The Chronicle of Wasted Time

New Year, New Work

2012-01-31T15:41:00.010-05:00

Yes, I know I'm a little late with the whole New Year thing, but I swear I haven't been idle. Actually, the opposite is true; I have been rather busy of late. Strangely enough what has kept me so occupied hasn't been collage, but rather a lot of painting. Good thing I never dropped the "fine oil paintings" from the banner of this blog! As there is no longer an oil painting section on my recently revised website, this blog and Facebook are the only places you will see this work. So much for swearing off painting.

Les voici, here they are:

The first is a portrait of my friend Eric's beautiful daughter, Rafaëla, who was a model for my art classes last fall. I enjoyed the process of portrait painting so much - something I haven't done in a very long time- that I had her come back to the studio and sit for me so that I could finish the job. The finished painting turned out very well, although it is now painfully obvious to me that I need new glasses.

Most recently I completed a couple of small landscapes. The first one is an oil sketch on a little 6"x 4" panel. If you think you might like to own it, just drop me a line. It is priced to sell at $95 CAD, and I will ship for free within Canada.

This landscape is signed, varnished and ready to go. Yours for $415 CAD.

"Autumn Bouquet"

Yes, "Autumn Bouquet" IS the same still life from the last post where it was called "Autumn Still Life with Plums". I'd like to say that I renamed it for some sensible reason, but the truth is I had forgotten what I called it. "Autumn Bouquet" is signed, varnished and available to hang on the wall of your sunny kitchen. Just drop me a line here.

And now it's back to the glue again.

Still Life Step by Step

2011-11-17T09:40:00.008-05:00

Although I have mostly been working on collages just lately, teaching an intro to painting class has kind of gotten me in the mood to pick up my brushes and paint. Last week, the class worked on a floral still life, and since the flowers were pretty and seemed to be holding up all right, I thought I would have a go at them as well.

I started by toning my 14x18 canvas with an acrylic wash of raw sienna, just to cut the cold, shockingly brilliant white of the acrylic gesso. I already had some acrylics out on my palette, so I opted to do the basic underpainting/blocking in with the acrylics.

Stage 1: acrylic underpainting (all images copyright of the artist).

The next morning, I made the decision to switch to oil paint, which is the medium I am most happy working in. It has been more than six months since I have actually worked on a painting, so I figured I needed to give myself every advantage!

Since the colour scheme of the still life was built on complements and near complements, I thought it would be a good idea to restrict my palette in order to achieve a less jarring, more harmonious appearance to the finished painting. My palette consisted of: titanium white, ultramarine blue, rose madder, permanent rose, cadmium yellow medium and cadmium yellow light. I also added a raw sienna, burnt umber, and sap green, although I wasn't sure if I would need them. I really only needed the green, as it turned out.

Stage 2: refining the blocked in image, this time with oils.

By restricting the palette and limiting my colour choices, I ensured that the same basic colours- the blue/purple, orange/yellow - would appear throughout the painting. Those colours, plus titanium white, are, for example, the shadows on the white marguerites, the "grey" of the jug, the "white" of the table cloth, the "silver" of the teaspoon, and the "yellow" of the background.

Stage 3: a little more pulled together.

Painting is a process of decision making and refining of the image. In the photo above, you can see that I continue to define the areas of the flowers, leaves, the jug, and fruit. I also have some decisions to make about the drop off of the front of the table (Do I add it even though it wasn't part of my view?) and the corner of the table edge at the back (Do I remove it even though it was part of my view?). In the end, I left out both the back corner and the front drop off: the back corner destabilized the composition too much, and the front drop off didn't really add anything.

Stage 4: hurry up before those flowers die!

Painting a floral still life is a race against time- everyday it was a little different. By the third day, leaves and petals were falling, flower buds were opening, and some of the ferns were dead! I decided to add a few of the fallen petals and bits of fern where they fell. They conveniently helped to close up the too open spaces in the composition. I also decided to suggest the faint stripe of the table cloth for the same reason.

By the afternoon of the fourth day, I knew I was going to have to call it quits: an evening drawing class meant I needed to re-arrange the studio. It's hard to tell when a painting is really finished. I usually need to live with it for a while first. Right now, I'm not sure I love the very obvious counter weight of those plums. Certainly the perspective of those stripes needs a bit of adjusting, and possibly the table cloth itself needs to be toned down a bit, although, in my defense, the photo above is a bit bluer and colder that the actual painting- at least on my monitor. I can also see a couple of areas where the blending of edges is a bit too sloppy. Hmm.... It's always something!

You Never Can Tell

2011-09-29T13:27:00.010-04:00

Studio Tour 2011 - all photos by the artist (that would be me!)

The 2011 edition of the Hemmingford Studio Tour is now a thing of the past. The signs have been stored for next year, the number of visitors tallied, and no doubt planning for the 2012 Tour will soon begin.

This year, I exhibited my work at Roxham Farm, which is the home studio of watercolourist Susan Heller. Roxham is a delightful place, a real old fashioned farm which dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century, and retains its antique charm.

Roxham Farm

Because I am a self-employed artist and a farmer, I really don't get out much. The weekend of the Tour was a pleasant opportunity to talk with other artists about our different techniques and media, and to chat about the art market. In Sue's barn, I shared wall space with Sue, John Hodges, and Helga Sermat.

Watercolours by John Hodges (in frame) and Susan Heller, along with some wool for sale.

Helga hanging her cards .

More of Helga's colour pencil work.

Some of my set up.

And some ducks.

The Tour was also an opportunity for me to see people I almost never get to see or haven't seen in years, and also the chance to meet all kinds of new people. You never know who will come out to a studio tour; it really takes all sorts. Of course there were some artists come to check us out, and I met some local farmers and people from the area, some Montrealers out for a day in the country, and a few Americans. I also met a statuesque,blond, Swedish masseuse (and her dog), and a man who had built a trebuchet. Yes a trebuchet: a forty foot high medieval siege engine capable of hurling a three hundred pound weight a distance of six hundred feet. Now, that's your winner right there, I think.

The Hemmingford Studio Tour

2011-09-22T11:37:00.009-04:00

It's that time of year again! No, not Christmas, but that is coming, too! The Hemmingford Studio Tour/ Circuit des Arts takes place this weekend, September 24th and 25th from 10 am to 5 pm. This year I will be moving my studio out to the farm of Susan Heller, 332 Roxham Road, where I am sharing wall space with three other artists: Susan Heller (watercolour), John Hodges (watercolour), and Helga Sermat (mixed media). This is the third edition of the Tour, and as always there is a beautiful collective exhibit at the Old Convent, 549 rue Frontiere, in downtown Hemmingford. If you are in the area, please stop in- I'd love to meet you! To take a look at the Tour brochure just click here . There you will find a map and details about the participating artists. And you never know, you might just get an early start on that Christmas shopping or find the perfect gift for a friend's birthday. Keats wasn't wrong, a thing of beauty is a joy forever.

I'm taking fifteen collages to the Tour this year, all varnished,framed and ready to hang. Here is a sample of what I will have on sale:

I hope to see you there!

Winter Blues

2011-09-01T14:44:00.000-04:00

As much as part of me dreads the coming of winter, another (weird) part of me actually looks forward to it.

I usually start thinking about the winter sometime in July, and this pondering of the ice and snow generally manifests itself in some winter themed art.

Since I am full on into collage making now and am anxious to try it out on landscape "paintings" and other subjects, fittingly the need to represent winter came out as a collage: Winter Blues.

When my daughter asked me why on earth I was making a winter picture in August, I could only answer, "Because I like to look at blue." Go ahead and imagine the appropriate eye rolling.

Still Horsing Around

2011-08-05T15:37:00.006-04:00

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time on horseback: long trail rides, do-it-yourself steeplechases, make believe rodeos, stupid stunt riding- you name it. And FYI, jumping onto a horse from a second story window is only fun in the movies. Bumps and bruises aside, the freedom I felt as a young girl when galloping across a flat, open hayfield, my stirrups run up high so I could ride like a jockey, was a freedom unsurpassed. It was sheer joy. If you've never ridden barefoot and bareback on a pony through fields with the grass and flowers grown so high you could pick daisies with your toes, then, my friend, you have never lived.

Small wonder, really, that I never stray very far from the equine themes in my art. Yes, I am still working on that large non-equine collage, but I needed to give my eyes and brain a rest, so opted to create this smaller, equine collage.

The title of the piece was supplied by my friend Cathy Macfarlane-Dunn who, like me, also remembers the happy, freedom of galloping bareback on a pony. Thanks Cathy!

I'm delighted to report that my collage, "Saratoga" has been accepted into the American Academy of Equine Art Fall Exhibition. This is a very competitive, juried show which features some of the best equine art in the world, so I am very happy to know that my piece will be in such good company.

The 2011 exhibition takes place at the Scott County Arts and Cultural Center in Georgetown, Kentucky in September. The show will also appear online on the A.A.E.A. website. You may still take a look at the fine work in last year's show here.

Happy Trails!

This Little Piggy

2011-07-08T13:57:00.006-04:00

It seems like I'm always playing catch up these days - on the farm work, in the garden, in the studio; there are never enough hours in the day. I can't really complain, though. Compared to our horrible spring of sick sheep and lambing disasters, summer so far has been a breeze! The garden is beautiful, all the livestock are healthy, my hens are laying, and the turkeys are getting fat. Oh, and there is art galore, too!

I have a few group shows coming up in the fall (yes, I know it is only July, but tempus fugit!), so I have been busy preparing work for those. I've got lots of panels ready
and lots of ideas. I also have a couple of large scale collages in the works (more on those later), but mostly I'm trying to put together a collection of small pieces which are quick and fun to make, and which, by virtue of their lower price tag, give people the opportunity to buy something beautiful and unique at a reasonable price.

I've just finished the first small collage for this collection. This little cutie is one of a litter of piglets I photographed at the Ormstown Exhibition this past June.

The piglet's mother is a sow named Fluffy, who is quite possibly the biggest sow I have ever seen. Fluffy isn't exactly cute, but she is impressive, and her piglets are just adorable. If you are curious, there is a photo of Fluffy on the Ormstown Exhibition website here. And if you live in the Montreal area and you have never been to the Ormstown Exhibition...SHAME ON YOU!! Be sure to check it out next year. And if you go, be sure to check out Fluffy, too. When you are in the barns, if you see a strange, blond woman photographing pigs...that would be me!

Farmageddon

2011-06-25T09:12:00.006-04:00

Dumb Dora in the Doorway- photo © the artist

“You know, ever since 2011 began, crazy stuff has been happening. Trouble on all levels: here on the farm, in the Middle East ... a lot of unrest ... must be something to do with the planets.” my friend Anna-Maria said to me recently. From the start of lambing back in February, bad things kept happening on her farm. There were stricken ewes, rejected lambs, surprise pregnancies gone horribly wrong, outbreaks of foot rot and orf: it was a litany of disaster.

“Well,” I said, trying to inject a little levity into the situation, “maybe you’re getting a jump on the whole 2012 thing. Maybe the end of the world really is coming- and it’s starting on your farm!”

Anna-Maria laughed. “Shh, don’t say that!,” she said, “you might bring it on. I mean, it’s not like I’m really worried about the apocalypse, but why toy with it?”

Not being an especially superstitious person, naturally I scoffed at the idea that you could bring on your own bad luck. Besides, nothing was wrong on our farm…

The first thing to go wrong on our farm happened almost immediately. An older ewe, always a little peculiar, began acting really strangely. Although she continued to eat well, I often found her lying alone in dark corners of the barn. When she did move about, she was slow, her gait awkward, her expression blank and staring. I combined these symptoms along with her pre-existing quirks- compulsive lip licking and a crazy sensitivity to having her back scratched - and the search engine result was always the same: SCRAPIE. I phoned the vet.

As luck would have it, my regular vet was on vacation. An eager, new veterinarian, fresh out of school, arrived at our farm. He examined the ewe and agreed that her gait and nibble reflex were odd. She also had pneumonia and he treated her for that. When I asked him if he had ever seen scrapie before he admitted he hadn’t, but was nevertheless fairly sure he would know it if he saw it. He agreed that, based on the ewe’s history and her current symptoms (pneumonia notwithstanding), she was indeed a suspicious case. I was horrified. The vet told me not to worry, that the risk of scrapie transmission to humans was “theoretical” at best.

“Besides,” he added in all seriousness, “the disease has been in circulation for at least four hundred years and if it were transmissible to humans then the Scots would all be crazy.”

I felt so much better.

