Equality

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Equality.  Whether size, shape, colour or sexual preference, are differences really strong enough to cause hurt over?


Others could compare all the differences but none of the similarities, make these two keep hiding in the confines of the sugar bowl forever.

“Once upon a time they was two girls," I say. "one girl had black skin, one girl had white."

Mae Mobley look up at me. She listening.

"Little colored girl say to little white girl, 'How come your skin be so pale?' White girl say, 'I don't know. How come your skin be so black? What you think that mean?'

"But neither one a them little girls knew. So little white girl say, 'Well, let's see. You got hair, I got hair.'"

I gives Mae Mobley a little tousle on her head.

"Little colored girl say 'I got a nose, you got a nose.'"

I gives her little snout a tweak. She got to reach up and do the same to me.

"Little white girl say, 'I got toes, you got toes.' And I do the little thing with her toes, but she can't get to mine cause I got my white work shoes on.

"'So we's the same. Just a different color', say that little colored girl. The little white girl she agreed and they was friends. The End."

Baby Girl just look at me. Law, that was a sorry story if I ever heard one. Wasn't even no plot to it. But Mae Mobley, she smile and say, "Tell it again.”

― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

Mackerel

 Mackerel

6" x 12"  

Available from my Daily Paintworks gallery

I was sketching out some ideas for new prints and one of them is a mackerel.  These fish are found in many parts of the world and there are a lot of variants within the species.   I love their torpedo like shape and dark stripes along the dorsal section.

This started as a simple sketch, then I added watercolour over that, then a little pen work and finally some touches of soft pastel to finish it off.

You can watch for another variation in print form in my Fishy Bits series this year.

The catch

The salt-cod fishery was a mainstay of Newfoundland and Labrador’s economy throughout the nineteenth century. It consisted of three branches: an inshore fishery off the island’s coast, a Labrador fishery, and an offshore bank fishery. Of these, the inshore fishery was both the oldest and largest, with roots in an English migratory fishery dating back to the 1500s.

Until 1992, when the moratorium was announced.   The fishery is now a ghost of its former past.

And this is part of its past.   An old photo from the archives of a young fisherman selling his catch on the wharf at St. John's harbour in the early 1900s caught my attention as I browsed the archives.  The stance. the features, hand in pocket of overalls to keep warm, told the story of a life that comes with harvesting from the sea.  I needed to capture that in a quick oil sketch.

Spring - SOLD

 Spring - SOLD
acrylic on stretched canvas 7" x 5"

Available from my Daily Paintworks gallery

You know when it arrives.

The sun is brighter, the air is warmer.  You swear you think the grass is getting green again and there's a promise of daffodils and tulips poking their way through the soil.

You fling open every window in the house to release the winter worn air and replace it with the new season.

Then you start cleaning.

Pre-flight test

Young ducklings are such fun.  They’re curious and active and talkative.  Their bodies seem to grow before your eyes as they get taller and stronger.

Then one day during the wing testing exercises, the stretching, flapping and running across the yard and suddenly they become airborne.  The flight is usually short and they seem surprised that they can actually do this.   Most of the ducks test their flying ability in the first year and seem to lose interest after that, preferring to stick closer to the barn or field, which is likely a good thing with predators never far away.

The Chase

It's here! The Chase is the print for March in my Fishy Bits! project 

The codfish is a classic Newfoundland image.  A codfish chasing a capelin still common especially in summer when the capelin are plentiful and the cod become too full to ever be tempted by a fisherman.

A few weeks each year recreational cod fishery is open and many people take to the water to get their quota of five fish daily.   Last year the fish they came back with were huge - too large to sacrifice to me for printing.   So I made my own!   You can purchase your very own cod/capelin chase hanging on your wall by visiting my website  

These are printed using oil based ink on Japanese papers.  The piece here is printed on Masa paper. 

I'm presenting the finished prints in various frame options over time to give you an idea of how they look framed.

This is a simple frame, 13" x 13" square with a 5" x 7" opening.  The print area is 4" x 6" and the larger opening allows space for the signature and title to show.   Sorry about the reflection of me ghosting the image, a hazard of photographing glass.

Left or right?

Which is your drawing hand?  Left or right?  Or are you ambidextrous?

My right hand is my drawing hand, my most everything hand.  The left goes along for the ride but doesn't have the dexterity for fine skills such as drawing.  Any drawing I've tried with my left look like a child's drawing - shaky, broken lines without the smooth strokes that the right hand can produce.

This sketch is of my right hand.  I was lying in bed, considering light and shapes and hands and took some shots of my right hand and wrist with my cell phone camera.  Drawing extremeties can be challenging for artists, but as with most everything, if its broken down into simple shapes then built up from there, the intricacies can be figured out.  The idea of a small series of hand drawings, perhaps in charcoal piques my interest.

Did you know?

