt at it, to the point that whatever I’m painting is at least recognizable. Stroke by stroke, I’m slowly getting better.
Where I live there’s a cow or two around every bend. Here I painted some cows grazing in some distant fields just down the road. The day was decent by January standards and the view was artsy enough that I took a few minutes to try my luck painting it. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?! General landscapes are fairly easy and speedy to paint as they are fairly light on details. All you do is just lay down some swatches of color while paying some attention what colors go where. Let things dry a bit and then add some more colors and try to begin tying things together. Quicky paintings are a trick as the spontaneity is like a walk on the wild side since you can’t really anticipate what you’ll end up with unless you’re a lot better at this sort of thing than I am. I’m coming to realize that I’m not painting photorealistic pictures of what I see. Nor do I have to. That would take days of labor and is way beyond my skills. But I do want to create an art piece, however amateurish, that has an uncanny resemblance to what I’m seeing. Watercolor painting has a certain playfulness and whimsy to it that, even when it isn’t spot on (as is usually the case), the spirit and essence of the subject is still very evident which is one of the charms of painting. The odd thing about painting is that the colors themselves are not so important to the authenticity of the final work so much as the values of the colors (how faint or vivid one makes the colors). The tricky thing about watercolors is that the paint you immediately deposit on the paper may look terrific at first. But then it dries on you and when it does it will inevitably become fainter and paler than what you want it to be. Making dark colors and getting the contrasts and shadows you want is tough to achieve with watercolors because watercolor paint by its very nature isn’t terribly dark or vivid. You have to build up the color intensity with several passes which makes watercolor painting a laborious and somewhat frustrating endeavor. I laid down the basic color scheme on the spot and then I finished the rest of it, and added the cows, the next day after an hour of plinking around with this piece in my studio.
Some random people sketches which I like and was done recently while I was on the go. The scene was at a funeral home during visitation of one of my dad’s many cousins who recently passed away. I didn’t know her or her family but she did come out to our family reunions that we have been hosting for the last couple of years so I figured I probably ought to stop by. Some family who I actually did know was sitting directly across the aisle from me and that’s who is featured here. Even in a funeral home, opportunities for making art abound if you only pay attention. The colored pencil sketch was a quicky that I doodled at a local hole-in-the-wall where I stopped to grab a bite to eat. While waiting for my chow, a trio of gals were sitting nearby and enjoying some girl time. I could’t get the third girl in as I was up against the margin but I did knock out the other two.