CFIA phoned me straightaway and placed our farm under quarantine. They arrived shortly thereafter to inspect my deranged ewe. Preceded as they were by their sheep beheading reputation, I was fearful at what the future might hold for my sheep.

After observing the ewe and bearing witness to her Exorcist –like reaction to having her back touched, the CFIA vet agreed that the ewe was peculiar (no dissent on that particular question), but as she appeared to be in good condition generally -her pneumonia was clearing- they opted keep her in quarantine until she either turned out to be genotype resistant, or for three months. I welcomed the inconvenience if it meant I got to keep my sheep. Thankfully, the worst was behind me. Or so I thought.

No sooner had our scrapie scare been dealt with than another ewe became sick, this time it was Dumb Dora. After the scrapie episode, I developed a sense of foreboding and began stocking up on supplies that I might need in case of sheep related emergencies. In addition to the extra syringes, gloves and antibiotics, I picked up a gallon of glycol to treat toxaemia- just in case. So it was no surprise really when Dora began exhibiting symptoms of toxaemia two days later. I congratulated myself on the purchase of the glycol.

A day went by and Dora showed no signs of improvement. I knew my regular vet was in the area, so I asked her to stop in and have a look, just to be sure. The vet examined Dora, confirmed the toxaemia diagnosis, and left me with instructions to feed the animal whatever she was willing to eat, and also to increase the dose of glycol- which I did.

I was dismayed to see no improvement in Dora by the following morning. If anything, the ewe looked worse, and in addition to the jaundice, lethargy and anorexia , she now had a new symptom: black urine. Black! That couldn’t be good…

“No, that’s very weird.” the eager, young vet said when I phoned the clinic. Clearly this was not toxaemia. His scientific curiosity piqued, he came out to the farm to have a look at the ewe and phoned me later to tell me that blood samples he had taken revealed that Dora was having a haemolytic crisis.

“A haemo- what -now?” I asked, confused.

“Basically, all her red blood cells have exploded,” he said to me, “that’s why her urine looked black. You haven’t been feeding her onions, have you?”

“Onions?” I asked. What kind of weirdo did this guy think I was!

“Well, it can be caused by excessive consumption of onions. I felt compelled to ask.” he said, clearly assuming I was some sort of weirdo. “So, since we’ve ruled out the onions that leaves us with an autoimmune reaction or copper toxicity. Copper poisoning seems more likely. You haven’t been giving the sheep pig feed, have you?”

“Pig feed? “ I asked, alarmed. “No, we only feed our pigs onions.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said we don’t have any pigs.”

“Oh.”

The prognosis for copper poisoning was not good and the source of the copper was a mystery. I wracked my brain trying to remember everything I had fed the sheep, what they could have gotten into. Had they chewed on water pipes? Was my grain somehow contaminated, a mineral block mislabelled? None of the answers seemed especially realistic. Only one possible solution remained.

The previous fall I had raised twenty Guinea fowl for the freezer. They proved to be my most ill conceived and expensive farming idea to date. By the time they had reached a suitable table weight, the Guineas had cost at least $25 in feed per bird, all of this excluding the cost of slaughtering them, plus the time and general aggravation of keeping them- to which I could now add the extra cost of vet visits and copper antidote for sheep. Worst of all, the Guineas were inedible; stewed boots would have been more appetizing.

The reason for the poor feed conversion ratio of the Guineas only became obvious when I shovelled out the litter from their pen. In addition to the shavings, I also shovelled out at least twenty kilos of feed, maybe more. For the want of a better place to put it, I buried the feed laced litter in the manure pile and I covered it up, thinking to keep it out of reach of my dogs. I guess I should have been more concerned about keeping it out of the reach of my sheep.

Over the weekend Dora’s condition worsened and I fully expected her to die. Unable to find anyone willing to shoot her, I resolved to have my regular vet come out first thing Monday morning and euthanize her. Monday morning came, and Dora was still down…until the vet arrived.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I said to the vet as she got her equipment out of the van, “but that ewe must have heard me on the phone to you. Fifteen minutes ago she got up.”

Sure enough, when we got into the barn, there was Dumb Dora, dopey as ever, but looking quite healthy, happily munching away with her flock mates. She was no longer jaundiced, her urine was a normal colour, and she didn’t appear to have lost much body condition. You would never guess that anything had happened to her.

“She actually looks pretty good,” said the vet, completely puzzled, “ but if you want to confirm the diagnosis of copper poisoning, we would have to do a necropsy and send the liver to P.E.I. for analysis. What do you want to do?”

I sighed and thought for a moment. At this point, if anybody’s liver was going on holiday to Prince Edward Island, it ought to be mine. “Oh, forget it.” I said, “Just leave her.”

Maedi Visna, caseous lymphadenitis, Chlamydia psitacci. The more time I spent researching sheep diseases, the more anxious I became. We hadn’t even started lambing yet; what else was going to go wrong? I was too embarrassed to phone the vet any more, especially since the receptionist had started answering the phone with: “Hi Alyson. What is it this time?”

Eventually and against all odds, Dora did get better. Our scrapie case turned out not to be scrapie at all, but a combination of pneumonia, overgrown feet and excessive Googling. I wish I could say that this was the end of our bad luck, but it was really just the beginning. Out of a flock eight ewes - in addition scrapie scare and copper poisoning- we’ve had two abortions, two retained placentae, one barely averted prolapse, ring womb , breech lambs, one dead lamb, a foot abscess, entropion , inexplicable lameness and now lice. Who knows what plagues summer will bring?

So the moral of this story is…. I guess there really is no moral. I’m still not entirely convinced that you can bring disaster your way by merely taunting it. Sometimes bad luck just happens. You learn what you can from it, and then you move on. Now I have some tough decisions to make. I know farmers always say culling makes the herd, but if I were to cull all the trouble makers from my flock, I would be left raising chickens, which, come to think of it, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea!

Sleepy in the Sun - photo © the artist

Hot Turkey Sandwiched

2011-05-26T20:35:00.009-04:00

If I were a more hip, city dwelling artist, I might have a studio in an old warehouse or abandoned factory. Instead, as I am decidedly un-hip and rural, I have a studio in a converted garage on our farm. My studio has our barn on one side and backs onto the chicken run. It also features a spectacular view of the sheep pasture and our compost bin. No Brooklyn artist's loft for me! But it has good light (most of the time) and is quiet enough and big enough to make it a pleasant workspace. Believe me, I'm not complaining.

At the moment, my studio is less remarkable for what is on the outside than for what is on the inside. It has become a bicycle storage area and a makeshift plant nursery. I have also taken on some roommates. Now, if I were a Brooklyn hipster and I told you my roommates were turkeys, you would probably think that they were other artists who didn't clean up after themselves, or who didn't pay their share of the rent on time. But since I live on a farm, if I were to tell you that I'm sharing my studio space with a bunch of turkeys, you can safely assume that they are actually turkeys, and not just people of the sort who would eat your last ice cream bar and then lie about it.

Turkey poults. Photo by the artist

I'm not sure what to make of these turkeys. They look a lot like chickens and they kind of act like chickens....except for some subtle differences. They are gawky little creatures, curious and uncoordinated, and they have large, grey, ever watchful eyes.

When I decided to raise turkeys this year, many people warned me about the fragility of turkeys and their inherent stupidity:

"They will get into the waterer and drown in it!"

"They will be too stupid to find their food or water and will starve to death or die of dehydration!"

"Don't let them outside in the rain. They will drown themselves by looking up!"

And so on.

There are plenty of wild turkeys around here and I have yet to find groups of them drowned following a downpour, so how stupid can they be? For these little domestic turkey poults of mine, time will tell, I guess. Until their permanent pen is ready, they will continue to live in a big box in my studio. They have food and water and a heat lamp for warmth, and me for company during the day. I think I'm going to miss my fluffy little roomies when they move out. I certainly won't miss the plants and bicycles- those are just in my way!

Tomato and cabbage seedlings. Photo by the artist.

What's on the easel

I have recently completed another Well Dressed Dog collage. The subject of this one is my good

friend Brenda Castonguay's dog, Sisi. Here she is:

Apart from being Sisi's mommy, my friend Brenda is a fabulous photographer, who specializes in intimate, creative, family portraits. Check out her work here. And yes, in case you were wondering, many of my friends are photographers.....or turkeys.

Shh...It's a Secret!

2011-05-11T15:15:00.004-04:00

Yikes! No posts in over a month! Things tend to get a little crazy on the farm once spring rolls around and whatever time I have when I'm not out in the barn, I have been spending in the studio. Yes, I have been busy creating, but no, not really too busy to blog. The lack of blog updates had more to do with the nature of the work than with a lack of time.

A couple of months back I got an email from an old friend I first met in art class back in high school. My friend, Tracy Martin, and her siblings wanted to commission a collage from me to give to their mother on her birthday. The collage was to be a surprise and Tracy's mom reads this blog (Hi Tracy's mom!) so no posting images of the work in progress on the blog. Now the collage is finished and delivered, the birthday surprise has come and gone, and I am free to show what has kept me busy for the past month.

"Blue Heron" - detail

This collage was something of a challenge owing to its size - 20x24 inches- and my increasing predilection for detail . Also, I really wanted to do justice to the reference photo which was supplied by Tracy, a professional photographer of considerable talent. It isn't everyday that I get to use such beautiful photography as a starting point. If you would like to see the original photo, it can be found on Tracy's blog, Photo Sage. I hope you'll spend some time looking through the photo archives. If you do, your effort will be richly rewarded, and you will find a multitude of images which are not only visually gorgeous, but which are also deeply moving. I encourage you to check it out. Tracy also has a more formal website, just click here.

Some Nice Local Press

2011-03-22T12:17:00.030-04:00

I was a little surprised a few weeks ago when I received a phone call from Anne Gardon. If you are a Quebecker and an enthusiastic cook, chances are you know Anne as a food writer and cookbook author.
Anne, who is originally from France, lives a short distance from me, just south of St. Chrysostome. Not only is she a serious foodie, but she is also an excellent photographer and has taken all the pictures for her cookbooks. I encourage you to look up her books and check out the recipes and their very beautiful accompanying photographs.

We had a very pleasant meeting and I look forward to seeing her again when she comes back to interview my furniture maker husband, Andrew Carmichael. (More about that later) The article below is the result of my interview with Anne, and was published originally in the monthly St. Chrysostome newsletter, Info Communautaire, and is reprinted here with her permission. Merci Anne!

GENS DE CHEZ NOUS

ALYSON CHAMP, UNE ARTISTE AUX MULTIPLES TALENTS

Je suis toujours étonnée de découvrir à quel point la vie artistique est vibrante dans notre région. Savez-vous par exemple que notre municipalité abrite une artiste de réputation internationale?

Récipiendaire de plusieurs prix, Alyson Champ a longtemps été connue pour ses peintures de chevaux de course. Elle a immortalisé de nombreux champions de Blue Bonnets, ainsi que des superstars des circuits américains. Ses oeuvres font partie de collections privées et d’entreprises et elle est membre de l’American Academy of Equine Art qui tient chaque année la plus prestigieuse exposition de peintures équestres en Amérique du Nord.

Mais avec la récession aux États-unis et la disparition des courses hippiques au Québec, sa clientèle traditionnelle a fortement diminué et Alyson Champ a dû trouver d’autres moyens de gagner sa vie en temps qu’artiste.

C’est en travaillant avec des enfants - elle donne des cours d’art à l’école élémentaire de Howick - que lui est venue l’idée de se lancer dans le collage. Alyson utilise des papiers peints dans une variété de texture et de brillance qu’elle découpe puis assemble comme un puzzle et peint. Ses toiles, à la fois stylisées et réalistes, sont vibrantes de couleurs et ont parfois un côté comique, comme cette série de chiens habillés sur laquelle elle travaille actuellement. Elle a entrepris également une série illustrant les races d’animaux de ferme en voie d’extinction.

Malgré son changement de cap, de nombreux clients lui sont restés fidèles. « La réponse à mon nouveau style a été très positive et a même attiré de nouveaux collectionneurs » dit-elle avec satisfaction.

Photo of the artist, courtesy of Anne Gardon

Née à la campagne, tout ce qui touche à la nature est pour elle une source d’inspiration, les fleurs de son jardin, la lumière jouant à travers les branches des arbres, les vaches dans les prés, les moutons… Elle et son mari en élèvent une dizaine, ainsi que des poules, et en été des canards et des pintades.

Où trouve-t-elle le temps? me suis-je d’ailleurs demandé en l’interviewant, car Alyson Champ donne également des cours de violon. Oui, de violon, qu’elle a étudié pendant une dizaine d’années au conservatoire de musique de McGill.