• Approximately 8 to 15% of the adult population is left-handed.
• Studies indicate that left-handedness is more common in males than females.
• Left-handedness, in comparison to the general population, also appears to occur more frequently in identical twins, and several groups of neurologically disordered individuals
• Statistically, the identical twin of a left-handed person has a 76% chance of being left-handed, identifying the cause(s) as partly genetic and partly environmental.
• It is also noted that many bisexuals and homosexuals are left-handed more than their heterosexual counterparts.
• Also people of South Asian, Eastern European, Southeast Asian descent are more left-handed than any other ethnic groups in the world, while people of Western European, Northern European, and African descent are less left-handed.

Jellyfish

 I'm fascinated with jellyfish and depicting their shape and movement in the water.  Light passes through them and creates amazing colours that you'd never think possible.  Blues, yellows, purples, reds...  However, this sketch is simple pen and ink, finely hatched.  The beauty of the jellyfish is that the shape is simple but complex too, allowing the pen to build up layers to create form without worrying about strokes out of place.

I love to see them floating in the water, long tentacles trailing into the dark water.  Their movement is so graceful, like a ballet in water. But have you ever seen a jellyfish like this one?  The comb jellyfish, a voracious feeder, eating its own weight in food daily.

What does $25 buy?

What does $25 buy? You could buy a decent lunch. A weeks' worth of fancy coffee at Starbucks. A really good bottle of wine. But what do you have to show for it besides a memory after its gone?

Your contribution of $25 to my Indiegogo campaign gets you an original relief print from the January, February or March collections of Fishy Bits printed on Japanese paper. To keep. Forever. And a lovely hand printed thank you card from me.

Your $25 invests in local art, future printmaking and knowledge sharing. In this age of instant everything, artists who invest time to learn traditional techniques and share their inspiration through the creation of quality art are a dying  breed and need your support.

Of course if you would like to contribute more than $25, it would be very welcome and the investment return is more substantial. And if you'd like to contribute less, that's possible too. If you have no spare money at all and could only share this post or campaign link, you'll have good karma always.

I'd love to share my art with you and make you the proud owner of one of Newfoundland and Labrador's cold water marine fish. Find out how your contribution can help make it possible by clicking on the campaign information below. 

Or cut and paste this direct campaign link to Facebook, Twitter or a blog post to share with your networks.

 http://igg.me/at/jeanettejobson/x/653310

On March 15th, a new Fishy Bits print will be released and available from my website. I can't wait to share it with you.

Starting from scratch

Ages ago I bought a round gallery canvas.  I don’t know what possessed me to as I had no idea of what I’d paint on it.  Until today.

I was thinking of fish again and the sketch of what I wanted appeared under my pencil.  its good to see something evolve from concept to finished piece.  Now to work on enlarging and transferring the drawing. The painting may not start til this weekend simply due to lack of time.

I keep looking at the sketch and wondering if I should give it a turn and if it would look better a quarter turn to the left, like this.  Which do you prefer?

Red-breasted Nuthatch

These are frequent visitors to the bird feeder and are seen daily scrambling head downwards on tree trunks.  They are tiny birds compared to the others that arrive at the seed diner and never stay for long darting back to the safety of a tree or to the woods in case a hawk appears.

Originally called Le Torchepot du Canada, the Red-breasted Nuthatch is familiar to most North American bird watchers. Its present name in French is La Sittelle à poitrine rousse, a literal translation of its standard English name. It has been locally called "upside-down bird" (Newfoundland and Labrador)

Started on newsprint with charcoal, here's the original sketch then I added soft pastels.

George Street

 
In St. John's, there's a famous street in the downtown core called George Street.  Its home to a pedestrian only  two blocks of bars, pubs, restaurants – and nothing else. Its the entertainment centre of amusement, alcohol, music, dancing, and crime - not in any particular order.

Its rare that I go to George Street, even though all ages tend to populate it, however, it is predominantly a younger group.  When people visit from other places, they want to see George Street at night in all its glory and its then that I venture downtown as tour guide.

And of course when there I tend to people watch and sometimes try to sketch.  This is the result of me tucked into a corner trying to be unobtrusive and a woman watching me watching her. She never said anything or approached me and I tried my best to avoid her gaze and blend into the background.

Ducks

There are only two ducks left in the barn now.  B.D. and Lucky.

B.D. is a Muscovy duck and my very favourite boy.  Appropriately named  Big Duck (BD for short) as he's large, about goose size.  Muscovies don't quack but make a hissing sound and BD greets me like an old dog when he's out of the barn, rushing forward, crest up, hissing madly, tail wagging furiously. 

Lucky, the other duck, is a Pekin, the classic white duck of fairytales and nursery rhymes and who the sketch is based on.  Pekins are lovely ducks but very, very chatty.  They are constantly on the prowl, sifting through grass and talking to anything that will stand still long enough.

Lucky was so named as he survived a bad attack by a mink and then another by an owl. A tendon in Lucky's neck was damaged so his neck is crooked, aside from that he's just fine.   He and the two remaining ducks who survived the mink attack had been placed in a pen in the meadow til the owl visit, that killed his two companions. BD had recently lost his constant companion Buddy, so he and Lucky joined forces and are inseparable.  One would be lost without the other.

