Nearing the end

 Flatrock - watercolour

My art has been put on a backburner this week for the most part as I gear up for tomorrow's workshop. Most things are in place and it should be a fun day playing with the fishies.

Once the workshop is behind me I can finish up the paperwork for it, submit it and that's another chapter closed.  What have I learned by doing this project? 

• I can write a proposal with sufficient substance that it secures an art grant.
• I can produce a body of work in a specific time frame while working full time at a day job.
• I can compartmentalize my day job and my art.
• I can find extra hours to work on a project.
• I can juggle project work, as well as produce other non-related pieces of art.
• I can still keep the blog going with 3 or more posts a week while working on the project.

 Everything in life is within reach if you want it badly enough.  You'll find the money, the time, the energy - just go and do it. 

Meanwhile, here's a small update on the watercolour of the rocks leading out into the sea at Flatrock.  It still has a ways to go, but heading in the right direction.  The rock detail is time consuming as there are so many layers and shapes. Its a good exercise in concentration and like most complex pieces, once broken down into sections, it comes together more easily.

Photography

 Lonely

Monochrome photograph

Many artists spend almost equal time photographing to find the perfect references or capture light, action or life just moving too fast to commit to canvas or paper.  With the growth of digital cameras, it becomes easier and easier to shoot hundreds of images in search of the perfect one.

Lonely

Colour photograph

I am no different and usually have a camera close by either inside or outdoors - just in case.  Some of the images I'm quite pleased with and I've been collecting a select few to offer for sale. These are on my website and are both colour and monochrome - the version that I seem to favour for the mood and atmosphere they create, especially for damp seascapes and landscapes or mysterious images in the barn.

This is one of the newest pieces that you can see on my site www.jeanettejobson.com. I have also included the colour version here as well.  Which is your preference?  Each seems to have such a different feel to it.

1927

I couldn't sleep last night and was up very early, as I'd sooner do something constructive than lie in bed tossing and turning and thinking.


A small photo was on the table in my studio, about 2 x 3 inches if that.  Sepia and of my mother when she was about 4 years old, which would have been about 1927 or 28.  I thought I'd try my hand at drawing it.  The pose and the frilly dress/pantaloons appealed to me and there's something about old photographs that provide good challenges to work on values without getting too bogged down in detail.  Its not perfect, but from something so tiny at such an early hour, it was fun to do.

The graphite drawing is about 4 x 8 in a Canson sketchbook.

Word clouds

I stumbled across this neat little program called Wordle that creates word clouds from words that you type in, from a blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed or a del.icio.us user name.

You can tweak position, size, colour, and backgrounds to achieve the effect you want.  I played with a few options, the black background contained words which I provided, the other cloud came automatically generated from my blog feed.

What crossed my mind is that you could almost use it as a unique artist statement, especially if you fine tuned it using words that relate to a body of work or direction you are taking artistically. 

What words describe your art?