Son parcours académique est d’ailleurs étonnant. En plus d’un diplôme en musique, elle possèdes un baccalauréat en philosophie et a suivi plusieurs cours de dessin et de peinture, notamment à l’école des beaux-arts Saidye Bronfman, dont elle s’est faite expulser car elle suivait trop de cours. Et aujourd’hui, elle se lance dans le filage de la laine (de ses moutons) avec l’idée d’en faire éventuellement des tapisseries.

Je pourrais vous parler longtemps de la beauté de ses collages mais, comme une image vaut mille mots, je vous encourage à visiter son site web - www.alysonchamp.com - où vous pourrez voir quelques-unes de ses œuvres récentes et où vous aurez également accès à son blogue.

Si la peinture vous intéresse, Alyson Champ donne des cours (aux adultes et adolescents) dans son studio.

Anne Gardon

What's on the easel?

Spring is technically here, although you wouldn't necessarily believe it what with the cold winds and intermittent snow. I continue to work on my series of Well Dressed Dogs, and have a fourth collage finished. Hi there, Arnold!

Arnold Would Like a Cookie - 10 X 8" painted paper collage on paper, 2011 ©Alyson Champ

By the time July rolls around it will probably feel weird to be working on collages of dogs wearing sweaters. But for now, because of our cold weather, it remains appropriate. Well, as appropriate as anything I ever do anyway. Next dog up: Sisi!

Your Art Here

2011-03-08T12:15:00.007-05:00

Photo courtesy of Line Thibault

No, this isn't a picture of my living room. This is the Bruno Delgrange Saddles sales booth at the WEF in Wellington, Florida. Four of my recently completed collages are on display there. Three are shown below.

Photo courtesy of Line Thibault

This is by no means the strangest place I have shown my art. At various times I have tried restaurants,race tracks, banks, municipal spaces, private businesses, public libraries, and once (and only once) at a prestigious one of a kind craft show which had me showing my work in a barn - next to a pig pen! It's one thing to have your work come home smelling like food and coffee...

I thought the Bruno Delgrange booth might be a natural fit for my horse themed collages. And as my friend Line had graciously offered to supervise the whole endeavour, I figured it was worth a try. It's certainly a beautiful place. And no pigs!

Surf, Sun, Saddles and ...Art?

2011-02-21T14:08:00.016-05:00

Halt - Sandy Spicer and McGill, photo courtesy of Line Thibault

Every now and then a business opportunity arises which is just too good to pass up. No matter how frantically busy I think I already am, I can see I would be a fool to squander such a chance to expand the audience for my art.

I am fortunate to have a collector of my work who is not only a cherished client of long standing, but who, over many years, has also become a good friend. It is through my friend Line Thibault that I have recently been given the opportunity to send some of my collages down to Florida- to the winter horse capital of North America, in fact. Yes, my art is going to Wellington, Palm Beach County!

My friend's horse trainer partner, Jacques Ferland, is the North American sales representative for French saddle maker Bruno Delgrange and they have a booth at the Winter Equestrian Festival in Wellington. The booth needs decorating, so.....

What this means, of course, is that I have to stop what I was doing (Well Dressed Dogs, etc.) and concentrate on collages of horse-related subjects. The collages must be finished, varnished and framed, ready to go to Florida by the second week of March. Enough blogging! I have to get to work. Here is a recently finished horse collage called simply "White Horse"

and some photos of Wellington for you to drool over. Yes folks, this is a barn(!).....

White Fences Barn - photo by Sandy Spicer, courtesy of Line Thibault

An indoor riding arena...

A White Fences Arena - photo by Sandy Spicer, courtesy of Line Thibault

The grounds.....

Horse Paradise, White Fences Equestrian Community - photo by Sandy Spicer, courtesy of Line Thibault.

Are you drooling yet?

Everything's Coming Up Daisy

2011-02-14T14:08:00.011-05:00

Daisy and Arnold waiting for a treat. Photo by the artist

Daisy, a miniature Dachshund, and Arnold, a Dachshund cross, are the much loved fur children of Margot and Tommy MacKinnon. The MacKinnons kindly submitted to my weird request to photograph their dogs wearing their doggie sweaters with a view to including Daisy and Arnold in my Well Dressed Dogs collage series.

Daisy and Arnold are something of a study in opposites. Daisy, the smaller of the two, is nevertheless the louder and more assertive- definitely a wild, feisty female.

Daisy standing her ground. Photo by the artist.

Arnold, on the other hand, has more of a laid back vibe going for him. He is lovably goofy (but polite) and will do pretty much anything for food.

Arnold, what are you looking at? Photo by the artist.

We had a good photo shoot on a nice mid-winter day. Outside first, but the space of the yard was a little too distracting for the dogs, so we went inside. In my mind's eye I had imagined making a collage of the pair of dogs together on a chair. This was a little more difficult to arrange than I had anticipated: two dogs with two very different personalities and two different attention spans where the promise of a cookie is concerned. Arnold might have sat nicely for me all day. And Daisy? Well, forget about that idea.

Eventually I settled on the design for two separate collage portraits (both keeping the chair idea) which I hope revealed a little bit of each dogs personality. The preparatory drawing for Arnold is below:

And for Daisy:

Happily, I was able to get the Daisy collage finished. And here she is:

If you would like to see the step by step progression of this collage, please check out my Facebook fan page. Photos are posted there.

Trial and Error

2011-02-04T09:40:00.015-05:00

There have been a couple of eureka moments in the past couple of weeks. One such moment came when I found a reference photo I thought I had lost forever (Filing system? I don't need no stinking filing system!) and the other moment came to me after watching the work in progress of fellow collage artist Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson.

When I shifted the focus of my art making away from oil painting to painted paper collage, I found myself working in a medium for which I had had no formal training - in fact, I'm not sure if formal training really even exists in the art of collage. Although this was a very liberating experience artistically, it also meant that I no longer had any tried and true method or efficient working system to fall back on. Basically I have been making it up as I go along. My first collages were made on paper, which I found wasn't really a heavy enough support and maddeningly prone to buckling.

After trying out rigid, acid free mat board and then canvas, which were better than the paper but still posed problems, I tried out medium density fiberboard, or MDF, as a support surface and this I liked: it's rigid and stable and smooth. Unfortunately, it needs to be completely sealed to make it archival and safe.

I chose to seal the panels with black gesso because my idea at the time was to have a little of the black background show between the pieces of paper to give the collages a stained glass appearance.

Yellow Iris (2009) in progress. Note the "puzzle pieces" of collage on the black background.

The problem with the black gesso was that it was so dark that I had to work blind; I couldn't transfer my drawings onto the black surface because no pencil, chalk or charcoal was really visible on the black. Nor, as it turned, was the stained glass effect quite as appealing as I had hoped. So, what to do?

For a while I continued working as I had simply for the lack of a better method. And then I happened upon Elizabeth's work (shown below) and EUREKA! She draws directly on the panel and then preserves the drawing, while also sealing the panel, with a clear, acrylic sealant. Duh! Now why the heck didn't I think of that?

As you can see, Elizabeth works free hand on her panel. I still prefer to make my preparatory drawing on paper first, work all the kinks out, and then transfer the main elements of the drawing via tracing paper onto the panel. Having a drawing to refer to and a basic drawing of the planned collage on the panel itself certainly is making my life a lot easier! And if you think Elizabeth's drawing is terrific, I encourage you to check out the finished collage on her website, www.PaperPaintings.com It is fabulous!

What's On the Easel?

Quite a lot, actually! Thanks to some generous friends, I now have many more reference photos for my Well Dressed Dog collage project - yeah, I know I keep changing the name of the series but I swear "Well Dressed Dog" is it!

I'm also continuing to work on my large collage "Mara Under Water". Check out the drawing and prepped panel below:

Pencil study for "Mara Under Water" © 2011 Alyson Champ

"Mara" transferred to the 20x24" panel

You can see what a help Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson's method has been.

This week, I almost managed to finish another collage, my second rooster to date. The very handsome subject of this collage is our own rooster, Pretty Boy Floyd.

He knows he is good looking. I'm not sure if my hens have an opinion.

Odds and Ends

2011-01-22T11:30:00.009-05:00

It was a funny week here in St. Crazy, both weather-wise and art-wise. The weather was all over the place: we had bitter cold, then above freezing temperatures, sleet, freezing rain, and snow. Now we are back to bitter cold again. Winter in Quebec provides a little something for everyone, I guess.

As for art projects, there was also a little bit of everything. My plan was to continue with my Clothed Dogs series of collages. I was waiting for an opportunity to photograph a friend's mini-Dachshunds in their sweaters but the weather conditions and my schedule were not co operating. I did get as far as photographing one of my own dogs, though. Here is Toby looking smashing in a royal blue, form fitting, little knit number.

Toby in Blue - photo by the artist

With my dogs- in- sweaters plans thwarted for the time being, I shifted my attentions to making the preparatory drawing for a big collage that I had been planning for several months. I was having a good time working on that one until I realised that I wouldn't be able to get beyond the drawing stage. The reason? My big garage/studio does not yet have proper heating (not good when it's -20 degrees C) and my indoor spare bedroom studio lacks adequate workspace to accommodate the large panel. So...what to do?

Happily, mid-week my husband came home with a bag of cast off neckties- a gift from his father (thanks M.) - to add to my Cache of Truly Hideous Neckties, bits and pieces of which regularly appear in my collages. Check out these babies:

Photo by the artist

Now, when you look at these ties, I don't know what comes to your mind, but to me they said, "Rooster!". Lucky for me, I had already made drawings for some rooster collages which hadn't gotten beyond the planning stage, (Hmm...anybody else beginning to notice a pattern here?) which meant that a fair bit of the work was already done. I simply had to get a-gluing. Here is the result:

There are still some small details on the image to work out, but he is very nearly complete. And, I am pleased to add, he is already sold.

Rooster detail -front end....

...and back.

The Well Dressed Dog

2011-01-12T14:29:00.010-05:00

My first collage of 2011, and the second dog collage in what I hope will be a series of Dogs in Coats, is finished. The subject of this collage is Gus, a pug who belongs to a friend. Here he is below.

Gus- photo by Alison Taylor

Cute little fellow, isn't he? And also strangely noble. Big dogs often look goofy, but small dogs have a way of exuding self importance: they really don't seem to understand the whole size-thing. I guess that's just part of what makes little dogs so endearing.

As you can see, the photo of Gus shows him in a black coat. Black is not an especially easy colour to work with when making art. As colours go, plain black looks flat and dead and really dominates the composition. So, the black was out. I could also see that for design purposes the stumps would be problematic. As much I liked the original picture, clearly some changes would be in order.

Sorting out the background and removing the stumps wasn't much of an issue. But the colour of the doggy coat? Well, would it be Red Gus?

Photo by the artist

Or Blue?

Photo by the artist

After pondering this dilemma for a while, I remembered that I have a collection of silk neckties in the craziest colours and patterns. Finally, a solution presented itself.

Here is Gus in his new sport coat made from a silk necktie dating from the early eighties. It's what all the fashionable lap dogs are wearing this season.

Gus -detail

Next up, Dachshunds!

So You Say You Want a Resolution?

2011-01-03T14:04:00.009-05:00

Welcome, 2011!

I don't normally do the New Year's Resolutions thing. Tackling bad habits it has taken years to acquire, and thereby attempting to remake one's life in a short list just because it's January, smells like a set up for failure. I resolve instead to choose resolutions that are do-able, things I might be inclined by nature to do anyway, but just haven't gotten around to doing yet. I hereby resolve to:

Use the word brachycephalic more frequently. English is chock full of fabulous words. Bamboozle is a beauty, as is mukluk*. Just saying mukluk aloud is guaranteed to lift one's mood. You doubt me? Go ahead and try it.

Mukluk.

See, I told you.
Just recently I started making a series of collages featuring dogs in sweaters or doggy coats. Why? Well, as with the word mukluk, a dog wearing a sweater is so inherently ridiculous that seeing a canine so attired makes me smile. What could possibly be better than a dog in a sweater**, you might ask? Why, a brachycephalic dog in a sweater, of course! When I saw a friend's photo of her pug in his little coat, I could not resist. Say hello to "Gus", everyone. Isn't he handsome?

Pencil sketch of Gus
(Oh, and incidentally that's two brachycephalics - no three- in one post! Bazinga!)

Quit Slacking Off and Actually Get Some Work Done. I went into the studio to work today for the first time in a couple of weeks and it felt pretty good. I was a little slow getting started, but did manage to get some drawing done and to get a panel prepared for the new collage of Gus. However, my studio assistant, Tabitha, was more than an hour late. During the Christmas break, she got into the habit of sleeping in a rocker by the woodstove - guess she forgot it was Monday. That's coming off your paycheck, cat.