I think I would too.

People watching

I love watching the interaction of people with the world around them. While uniquely individual, they are all the same in terms of repetitive motion.  That's what makes sketching in public easier for me

People change position, move around, walk, bend, eat, drink and I put down a few lines here and there then wait til they resume the position again, which they invariably do.   I move from person to person with a line here and there then back again and hope they don't leave the scene entirely before I'm done.  I like to test myself with just how much information I can get down in a very short time frame.

While waiting today, I sketched heads of others.  I find most people that I sketch are engrossed in their own activities and rarely aware or interested in what I'm doing. The lead in my mechanical pencil gave up the ghost mid sketch and all I could find today was a ballpoint pen in my bag to sketch with, but it fits the bill to capture lines.  I think the next challenge will have to be about unusual tools for drawing.  Toothpicks, twigs, etc. etc.  Never be afraid that your sketchbook is too precious or your drawing not perfect enough.   Each line is a moment in history.  Your history. 

Keep mark making.

Inchworm

Bugs.  Shudder.

Those who know me know I don’t tolerate insects well.  I’ve been known to sleep in other rooms if a moth invades.  Wasps and bees freak me out and I loathe spiders and barely tolerate earthworms. Even butterflies are just colourful moths to me and I don’t want them anywhere near me.

Inchworms?  Well they’re a little different.  They’re tiny, or at least the ones I knew were, and a lovely chartreuse colour. I remember playing games with them with I was a child, watching them pull up their centres and stretch out again to move ahead.  I loved seeing their strength as they extended their tiny bodies to test for the next landing point, waving gently back and forth

Who remembers this song and your own adventures with inchworms?

Cup o’ Joe

A couple of years ago, several dozen seagulls in St. John’s met their untimely end due to ingestion of coffee grounds.  Seagulls seem to populate every part of town and are voracious eaters, tackling any garbage bag they see and I imagine there are coffee grounds in many bags, especially if they find one from a local coffee shop.

The expression on this bird seems a little surprised. Its that wide-eyed look, a little frantic and undertone of calm supporting it, verging on the edge of wanting to go back for more, but feeling that he shouldn’t.

I love gulls, crazy, pugnacious and greedy as they are.  Drawing this one was very enjoyable.  This is day seven of my March Sketch a Day project.   Each day sharing a sketch with you on a blog page devoted to just that.  You can take part too and add your sketch during March.  Doesn't matter if its each day or only one, its all about the drawing practice!

Talking about aggressive, take a minute to watch the video below of a very bold seagull who swiped a woman’s camera in San Francisco while she was filming the sunset.

The camera was still filming and the gull eventually relinquished it in another spot after determining it wasn’t edible.  The gull-eye view footage, including the thief’s getaway, was included.

Little things

On February 24th, my eldest daughter had her first child, a boy.  I'm looking forward to meeting him for the first time in early April, but until then I have to be content with virtual visits and photographs.

This is the first sketch of my new grandson and I'm sure there will be many more to come.

Reynard II

Reynard the Fox was a medieval European trickster figure, a nasty but charismatic character who was always in trouble but always able to talk his way out of any retribution.

I'm not so sure whether this fellow is quite so willing to talk his way out of trouble.  He lies in wait in the grasses at the edge of the meadow, hidden enough from view but with full view of his surroundings.

Foxes have very cat-like features I think and quite delicate faces, legs and feet.  I've had quite a few encounters with them on the farm and just the other morning saw a silver fox race across the road as I left for work.  Red foxes are much more commonly seen so the silver one was a treat.

This fox is drawn on newsprint in pastel.  12" x 12" approximately.

Veiled

Drawing casts is a traditional method of learning to draw form.  All kinds of sculpture is used to draw from and good lighting helps the artist create the play of light and dark that gives the piece shape.

This is a form of gargoyle found on many buildings, little heads with various expressions that populate churches, cathedrals and buildings of importance.

This is a quick sketch done at lunch today that will be turned into a drawing.  I have vowed to produce several complete drawings this year and this will be one of them.  I think I hear charcoal calling for this one...

Reynard the Fox

Living in the country, there's always animals around.  Some wanted, some not so wanted.

Foxes are elegant opportunists.  They watch unseen from the woods and lurk on the edge of the field, waiting for a moment to grab a chicken or duck that's wandered too far or if very bold, they venture into the barn to see what's available.

Although I don't like it if they do kill one of the birds, I also have a degree of sympathy for them, as I know they're simply looking for a meal to feed themselves or a den of kits.

This sketch is the start of a small oil painting of Monsieur Reynard.  Drawing is the backbone of art and the need to draw and sketch daily pushes me to keep those hard earned skills intact.

You can add your sketch for one or all days in March on my March Sketch a Day page.  Simply add your name, blog post url and image to the Add my Link button on that page.