Tabitha on the job- photo by the artist (that would be me).

Make more drawings of sinister-looking rodents. Shortly before Christmas, I began a drawing of our rabbit, Jasper, to give as a gift to a friend who has a fondness for rabbits. I was quite pleased with the drawing until my daughter looked at it and said, "It's nice, but he looks kind of evil." I ended up giving the friend a tin of Bag Balm instead. What can I say? Bring on the mice and squirrels.

Stop swearing. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! NEXT.

Spend more time discovering the work of other artists. Here are some artists whose work I have recently discovered.
Elizabeth St. Hilaire-Nelson is a collage artist who lives in Florida. We recently "met" (in the virtual sense) and have exchanged Christmas cards (in the actual sense). I think her work is colourful and gorgeous.
Claudia Roulier makes assemblages, collages, and paintings which are funny-bordering-on-disturbed.
I have my husband to thank for turning me on to the work of Brian Dettmer. This guy carves books - yes, you read that right- carves books. Check it out. I guarantee his work will blow your mind.

Pay my hay bill. Sorry V. The cheque is (almost) in the mail.

Stop worrying about money. I have been poor, but neither I, nor my business has ever been bankrupt. Donald Trump has been on the verge of personal bankruptcy and his businesses have been bankrupt not once, but TWICE. So.... who's the failure again? Plus, this is really my hair.

Spend more time petting my dogs, playing with my cats, talking to my sheep, and less time arguing with the humans in my life.
That's about it. Happy New Year!

* If it's in the OED, it's word.
** If any of you are dog owners and have photos of your dog in a sweater or doggy coat, and you wouldn't mind seeing your dog so immortalized in a collage, please send those photos to me at: info@alysonchamp.com Extra points for brachycephalic dogs. (That's four times, baby!)

Sheep Pellets of Wisdom: The Year in Review

2010-12-27T09:22:00.005-05:00

Well, here we are nearing the end of another year. Although I am looking forward to what the New Year might bring, like most people I can’t help but cast a glance backward over the old year now drawing to a close. On our farm, 2010 was a pretty good year. We had a number of successes: a healthy little crop of lambs which sold easily, many bags of beautiful fleeces, a freezer full of fat roosters and Guinea fowl, and a wonderfully productive vegetable garden with some of the most beautiful tomatoes I have ever grown. In the failures column, we had no zucchini, inedible pole beans, edible but strangely deformed pumpkins, some trouble with pasture parasites, and a favourite wether had to be euthanized. We got some things right and we got some things wrong. Where the sheep were concerned, 2010 was a year of learning from mistakes made the previous year and, no doubt, making new mistakes- ones which I am sure are bound to reveal themselves in due course. But that’s for next year. For now, here are the top twenty things I learned about sheep in 2010.

20. From the point of view of the sheep, there is no such thing as too many windfall apples.

19. From the point of view of the shepherd, “too many” windfall apples is approximately one half bushel less than the amount required to cause gastro-intestinal upset in sheep.

18. The friendliest, most persistently affectionate animal known to humanity is a 200 lb wether with diarrhoea .

17. Don’t de-worm sheep on a day when it is cold and wet unless you also would like to be cold and wet.

16. Delphinium: It’s sheep Latin for “Poison? No! Eat me, I taste like candy!”

15. If it is thirty degrees and mid-July, and the renderer says he will be coming on Wednesday to pick up a dead sheep, he really means Friday. If it is minus thirty degrees and mid-January, when he says Wednesday, he means Wednesday.

14. Under no circumstances ever tell your dinner guests what is under that tarp outside the barn. If anyone asks what it is, just say, “Stuff”.

13. Sheep who turn their noses up at slightly coarse hay will, in the very next instant, eat their straw bedding.

12. Sheep are untroubled by such concepts as irony or logical consistency.

11. The first time your ewes lamb, your whole family comes out to the barn with you in the middle of the night to make videos or take pictures or to otherwise be a witness to the miracle of birth. Lambing the second time around, when you complain to your husband about having to go out to the barn at two am, he says, “Well, you were the one who wanted sheep,” then rolls over and goes back to sleep.

10. To a lamb, everything looks like an udder except an udder.

9. Ewes can’t count.

8. When given a choice between running through a gate to rejoin its mother and running headlong into a fence, nine times out of ten a lamb will choose to run into the fence.

7. A fat lamb will always find a way to get into the creep feeder. Getting out is another matter.

6. The first time you take your lambs to the butcher, you cry in the truck during the drive to the slaughter house. The second time, you plan the menu.

5. The most agile animal on the planet is not a gazelle, a cat or a squirrel. It is an overweight seven year old Border Leicester ram who does not wish to have his feet trimmed.

4. If your sheep are standing outside in driving rain when they could be inside, one of two things has occurred: either a) the doorway to the barn is currently occupied by a flock of bad tempered Muscovy ducks or, b) one of Dumb Dora’s offspring is in the barn, racing around with a bucket stuck on its head.

3. A long wool sheep with an itch is a force of nature.

2. The number of times a person is willing to replace, repair, or re-position automatic waterers which have been ripped off the wall by itchy sheep before one gives up on automatic waterers and goes back to using buckets is: six.

1. To look out at your pasture in the spring and see it clothed with healthy ewes and playful lambs is possibly the best feeling in the world.

Photo by the artist

Eric's New Coat

2010-12-13T08:08:00.010-05:00

For inexplicable reasons, I have recently developed a fondness for images of dogs wearing doggie coats. There is something about the way they look, the expression on their faces, that strikes me as funny. So when I saw a photo of a friend's dog all decked out in his new threads, well, I just couldn't resist, could I?

Eric, whose official title is Eric the Perfect Dog, is a rescued greyhound. He belongs to Dr. Cathy Gallivan, who is an animal geneticist, and who is also the owner and editor of Sheep Canada Magazine. Sheep Canada, you will recall, is the quarterly magazine to which I contribute a humour column derived mainly from the sheep related contents of this blog.

Cathy and I met kind of by accident when I was looking for ways to get my sheep art out to the public, and strange as the world is, it turned out that we had friends in common. Funny how that happens.

Out of this nascent friendship, we have formed a business partnership and this year have produced a line of Sheep Canada Christmas cards which feature my sheep collages on the front.

I wanted to make an artistic holiday arrangement of the cards in order to show them off to their advantage, but as you can see, my studio assistant Tabitha had other ideas. Here are the images:

Winter Julius - 5x7 card, printed on glossy card stock, with envelope, $3 each

Gerry - 5x7 card printed on glossy card stock, with envelope, $3 each

Celeste - 5x7 card printed on glossy card stock, $3 each

Bazoo - 5x7 card on glossy card stock, $3 each

The Sheep Canada logo is the back of each card, along with my contact information. The interior of the cards is blank.

The cards are available from me or from Sheep Canada -see the link above. The cards are sold individually or in packets of eight for $20 CAD, plus shipping. I will accept U.S. money orders and cheques at par.

Can I Get There from Here?

2010-12-02T14:12:00.010-05:00

As I wrote in my previous blog post, my studio is finally more or less finished, and every Saturday afternoon for the past month I have been teaching an Intro to Acrylics class to an absolutely terrific group of talented and enthusiastic women who have decided to throw caution to the wind and learn to paint.

Starting a painting is often intimidating, and not just for beginners, but for more experienced artists as well. A blank canvas is a scary thing- so much possibility, not only for success, but also for failure. How do you start?

When I was an art student, I can remember some of the most useful and instructive classes I ever attended were those where the teacher did a painting demonstration for the class. Not only were you told what to do and when, but you were actually shown how to do it. That really de-mystified the process for me. I once watched a teacher in a figure painting class paint a 24x20 inch nude portrait of a model, alla prima style, in just under three hours. He showed us how to make a basic drawing on the canvas to establish proportions. We watched him block in the major areas of the painting, watched him lay down shadows, make choices for colour and value, gradually developing the whole image, until the end when we saw him paint in the brightest highlights in the woman's hazel eyes and on the tip of her nose.

And then we watched him scrape the whole thing off with a knife when he was done.

He didn't destroy the portrait because it was a bad painting, but because it was just a painting, a job, a process, made simple for him because he knew what he was doing. He was capable of reproducing the same steps over and over again, with consistent results.

What's on the easel

That type of demonstration was what I had in mind last week during the Saturday acrylics class. Unfortunately, I am a slow worker and I talk too much in class, so I didn't quite get the painting finished during class time.

Anna-Maria's Garden- 12x16 pencil drawing

When the composition is complicated, I like to work things out on paper first. This saves me a whole lot of headache later on. It's so much easier to correct problems on paper first, rather than trying to fix things on the canvas later. I transferred the drawing onto the canvas by simply putting some charcoal on the back of the paper, placing the drawing over the top on the canvas, and then retracing the basic outlines again with a pencil. When I removed the paper, a simple charcoal outline is left on the canvas, which I then secure by painting over it with diluted, earth toned paint. (Sorry, I forgot to document that stage.)

Anna-Maria's Garden - blocked in

Next, I try to establish the most important shape areas, colours, and shadows. It helps me to have a sense of where the painting is going in its entirety. I keep the paint fairly thin in order to avoid unpleasant lumps and visible brushwork where I perhaps don't want them.

Anna-Maria's Garden - the middle uglies

The middle phase of any painting is usually the worst part. This is where the tough decisions get made. I can see that some of the perspective is wrong and that the busy colours and brush work on the barn wood and the roof is too distracting for its place in the composition. It doesn't recede enough, and since I want the flowers to dominate, I can see I'll have to tone that part down and reserve the colour and detail for the flowers in order to achieve maximum impact.

I put a little more time in on this canvas and it feels pretty much finished. There may still be a few wrinkles to iron out, but I'm fairly pleased with it. The art class can critique it on Saturday!

Spaced Out

2010-11-20T07:15:00.007-05:00

I've been dreaming about having a proper studio for a long time, so when my husband and I were looking at properties a few years back, one of the requirements I had for a place to live was that there also had to be adequate work space for me.
We bought the Funny Farm in part for its beautiful garage- yes, I know most people are hooked on kitchens and bathrooms. The kitchen and bathrooms in this house were great, too. But it was that 15 by 30 foot garage with a north facing wall, already wired AND with running water that really sold me on the place. No more tiny spare bedrooms or poorly lit basement studios for me! All the garage needed was insulation, some new windows, finished walls and a floor, and it would be a perfect studio. I could so easily imagine myself working away in my own little haven, teaching classes comfortably. I would finally be able to use my big French easel, get a drafting table! I would be so productive! Oh the possibilities! It's a good thing I have an imagination, because imagining my perfect studio was pretty much as far as it got. For three years the studio remained unfinished.
Since moving here, I have been working in a small upstairs bedroom, where the glare is so terrible I have to contort myself to see what is on my easel. When I started making collages, I found I needed even more room to spread out, so I shifted some of my work space to the ground floor, into the room where I teach music, a space where I also wound up teaching art classes. Once in a while, my art has taken over the kitchen when I needed extra room to paint, or to build a box to ship artwork, or to pack something. Even the living room wasn't immune, as I sometimes went in there to work on drawings. Forget the problems of urban sprawl. In our house the problem was definitely one of art sprawl: easels everywhere, paintings and collages stacked up against the walls, empty frames, boxes of art supplies, packing materials and two separate studio spaces, both woefully inadequate. Fortunately this house hasn't got much of a basement, or I surely would have found myself down there as well.

Lucky for me, my wait for a studio is now almost over. My kindhearted husband, who is a carpenter and a masterful maker of fine furniture, was able to find the time to get the studio almost finished- finished enough to make it a usable space, and for the past three weeks I have been able to work in it and teach in it.

Funny farm studio from the front. Photo by the artist.

You can't imagine the happiness I feel whenever I open the door and see all that space, the perfect light, the beautiful north facing window, the peace and quiet ...

Studio interior. Photo by the artist.

OK, the walls aren't finished and the sink drains into a bucket, but still....

Out of Commission

2010-11-11T08:39:00.016-05:00

Dori (oil) © Alyson Champ

I had one of those moments recently where I was reminded of why I rarely do commissioned work: it's a pain in the neck. I didn't always have that opinion, though. For years commissions formed the main part of my artistic income, my bread and butter, so to speak.

When I spent most of my creative energy producing equine paintings, not only did I accept commissions, I eagerly sought them out. I traveled to horse farms, training facilities, and race tracks. I met all kinds of people- some real characters,too- and got a first hand look at the "back side" of horse racing in all its weird, distasteful, beautiful, hard working, corrupt, and somewhat faded, glory - something most people never get to see.

Fier-a-bras (oil) © Alyson Champ

So why did I give it up? Well, for one thing, the market basically bottomed out. The race track in Montreal closed and a lot of the people who were in the business either got out of racing entirely or pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere. There was also the question of my stifled creativity and restricted artistic growth. When you spend all your time working according to the specifications of other people, you don't really get to grow much as an artist. Commissioned work very seldom allows you the opportunity to experiment or take chances. He who pays the piper, gets to call the tune, and after a while, dancing to someone else's tune gets a little boring.
Then there is the Human Factor: you have to handle other people's egos, their unrealistic expectations, their sentimental attachments, and in the case of the very rich and very busy (mostly) businessmen/racehorse owners, you also have to also have to work around their crazy schedules.
I don't mean to suggest that doing commissioned work was a completely negative experience, on the contrary! It taught me the two most important rules for an artist: 1) Always Have a Written Contract, and 2) Always Get a Nonrefundable Kill Fee of 30 % Upfront. It also taught me how to say no to jobs I knew just wouldn't work out, how to humour difficult people, and how to distance myself from my work so that I didn't take criticism personally. And if I hadn't danced to the tunes of others, I would have been deprived of such learning experiences as:

- Being commissioned to produce a double portrait of a teenage girl and her horse only to have the 'girl' part of the portrait proclaimed unacceptable by the unpleasant mother because the LIKENESS WAS TOO GOOD! The girl had a rather prominent nose, which I had faithfully reproduced. The horse part of the portrait was deemed adequate and they eventually settled on the horse alone.

-Receiving photos in the mail of an aged brood mare and being asked to paint a portrait of the horse, but would I please: straighten the animal's back, lift the sagging belly, remove a scar on the neck, flesh out the neck a little more, make the eyes more youthful, fill out the mane, and not include all the ear hair. I should have asked them if they would perhaps have preferred that I paint a different horse entirely.

-Being handed a handful of blurry, underexposed, distorted snapshots of a standardbred in a stall, and being asked to immortalize an animal I could barely see.

-Having to do a photo shoot of a racehorse outdoors in a snowstorm because the trainer was only available that one day. The owners wanted a summer scene.

-Delivering a completed racing portrait to an owner only to have him look at it and say, "But that's the wrong horse." Whereupon ensued a rather heated cell phone conversation between the owner and the trainer in which the owner said, "Bay? What the hell is bay?!"

-Being paid by an owner in cash,in thousand dollar bills, from a desk drawer stuffed with money, the provenance of which I dared not ponder. Fortunately he didn't want change, either.

-Being sent to the wrong address and ending up at a sort of abandoned looking horse farm, only to find myself alone and surrounded by Rottweilers.

-Arriving at a training facility to photograph a stallion worth a couple of million dollars, and being told by the trainer that they were too busy to deal with me, at which point he handed me a towel and a bucket full of brushes and said, "Go put him in cross ties and groom him yourself." So I did.

Idole (oil) © Alyson Champ

The Dog Who Could Have Been

2010-10-20T15:06:00.011-04:00

We first met Bella, a lovely smooth coat Jack Russell terrier, in our veterinarian's office during one of our many visits with our poor, chronically ill, miniature schnauzer, Cleo. My daughter instantly fell in love with Bella and, as luck would have it, Bella fell in love with my daughter. Whenever we had to make a visit to the veterinary clinic, we had to pay a visit to Bella too, as the clinic kennel was Bella's home away from home. She was (and is) one of Dr. Bill's own dogs. And last summer, for a very brief time, she was also ours.

Cleo was my daughter's special dog, and unfortunately she was a dog with myriad health problems. We knew that her life would be cut short, and sure enough last spring, just past her ninth birthday, Cleo had to be euthanised. Her death left a gap in our little pack and a hole our affections.

We had often joked with Dr. Bill that if he ever wanted to get rid of Bella, he knew who would take her, seeing as the dog and my daughter had hit it off so spectacularly. He told us that he had always wanted a Jack Russell and when he found one that was returned to its breeder in a divorce case, he jumped at the chance to adopt it. This was how he came to have Bella. Dr. Bill really liked her, but as time wore on it became obvious that the dog did not feel the same way. Not that the animal was hostile to him. No, in fact it was worse than that. As anyone who has experienced unrequited love will tell you, active dislike or hostility is at least something. The opposite of love isn't hate: it's indifference. My vet found himself in an unfulfilled, emotionally lopsided relationship with his dog. Naturally, he began to wonder if perhaps she would be happier somewhere else. So the next time we had business at the clinic, we came home with a Jack Russell terrier.

It started with the rabbit. Our pet rabbit Jasper, who completely lacks a fear of dogs (he must not have received the "prey animal"memo), looked on with placid amusement as this new deranged animal danced, yapped, bounced and snapped at his cage over and over again. She seemed never to tire of it, despite our repeated scoldings and corrections. A dwarf lop-eared rabbit and a Jack Russell in the same house was an accident just waiting to happen.

Then she fixated on our cats. First to catch her eye were the barn cats, and when she had succeeded in thoroughly terrorizing them, she turned her attention to our house cats. I knew that Jack Russells had a reputation as persistent hunters and could be problematic with animals of the feline persuasion; but, as Bella was already accustomed to living in a multi-cat household, and as Dr. Bill had assured me that she showed not the slightest interest in his cats, I didn't think this would be a problem. I could not have been more wrong.

The pursuit of our cats both indoors and out quickly progressed from an irritating game to something considerably more sinister. We were unable to correct Bella's behaviour because, quite simply, we couldn't catch her in the act. Hell, we couldn't catch her period. She was greased lightning on four legs, a white and tan Jack Russell whirlwind. Chased upstairs, downstairs, over the sofa, under the bed, up trees, and under the porch, our cats eventually became so panic stricken that they went into hiding. Obviously Bella couldn't stay. Even my daughter, who loved the dog, was not willing to sacrifice the life of one of our cats. Shortly thereafter we returned Bella to Dr. Bill. And do you know what? She was HAPPY to see him!

What's on the Easel

I couldn't send Bella back home without immortalizing her, now could I?

In the collection of Dr. William Johnston.

Apple Heaven

2010-10-04T09:23:00.009-04:00

The Circuit des arts Hemmingford Studio Tour took place this past weekend. We were blessed with good weather, a little cool perhaps, but the sun was shining. Because my actual studio is outside the boundaries designated by the Circuit organizers, I packed up my studio contents and took them to Hemmingford, a village which is a twenty minute drive away from where I live.

Hemmingford IS Appletown- no doubt about that. There are numerous orchards, juice makers, and several award winning cider and ice-cider producers in the township. I was at the Petch family orchard and had set up shop in their boutique/café with young up and coming artist-illustrator Melissa Perreault.

Melissa Perreault taking a break from her sketching.
All photos by Alyson Champ

We were lucky this year to have wandering minstrels to entertain us and the crowds.

Singer/guitarist Kevin Bickes doing his thing. Melissa's artwork in the background.

Overall, Petch's exudes a warm, friendly, family atmosphere, and it smelled fantastic! Throughout the day, in the café kitchen, the cooks were baking apple pies, apple crisps, apple strudels, and Petch's famous apple doughnuts. Mmmmmmm doughnuts. I thought I had died and gone to apple heaven.

The gardienne of the strudels

Art sales were a bit slow, but lots of people came out, and it's always nice to visit with friends and family that I don't get to see very often. And there was one unexpected bonus: when I was unpacking my artwork this morning, guess what? It all smells like apple pie!

Apples, apples, and more apples.

Of course, I came home with a big bag of fresh, crisp, juicy Cortlands, some strudels, and a box of doughnuts. Which reminds me, I think it's time for a coffee break. But first...

What's on the easel

Here is the latest sheep collage. I didn't have time to post this one last week because it was off being framed. It's called Dora in the Doorway, and if you've been following this blog for a little while, you'll know Dumb Dora as my "wing nut" ewe. Here she is looking like her loopy self.

Boundary Issues

2010-09-30T18:54:00.012-04:00

One evening last fall, my sheep came home to the barn with their fleeces a tangled mess of burrs and thistles. I noticed one ewe was also sporting a fringe of blackberry canes, another one had accessorized herself with a small tree. Now our pastures aren't perfect, but I did find this odd considering I had gone to some pains to cut down, dig up, and burn as much of this sort of debris as possible. The next morning I went out to check the pastures and the fences and discovered that the back gate was open. The sheep had been out in the fallow no man's land between out place and the neighbour's woodlot, no doubt scrounging for crab apples. I cursed irresponsible teenaged ATV riders and closed the gate.

What I had hoped was a unique event began to look more like a pattern when the episode repeated itself the following week, except this time it had been raining. Not only were my beautiful, white, long-wool sheep covered with sticks, burrs and brambles again, but they wrre also WET. The first time had cost me hours of labour pulling out the burrs and disentangling the sticks; the second time I used the hand shears and gave the worst offenders "punk rock" haircuts. At least two of the sheep looked like they had been shorn by a blindfolded lunatic using a lawnmower.

Celeste with haircut. Photo by the artist.

Of course, that back gate was open again. This time, along with the requisite cursing, I also considered getting a padlock or at least putting up a sign asking whoever opened the gate to please shut it behind him (or her), thank you very much. As it turned out, I didn't have to do either.

One Saturday morning as I was unloading groceries, a strange car pulled into our yard. A blond man in his early thirties got out and introduced himself as Sylvain, our neighbour. His house sits near the end of our long driveway, and although he had lived there for more than a year, this was our first real meeting. Casual observation of his behaviour from a distance had led me to conclude that Sylvain was both trigger happy, (he almost shot our other neighbour while out hunting deer the previous fall), and that he was quite possibly a pyromaniac, as he was always burning something in his yard, and had set fire to our ditch twice in a six month period. It was with some trepidation that I shook his hand.

"I was up here this morning, " he said, "but no one was home, so I was watching through my scope for your car. Your sheep are loose out in the neighbour's bush. I have permission to hunt there; I thought they were coyotes and I almost shot them."

While I was annoyed that my gun wielding firebug of a neighbour could mistake a flock of Border Leicesters for a pack of coyotes, I was even more dismayed that this rather strange man had been using his scope to watch our house. My days of topless gardening were obviously at an end.

"Well, my sheep wouldn't be loose if some idiot wasn't always opening our back gate." I answered.

"What gate?" he asked.

I explained the situation to him.

"Oh," he said, "well where does your property end?"

And I explained that to him too.

"Oh." he said, and paused as if contemplating something, then asked, " Do you want help rounding them up? I could get my four-wheeler."

I told him not to worry about it, that the sheep would come back on their own (which they did), if he would just please not shoot them in the meantime (which he didn't).

This autumn I closed off the back pasture completely so the sheep no longer have access to it at all. Better safe than sorry, I figure. Throughout the year I have continued to check the back gate from time to time, just out of curiosity. I have never found it open since. Not once.

What's on the easel

The Hemmingford Studio Tour takes place this week end (Oct. 2&3, 2010) from 10 am - 5 pm, both Saturday and Sunday. I'll be at Petch Orchards flogging my wares. If you are in the area, stop in and introduce yourself.

Here are a couple of new sheep collages which will be on display during the tour exhibition.

I give you Miss Juliet,

Fabulous Fionna,

and of course... Celeste!

You Gotta Know When to Hold 'em

2010-09-16T14:04:00.005-04:00

One of the toughest parts of being involved in any kind of creative work is knowing when something is finished. Rarely do I realise my artistic vision so completely that there is no doubt. Once in a while, I'll call something completed when I can no longer stand to look at it. Most times though, I have to live with a piece for a little while before I can really sign off.

I was working on a large, ambitious collage recently and thought I had finished it, yet there was something about the piece that left me uneasy; I didn't really feel I had accomplished visually what I had set out to do. I wasn't happy with it, but I didn't know why. So I decided to set it aside for awhile- this after having heralded the collage's imminent arrival on my Facebook Fan Page. That will teach me. The fat lady wasn't in fact ready to sing; she was merely clearing her throat.

I had the collage set up on an easel in our downstairs hall, a very central part of our house. This forced me to look at the thing, confront it, examine its flaws throughout the day, everyday, for a couple of weeks. That did the trick. Eventually I worked out what the problem was and how to fix it. It took some tough love and a little "renovation" work, but now it really is finished- finished and soon to be up on display at Salle Alfred-Langevin in Huntingdon as my contribution to the local collective exhibition for the Journées de la culture. The vernissage is Friday, September 24th at 5:00 pm. If you are in the area, come and check out the show.

Last Light, Ormstown- 24X30 painted paper and fabric collage on canvas

Differently Abled Daffy

2010-09-10T12:37:00.013-04:00

"What do you mean one of my ducks is simple minded!" my friend Anna Maria wrote with mock outrage in an email to me a couple of weeks ago. In a note I sent her, I had mused that of the three male Muscovy ducks she had given me, one of them appeared to be a little mentally slow. Daffy (my name for him) is definitely different. Whereas the other two are very adept fliers, he can't fly; when the others zig, he zags; while his companions are out foraging in the yard, he spends much of his day sitting in a corner in the barn looking at the wall. And this isn't exactly new behaviour. While he still lived at Anna Maria's place, he one day zigged when he should have zagged, got underfoot, had his tail stepped on and subsequently lost part of it. Truth be told, Daffy is a slow witted, off balance, flightless duck with no sense of direction and only half a tail.

Daffy is the off-kilter duck on the left. Photo by the artist.

In that same email, Anna-Maria went on to remind me that just as people have varying levels of intelligence and competencies, so it is with animals. This is undoubtedly true. Take my dogs, for example. I have one who can slip any collar, and who, through trial and error, learned how to undo the catch on the baby gate to let herself out of the kitchen. I have another who can stealthily rifle through a bag of groceries when my back is turned, extract a package of pastrami without disturbing the other contents of the bag, carefully open the plastic and eat only the pastrami. Pretty smart. And yet we had a third dog so stupid she couldn't find her way out from under a blanket.

Even among the sheep, an animal with a reputation for stupidity, I have noticed a fairly wide range of intelligence. Take Julius the ram for instance, while not a deep thinker to be sure, he did learn to use his nose to pop the hook on the side gate of the barn to let himself (and the others) out in the morning whenever he felt I was being too slow.

Furthermore, intelligence seems to be inherited. One of my ewes is smart and vivacious and her daughters are just the same. Another ewe, the one we call Dumb Dora, invariably has stupid lambs who get lost in the grass or can't figure out how to go around an open gate to get out of the pasture, or worse.

One afternoon this past summer, in the middle of a heavy downpour, I noticed my sheep standing outside by the front of the barn, wet, and looking completely miserable. Now, there was no good reason for them to be outside in the rain: the barn was open; they could go in if they wanted to. Weird, I thought. A little later, from an upstairs window, I could see a white shape racing back and forth along the fence line of the pasture behind the barn. I put on my boots.

First I went to scold my stupid sheep for standing in the rain when the barn was open, next I went in the barn to take a look around. Nothing looked amiss, at first. A moment later I noticed a water bucket was missing and I knew exactly what had happened and to whom. It was, of course, Dora's daughter Violaine who had somehow gotten her head through the handle of the nearly empty water bucket, and it was she who had terrorized the other sheep now left stranded out in the rain, and of course, it was she who was now out by the back fence frantically trying to run away. From herself.

But back to those ducks for a minute. In about ten days, the ducks have a scheduled date with destiny. Destiny being Lavallée's slaughter house. I have no doubt that I will be able to catch poor, witless Daffy- a sitting duck if ever there was one. As for the other two...I have no idea what I'm going to do. I don't know how they know, but they seem to be aware of some impending disaster and have recently started roosting up on the wooden supports for the stable cleaner track outside the barn, putting them well out of my reach. I suppose I'll have to figure something out. But for now, I'm afraid that I must live with the embarrassing truth: That I have yet again been outsmarted by ducks. Like I said before, there is a wide range of intelligence among all animals.

What's on the Easel?

Well, quite a lot, as it turns out. I'm participating in a studio tour and a group show this fall, so I've been quite busy of late. I will include more information about these upcoming shows next post. For now, here are two small pieces .

Back to the drawing board er, collage table!

The Island of Misfit Art

2010-08-06T19:47:00.010-04:00

OK, so it's not really an island. More of a lopsided pile.

On the floor of my upstairs studio there is a stack of unfinished paintings, all of them failures for one reason or another. Mostly they were flawed to begin with: bad colour choices, inherent (but initially not obvious) compositional flaws, or some stupid problem in perspective or anatomy that I couldn't get right but that I thought would just magically resolve itself if only I kept painting. And sometimes, sometimes, just like kids from good homes who go careening off the rails and wind up in jail, perfectly decent paintings go bad for no apparent reason at all.

Once in a while I will completely give up on a picture and throw it out, but generally I am reluctant to part with my stack of failures. I have been known to hang on to them for years, hoping that my artistic skill will catch up with my artistic desire, or that I will be granted a little flash of creative brilliance and suddenly simply know how to fix something which has, up to that point, eluded me.

This week I felt inspired and adopted a misfit painting out of the stack. It is an oil I had started a year or so ago showing a scene from The Rolex Three Day Event at the Kentucky Horse Park. The reference photo came from a disc of photos sent to me by a fellow artist who had been lucky enough to attend the event. I had high hopes for this painting when I started it and was frustrated when it didn't work out the first time. This time I figured I really had nothing to lose and decided to make a second attempt at finishing it. There were compositional issues to resolve and aerial perspective problems. It took two days to get it all sorted out. I'm sorry I didn't think to photograph the before and after so you could also see the transformation. Below is the after. I think it worked out pretty well.

The next painting is the completed landscape from last week: A View of St. Chrysostome. I'm calling it finished, although it's possible that there will still be some corrections to be made in the coming weeks. I need to look at it for a while first.

The Lay of the Land

2010-07-29T12:38:00.011-04:00

View of Naarden by Jacob Van Ruisdael (Image source Wikimedia commons)

Although I have been focused on making collages just lately, I am not immune to the lure of the landscape. Landscape painting has always been my first love, and every now and then I see a place, frame it in my mind, and think to myself, "Wow, that would make a nice painting!", and hope that I'll get around to actually painting it. This time I decided to make the effort to do just that.

Every morning and every evening when I am either taking out or bringing home our sheep, I walk up the rise behind our farm to our back pasture. There is a view of the village of St. Chrysostome from the top of the hill which I find especially appealing. It puts me in mind of some of the landscape paintings of the seventeenth century Dutch masters. The image is dominated by the sky as the horizon line is set low and the spires of the village church are seen in the distance. The overall effect is one of great space and is a reminder that humanity's place in the world is really rather small. Well, at least that's how I see it.

The spires of St. Jean-Chrysostome from my back pasture (photo © the artist)

It felt strange to sit down in front of the easel again. I haven't touched my oil paints for many months. Nevertheless, I am finding the process familiar but also invigoratingly new. Here is the tonal drawing on canvas for my new landscape:

I don't always go to such lengths to establish the general areas of a painting but, as I haven't painted in so long, I dread screwing things up. I decided to be extra careful rather than risk wasting a perfectly good (and expensive) linen canvas.

So much of the painting is taken up by the sky that the sky really requires a great deal of attention. People often look at the sky and see blue, white and a little grey. Careful observation will show that the sky is so much more than that. The photo below shows my efforts in colour mixing for the clouds and sky. Note the ochres, browns and pinks on the paper towel.
This is where I finished today. The painting is blocked in from the darkest areas to midtones and the general colour scheme is established. You can't see the church towers because I haven't put them in yet- there is so much to do before I get down to that level detail. I'll be back at it again tomorrow!

How to Pick Up Chicks

2010-07-20T12:54:00.008-04:00

If you have been lured to this blog by what you perceive to be a promise of dating advice, you are bound to be disappointed. Sorry, but these chicks are of the small, peeping, fluffy variety, not the thong wearing bar hags you may have been expecting. So if this is the case, by all means, go elsewhere. Please!

Chicken Tuesday

Last Tuesday we got our thirty broiler chicks and twelve Guinea keets from the Co op. The decision was made in the spring to raise these meat birds organically and on pasture as much as possible. Pasture is no problem; we have that in abundance. Organic grain? That was a whole different bag of mash. Although we have some local organic grain producers in the area and one organic mill, I could not find anyone who could supply us with smaller quantities of bagged feed. It was half a ton or nothing. In the end we had to order the grain from a mill in Berwick, Ontario. Not that I have anything against the town of Berwick, but it would be nice to be able to get locally sourced feed and not have the added carbon footprint of all those extra kilometres. A girl can dream...

Chicks and keets Photo © the artist

In spite of a few mishaps and a couple of untimely deaths, the birds now appear to be thriving. Originally the keets and the chicks were supposed to be separated by a fence. As you can see by the above photo, the chicks and keets had other ideas. We gave up on the fence and are letting them eat out of the same feeder. And boy do they like to eat!

So, how do you pick up chicks? "Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?" isn't likely to work on them. I suggest you scoop them up gently using both hands....

What's on the Easel

I wonder if being obsessed with sheep is a classifiable psychiatric disorder? If so, I may very well have it. To be fair, I have recently completed some landscape collages, but I just can't seem to shake this fascination with sheep. This morning I finished my newest painted paper collage. The subject is yet again my friend Anna-Maria's beautiful purebred Border Leicester ram, Julius Caesar.

Above is the preparatory drawing to work out the basic composition. Below is my work table with the work in progress.

At least it looks like I'm working hard. Photo ©the artist

And the finished collage: All hail Caesar!

Summertime, and the Living Isn't Easy

2010-07-02T14:55:00.011-04:00

We don't grow cotton here in St. Crazy but the soybeans in our front field are looking pretty good, and I'm sure if I were to take a stroll down to the river I could probably see some fish jumpin'. The problem is... I just don't have time!
It must be a holdover over from the many years I spent as a student that my brain is still governed by the academic calendar. The New Year begins in September, not January, and summer is a time for those other three R's: Recreation, Relaxation, and Rest. Of course, this totally doesn't jibe with the farming calendar which begins to get busy in the spring with the arrival of lambs and continues to get ever busier as we progress into summer. We've done vaccinations, castrations, deworming, and tail docking. We've brought in new laying hens, but haven't yet (ahem) 'dispatched' some of the old laying hens, and soon we'll be getting our broiler chicks and Guineas. We've re-fenced the chicken run, turned and planted the garden, stacked next winter's fire wood, are currently in the process of cleaning and refurbishing the barn, and soon we will have to put in hay and straw. All the while, of course, we do the regular feeding, tending, cleaning and WEEDING. O Lord, let us not forget the weeding.

Our more or less weed-free veg garden

I'm not really complaining. Our lifestyle is a matter of choice, and there really is something very satisfying about putting in a good solid day's work. And speaking of work...

What's on the Easel

In spite of all the other labour, yes, I continue to work in the studio most days, and there actually is something on the easel! I have, I'm proud to say, just finished my first collage landscape.
This drawing for Port Daniel Lighthouse I have already posted back when the collage was in its planning phase. Here is the finished work:

I'll get my rest and recreation in November.

Up and Dyed

2010-06-09T08:35:00.011-04:00

Last Monday at Pinehill Farm, my friend Anna-Maria was host to a group of school children from the urban elementary school where she is also a teacher. The purpose of the visit was to give the children, many of whom had never spent any time in the country before, the opportunity to visit a farm, meet the animals, and experience nature. The activities included nature walks, hand carding and spinning wool, and tie dyeing their own t shirts with a natural, plant based dye. I was in charge of the tie-dye workshops and showed the kids how to make basic tie-dyed designs and how to do the steps involved in the dyeing process- except for the actual dyeing part. I did that. For obvious reasons, we thought it best to keep the children away from the five gallon bucket of dye.

Indigofera tinctoria

The natural dye that I used was indigo. Indigo is an interesting plant, pretty in its own right, with a long history of use as a dye plant all over the world. The dye is made from the leaves, and in its natural state, is insoluble in water. The dye must be 'reduced', a process whereby the oxygen is removed, and it can then be mixed with water. Jacquard makes a ready to use reduced indigo dye, which is what I used. The actual dye in the bucket was a nasty-looking green, and the tied up shirts came out of the liquid first a bright yellow-green, but then turned a deep blue as they were exposed to the air. This was fun for the kids to watch - like magic! After the dye had oxidized and the children rinsed and untied their shirts, they saw what they had created. This was my first experience working with indigo. I wasn't sure what to expect, but results were quite beautiful.

These two shirts are ones that I made with the left over dye. And there was quite a lot of extra dye. I hated to waste it, so we now have a lot of blue work shirts and linens.

Back in the Saddle

2010-06-02T07:24:00.009-04:00

Along with all the gardening and animal husbandry (wifery?) that goes on around here, I have managed to make time to produce some new collages. I made my first attempt at an equine themed painted paper collage with the intention of submitting it to the jurying process for an equine art exhibition in the U.S. coming up this fall. It took a lot longer to make the collage than I thought it would, but I was still able to squeak in under the wire and get my entry in on time. Now I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Here is the work in question. I call it "Up and Over".

This is a detail shot of the horse's head. Yes, those are little pieces of painted paper. You can see why it took so long, can't you?

Up and Over detail

And while we are on the topic of equine art, I found this print in a flea market near where I live. I was admiring it and, much to my surprise, my husband up and bought it for me. It is likely that the frame is worth more than the print itself, but still I thought it was beautiful. It's probably a copy of a Mughal or Persian miniature.

Ian Brown: Rent-A-Ram

2010-05-07T13:06:00.009-04:00

We are having a fitful start to spring out here in Southwestern Quebec. One day it's blisteringly hot, the next day it's snowing. My rhubarb and garlic are both up and doing well, but with this unpredictable weather, I don't dare plant anything in the garden because one day to the next it's hard to know what to expect. I guess that's just how it is when relying on Mother Nature; you have to learn to expect surprises.

Last Fall I borrowed a young ram from a friend. Ian Brown (not to be confused with the writer of the same name) is a Dorset/Jacob cross, and I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such a cute little fellow, I was curious to see what the resulting offspring would look like if I bred my ewes to him.

Ian Brown

I thought he might be a little small for the task, and he was certainly inexperienced, but then I figured that Nature invariably finds a way, so after a few days in de-worming quarantine, I put him in with my ewes. He was very interested in the girls. Unfortunately, the feeling wasn't mutual. Their reaction to Ian fell somewhere between horror and disgust. In his deep, baritone voice (think ovine Barry White), Ian would call to the girls and approach them with what I imagine must have been something like, "Heyyy Baaaaaaby!". And the girls, well, they ran as fast as they could to whatever place he wasn't. When he saw the ewes running, of course Ian would run too, no doubt thinking that if they were running, there must be some reason to run. Poor Ian, he never caught on that HE was the reason. This went on for several days. Ian would approach the ewes, the ewes would run; Ian would run in pursuit of the ewes, the ewes would run faster; Ian would try to catch up, the ewes kept running, and so on. For about a week we must have had the most fit and thoroughly exercised sheep in the county. It also seemed highly unlikely that any of them were going to get pregnant that way.

Finally I decided to take matters into my own hands. I put Ian and one of the girls, Fionna, who was in heat, into a pen together. A couple of flakes of hay, a little grain, a water bucket, some soft lighting: the stage was set for sheep romance. Ian was certainly happy with this new arrangement. Fionna couldn't run away, nor did she seem inclined to- she was too busy eating. Ian tried to approach the matter from several different angles, but Fionna continually evaded him, chewing all the while. Once or twice, I saw her shoot him a look that as much as said, "Do you mind? I'm eating! Quit bothering me, you jerk!". I started to think that my plan was a lost cause.

I crossed my fingers and left them together for a day or two, and then returned them both to the fold. The others ceased running from Ian Brown and things eventually settled down. The girls accepted Ian's presence, but there didn't seem to be a lot "going on", if you catch my drift. I continued to hope. About two and a half weeks later, what hope I had was dashed when I noticed Fionna had come into heat again. I had to conclude that Ian was just the wrong ram for the job. So I sent the poor boy packing and brought in a bigger, older Border Leicester ram (Julius) to finish the job before my girls went out of season.

I began to suspect something was up a few weeks ago when I noticed a couple of the girls looking very pregnant- too pregnant for Julius to be the father. It seems Nature had some surprises in store for us after all, and I don't just mean the weather. Sure enough, last week the lambs started arriving.

Finneas Brown and Chocolate Legs

As yet unnamed ram lamb.

Congratulations, Ian brown. Well done and good on ye lad!

What's on the Easel?

I'm still in the planning stage for several collages. In the next few days I'm going to have to make some decisions about colours and papers. For the time being, I'm still drawing. Here is the line drawing plan of my first big landscape collage. The subject is the Port Daniel lighthouse in Gaspé, Quebec.

Something to Crow About?

2010-04-29T14:14:00.032-04:00

If you found yourself passing by our yard on a summer evening sometime in the mid-1970's and heard a cry of "WILLIAM!", followed by a frantic scattering of children, you might think you were witnessing a game, perhaps some local variant of tag or British Bulldog. But in that notion you would be mistaken. "WILLIAM!" certainly wasn't a game; he was a rooster.

For reasons I can no longer remember, in my childhood I developed the strange hobby of breeding Bantam chickens. Certainly they were pretty birds, coming as they did in a wild variety of colours and with all manner of fancy plumage. I had Cochins and Silkies, a black Polish hen, a beautiful pair of Mille Fleurs, and.... William. I don't remember what breed he was, but he was tiny and multicoloured: gold on the neck, dark on the breast, with rusty wings and back, and he had a long opulent tail of the most exquisite dark iridescent green. He truly was a handsome little fellow. Yet only a fool would have been deceived by his lovely appearance and diminutive size. Simply put, William was a nasty piece of work.

An interrupter of games and a spoiler of fun, determined to eradicate all forms of childhood entertainment, William was a ferocious flurry of hackles, talons and spurs. Fast and devious, he would surprise us coming around corners or spot us from across the yard and then run at us full tilt. Nowhere was safe. He chased us. He jumped at the backs of our legs. And worst of all, if he could manage it, he flew right up at our faces.

Not only was he a misery to me and my family, but woe betide any visiting cousin or neighbour. The last straw came one day when I was playing outside in the yard with my best friend- a girl with waist long hair. William spotted us enjoying ourselves from some distance away. He ran at my friend , launching himself at her head and somehow in his fury, he got himself tangled in her hair. She was screaming and crying; he was flapping and fluttering. To remedy the situation I did the only thing I could think of: I grabbed a stick and swung.

Luckily, I missed my friend's head. Unluckily for William, I did not miss his. The rooster dropped to the ground like a stone and lay there too stunned to move. I thought I had killed him. After what was probably only a few seconds (it seemed much longer), he got back on his feet. Humiliated and chastened, he made a staggering exit from the scene. And his pride wasn't the only thing that he left without: he also left without his tail. Every single one of his beautiful tail feathers had fallen out and lay in a small heap on our lawn. William was never quite the same after that. Perhaps his change in personality was due to that blow to the head, or perhaps he was simply embarrassed. Either way his reign of terror ended. His tail never grew back either.

What's on the Easel

I have a series of commissions looming- all collages. One will be my first ever large-scale landscape. I am both excited and a bit apprehensive about that. Soon I will also start work on a couple of dog portraits. Those are always fun. I'll post photos of the work in progress as I go. Strangely, the collage commission which has piqued my interest the most is an order to produce a series of roosters. I've gotten as far as making some preliminary drawings, shown here above and below.

Lighting the Way for Others

2010-04-13T11:53:00.010-04:00

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. ~William Arthur Ward

Painted paper collage art project for children- Alyson Champ

I've had a regular teaching gig for about seven years now. Although I have been teaching music and art privately for decades, it wasn't until 2003 that I first set foot inside a real classroom. There was nothing quite like standing in front of a class of twenty or thirty energetic children to make it painfully obvious that I really didn't know anything. OK, maybe that's not entirely fair. I do actually know quite a lot about making art. But knowing, and being able to impart this knowledge effectively to others, especially children, are not at all the same thing. Teaching is in itself an art. And just as a great work of creative genius is something marvelous to behold and is not easily forgotten, so it is with great teachers. A great teacher teaches you in way that makes you want to learn. He or she inspires you to go beyond the set lesson, to strive and to experiment. No, I'm not claiming to be one of these rare creatures. Most of the time, if the kids enjoy the project, have learned something, don't have glitter glue in their hair or paint on their good clothes, and the classroom isn't on fire, I call it a good day. Great teachers are memorable. I have had a few truly wonderful teachers in my life, and one of them was my high school art teacher, Mr. Tilley.

Mr, Tilley was an Englishman, transplanted to Quebec, who somehow found himself responsible for the art program at Chateauguay Valley Regional. How he came to be there I never knew, but during the five bleak years I spent as a high school student, I was awfully glad that he was. The art room was a haven to the school's social misfits and creative weirdos, of whom I was obviously one. My friends and I lived in that room, spending every free moment there - and Mr. Tilley let us. He certainly wasn't a strict teacher. He explained and assigned projects and then pretty much left us to ourselves. We did things in whatever order we wished and as long as we did our work and made a reasonable effort, he was happy. Help was always available if we needed it, but mostly we were responsible for ourselves and left to learn at our own pace.

And boy did we ever learn. We explored everything from three point linear perspective, to traditional lettering, basic elements of graphic design to Carolingian calligraphy. We hand lettered diplomas and made posters for local events. We painted in the style of the impressionists, the cubists, the fauves, and the pointillists. We studied colour theory and art history from cave art to modern art. We learned a great deal and we learned it painlessly, or so it seemed to me, because it was fun. Now, when I look back over the past (gasp) thirty years, I am shocked not only by how much he taught me, but by how much I have retained and continue to use.

I have read that the skill of a great teacher is like a candle: it burns brightly and in so doing consumes itself to light the way for others. Mr. Tilley has been dead for many years, but his light lives on in all of us whom he taught. One teacher in a rural high school helped to create the careers of many professional visual artists, graphic designers, illustrators and photographers. He also helped to foster an appreciation for art in countless others. Mr. Tilley probably could not have guessed how far reaching his influence would be. That's the thing about being a teacher. You never know whose life you are changing.

Mr. Derrick Tilley, CVR yearbook 1982

Going Ovine

2010-03-30T10:39:00.013-04:00

I'm not exactly sure what it is about sheep that is so appealing, but I'm happy to know that I'm not the only artist to find myself visually hooked on them. I have recently come across a collection of drawings by British sculptor Henry Moore depicting the sheep he saw outside the window of his studio. He too was fascinated by their beauty, their solid shape, and their behavior. Several of the drawings show the interactions of lambs and ewes, which bring to mind some of Moore's maternally themed sculptures.

While we are on the subject of sheep and maternity, and with lambing nearly upon us, I can't help but think back to last year's experience with lambing. It was the first time we had bred our ewes, and as much as it was exciting, it was also nerve-racking and exhausting. Lambs, much like human babies, prefer to arrive in the middle of the night or the wee small hours of the morning. I spent a number of long nights out in the barn, waiting and watching and acting as midwife. The birth of our first lamb, however, I did not witness as she came as a total surprise. She was a few days early, and the ewe, a first time mother, didn't really show much sign of going into labour. I got quite a shock when I went out to the barn early one morning to feed the sheep and heard a little voice calling out, "Baaa". I looked around but could see nothing in the pen, just my sheep standing at the feeder waiting to be fed. I went into the pen with an armful of hay and again, "Baaaa". There at my feet, in the bottom of the hay rack, was a beautiful little white lamb, still wet, and shivering with cold. Her mother had given birth to her and then, not knowing what to do, abandoned her. The baby had crawled into the hay to keep warm. Ewe and lamb had to be forcibly reunited and the ewe needed to be restrained in order to allow the lamb to nurse. It took the better part of a day before mother and child actually bonded, but they did, and the ewe proved to be an excellent mother, if initially a reluctant one.

What's on the Easel
My collage exhibition is drawing to a close. The last day is April 4th. I'm delighted that my sheep collages have proved to be popular and I have sold several of them. I guess people just like sheep!

The Day After the Afternoon Before

2010-03-15T09:50:00.020-04:00

My collage exhibition opened at Salle Alfred-Langevin yesterday. In spite of the rather wet and dreary weather, the turn out was good, the crowd was very enthusiastic, and sales were brisk (thank you!). One woman, a fellow artist, liked the collages so much that she went home to get her husband, came back with him and did the tour again!

So, I guess that my fear that people would look at the collages and say, "Well, these are ok, but where are all the horse paintings?" was completely unfounded. If anything, I was pleasantly surprised by just how open minded people were. Yes, I was asked if I had completely given up oil painting- I haven't, I'm just on oil painting hiatus- but by and large the audience was accepting and encouraging. Several pieces sold, including one of the large Iris collages. All in all, it was a very good day.

These are some of my collages on the walls at Salle Alfred-Langvin. I must mention the real stars of the photo which are the spectacular stained glass windows designed by Detlef Gotzens, a stained glass artist whose atelier is across the river from mine.
Here is a slightly different view. You can see what a large and beautiful space the hall is. Painter Suzanne Olivier, who is a member of the hall's management committee, did a terrific job of hanging the show. It's a good thing that that particular task wasn't left up to me! Merci Suzanne!
And last but by no means least, here is a photo of Luc and me. Luc De Tremmerie is the coordinator of cultural events at Salle Alfred-Langevin, which means that he's the one who really does all the work. Luc, je ne sais pas comment te remercier...

Bearded Beauties

2010-03-11T20:50:00.011-05:00

I like Irises and grow several varieties in my flower beds. They are a graceful, stately flower with elegant and sculptural blooms which make them interesting subjects for my collages. Last summer I made a point of photographing all of my irises when they were at the height of their beauty and these images have kept me going (art-wise) over the winter. So far, I have produced seven iris collages of varying sizes, all of which will be on display at my solo exhibition.

What's on the Easel
This second purple iris collage is close in colour range to my first Purple Iris collage, but the scale is just a little smaller. It's a 20X16, instead of a 20X24.

The next two collages are actually mirror images of the same photo, but were conceived with complementary colour palettes. Small Mauve Iris relies on the purples, blues and blue-greens.

High Key Iris is based on yellows, oranges, and yellow-greens. It's interesting how a shift in colour can totally alter the appearance of what is essentially the same image, isn't it?

My collage exhibition, Paper, Paint, Scissors, and Glue, is up on the walls at Salle Alfred-Langevin, 10 rue King, Huntingdon, and the labels are going on as I type. The door opens at 1:00 pm on Sunday, March 14th, and the vernissage starts at 2:00 pm. Bring the family!

Cut and Dried

2010-03-04T14:58:00.008-05:00

My solo exhibition at Salle Alfred-Langevin opens in ten, yes count 'em, ten days. All the collages are finished, varnished and framed. Somehow I am ahead of schedule! Can I possibly be this organized, or have I forgotten something? I'm sure I'll find out soon enough. While I'm racking my brain, trying to remember whatever it is that I've forgotten, here is a preview of a few small pieces which will be included in the show.

Sometimes I like to work small; it forces me to simplify my ideas. I can't get too caught up in the details on a panel that is four inches wide and six inches long- the small scale just forbids it. Bold colour and strong design are what works best in the small collages. These two goldfish collages are companion pieces.

My tree frog obsession shows no signs of abating:

And last, but not least, something a little different:

Sheep Go to Heaven

2010-02-19T19:52:00.012-05:00

Pinceau, aka The Goat

I never fully understood the connection between goats and the devil until I owned a goat, and then it all became clear. It's not their horns or their weird eyes that make them seem evil. It's their personalities.
Sheep will test your fences, get into your garden, run when you don't want them to, or refuse to move when you most need them to, but what sheep seem to lack, and what goats possess in abundance, isn't so much intelligence as it is a creative imagination: the capacity to posit the big "what if ", as in

"What if I turn the key in the tractor ignition?"

"Suppose I eat this bucket handle?"

"I wonder what would happen if I picked up this handsaw and
ran away with it?"

Sheep just don't think this way.

The Goat never ceased trying to find new ways to amuse himself- amuse himself and torment us. Ever the nimble escape artist, he broke, jumped, or climbed his way out of every stall, pen, or paddock he was put in. From his point of view, a fence wasn't so much an enclosure as it was a suggestion: "You probably should stay in here and eat this grass...but then again, you might prefer to be out there eating those currant bushes. Really, it's entirely up to you."

He ate through electrical wiring in the barn, pulled insulation out of the walls, broke windows, collapsed feeders, and destroyed the slop sink by standing in it. With lips as quick as the Artful Dodger's fingers, The Goat could go through your pockets and grab your wallet, a pen, a utility knife, a syringe full of penicillin, a pair of hoof shears, or just about anything else you'd care to mention, and be off with it in a flash . You wouldn't even know something was missing until you found yourself patting your pockets, saying, "Now where the heck did I put that...."
Too many times my tool belt clad husband would go out to the barn to repair some goat-related damage and come back with half his screw drivers missing. Or his tape-measure. Or his pliers.
And that myth about goats eating anything and everything? Well, that's not a myth. They really will eat anything. I didn't believe it either until I witnessed The Goat cheerfully scarfing down a plastic bag with a side order of latex glove.

In the end it wasn't his appetite for destruction that ended The Goat's tenure here as much as it was simply his appetite. One day The Goat got out into the yard and ate my husband's plantation of cherry trees. And that was that.

Now, The Goat lives at my friend Anna-Maria's place. No, it wasn't an act of revenge for those horrible (but ultimately tasty) Muscovy ducks that she gave me. As crazy as it sounds, she really wanted The Goat. Honest!

Julius Caesar, Border Leicester Ram

What's on the Easel

I have almost finished all the collages for my upcoming exhibition, and yes, many of these new collages feature my sweet, beautiful sheep. I promise to have all the photography done for the next post so that those of you who can't get to the show itself will at least be able to see a virtual version of it. Until then I'm happy to share with you some of the reference photos which serve as the inspiration for my work. And no, there won't be any goat collages!

Fabulous Fionna, Border Leicester ewe

Culture - It's Not Just a City Thing

2010-02-11T20:07:00.014-05:00

We are fortunate out here in the Chateauguay Valley to have a rich cultural life, and no, I don't mean that we get HBO on cable. This is a rural community that takes culture seriously, and not just imported "city" culture, but local culture. Besides our sizable population of cows, we also have a large number of professional, high calibre artists of virtually every type: writers, theatre people, all manner of musicians, and visual artists. And the really nice part is that, as a local artist, you can put on a show, or a concert, or an exhibition, and people will actually come out to see or hear your work and support you. I went to a vernissage last weekend for a local painter and the exhibition space was absolutely packed. I've seen Montreal galleries with smaller crowds at the opening of a show. So, all you city people, don't be fooled by our laid-back rural ways. Interesting, stimulating things do go on beyond your crowded streets and highways. There is definitely some culture out here in the heart of agriculture.

Photo courtesy of MRC du Haut-St-Laurent

One of our little jewels is the exhibition space in the old "Chateau" hotel in the town of Huntingdon. Salle Alfred Langevin (above) is an elegant, open and beautifully lit gallery space which is administered by our MRC -a sort of association of rural municipalities. Every year the cultural committee accepts proposals from artists looking to mount exhibitions. This year I am getting the exhibition space from March 14- April 4 and I will be showing my collages. The MRC prints your posters, invitations (and mails them), supplies the food and drink for the vernissage, and sends out all the press releases to the media. OK, so it's not Berlin or New York, but the space is free and there is no commission on sales. From an artist's point of view, it doesn't get much better than that!

Paint, Paper, Scissors and Glue

2010-02-04T20:40:00.012-05:00

"To have all your work and to have them along the wall, it's like walking in with no clothes on. It's terrible."-Andrew Wyeth

I'm getting pretty excited about my upcoming collage exhibition. Excited and a little nervous. Although I am looking forward to showing my collages for the first time, I'm also concerned about the public response. Most people who know my artwork know me as an oil painter, primarily as a painter of horses. I have been making collages regularly for the past year or so, and generally the response from the people who have seen these new works has been positive. But a solo exhibition of only collages? Will people love it? Hate it? Or simply be indifferent to it? I just don't know. I do know this though, I have greatly enjoyed making the collages. I can only hope that some of my pleasure in making them is transferred to the viewer.

The above image is the last of my large scale floral collages. Yes, I am still very much hooked on the phthalocyanine blue and quinacridone blue/violet. Below is a recently completed collage of the same dimensions and similar palette, but with a slightly different subject. I have been trying to come up with a suitable name for it. For now it is called Tranquil.

The invitations to the vernissage will be in the mail soon and I have just seen the lay out for the poster, which looks very nice. I will post more details about the exhibition closer to its March 14th opening date.

Picture Perfect?

2010-01-28T14:50:00.013-05:00

Photography is a wonderful and useful creative vehicle. As an art form, it can be emotionally expressive, intellectually provocative, brutal in its realism or as freely abstract as any painting. In its illustrative use in journalism, a good photograph brings a deeper understanding to the story being told. On a personal level, cameras have become a necessity. It's hard to imagine a time when all of the important (and many of the mundane) events of our lives were not documented by photography.
I have something of a love-hate relationship with my camera. As an oil painter trained to work exclusively from life, I have a hard time with the use of photos as reference material. No, I don't think it's cheating to work from a photo- far from it. It is often far more difficult to work from a photo than it is to work directly from life. The reason for this mainly has to do with the "flattened" perspective of photos, distortion from the lens, and from a painters point of view, the lack of a full range of values (light and shadow) and colours.
I didn't use reference photos until I began painting horses for a living, and then did so out of necessity. You can set up a still life and paint it at your leisure until it collects dust or rots. You can mark the pose of a model with chalk or masking tape so that the pose can be resumed at the next sitting. As for painting a landscape, true the clouds and light do move, but at least the movement of the light is predictable and if the clouds aren't totally accurate, no one will be the wiser. Horses, indeed all animals, are another matter. I painted one horse portrait from life, early on in my career. Once was enough.
Above is the reference photo for a dog portrait I recently finished. The car, road, disembodied pants, misplaced shadow and slightly washed out colour all have to be dealt with to make a successful painting. Also, going from photo to painting, I have to take extra care to control my edges. By "edges" what I mean is the area of a painting where an object meets another object or where it meets the background. Too much sharp focus and crisp edges will make the dog look superimposed. Not enough crispness and the focal point of the painting won't look distinct enough. It's something of a balance.

I am fortunate to have some friends who are hugely talented photographers. If you want to see some really excellent photos, I encourage you to check out the work of: Phil Norton, Tracy Martin, and Brenda Castonguay .

Tangled Up in Blue

2010-01-15T10:13:00.013-05:00

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way -things I had no words for. Georgia O'Keeffe

I know that music is often spoken of as the language of the emotions, but what of colour? Colour psychology, which is a relatively new discipline with roots in ancient eastern medicine, tells us that colour has a profound effect on mood: the power to calm or to stimulate. Colours in the red/orange family are thought to be active and exciting colours. The blues and greens of the spectrum are soothing and passive. Factual neurological evidence aside, here in the West, we do certainly have strong, long-held associations of colours with particular concepts. For example, the colour red is associated with courage and sacrifice, but also love, passion, and appetite. Red is a favourite colour for restaurant interiors for that very reason. A bright sunny yellow is frequently called the colour of the intellect; green the colour of youth, nature, and life; purple the colour of nobility and wisdom; black the colour of mourning; white symbolizes the pristine and virginal; and when we hear someone singing the blues, we know exactly what that means, don't we?

I'm writing about the impact and meaning of colour because I find myself at something of a turning point in my artwork. Having been an oil painter for more than twenty years, I am increasingly drawn to collage making as my primary means of artistic expression. Obviously this has necessitated some changes in my materials, most notably my switch from oil to acrylic paint.

As a painter, I never learned to love acrylics because they seemed to lack the richness and luminosity of oils. Acrylic colours always looked "plastic" and gaudy to my eye, like a cheap imitation of the real thing. But collage making has caused me to revise that opinion. Oil paint just doesn't work for the type of collages that I want to make. I experimented with watercolour but didn't like that either. Finally, I started fooling around with some tubes of acrylics, and guess what? It was a perfect fit.

Apart from the convenience of water solubility and the fact that you can apply acrylic directly to paper without any primer, I find that the quality of saturated, intense colour, which was the original reason that I hated acrylic paint as a painter, is the virtue I have most come to love in it as a collage artist. And the variety of colours available! It boggles the mind. I have become hooked on phthalocyanine blue and quinacridone violets. What the heck are they? Have a look below.

This is the latest in my Iris collage series. For this one I moved away from strong colour contrasts of the previous flower collages, and have opted for a more analogous blue/violet palette, with the exception of the small punctuations of yellow and orange. I wanted the flower to have the appearance of emerging from its background and to make the picture so lush and rich in colour that viewer could just sink into it. Here's a detail:

So, what's the verdict? Soothing, calming, peaceful? I think so. I hope you are getting a little bit of what I felt as I watched the blue pigment soak into the white paper which was just, "...oh my....".

It's a Groove Thang

2010-01-06T16:00:00.005-05:00

In November of 1818, French artist Théodore Géricault began work on the canvas “The Raft of the Medusa”. It wasn’t a particularly happy time in his life and his reaction to his personal unhappiness was to throw himself into his work. Géricault shaved his head to make him less inclined to go out in public. He lived in his studio with only his assistant, had most of his meals delivered, and worked in almost total silence and with such intensity that the unrelenting progress made on the painting fairly astonished his artist friends. “The Raft of the Medusa”, which is sixteen feet high and twenty-three feet wide, was completed in eight months.

I have often wished I could stay in my studio for months on end and just work. Somebody else could shop for groceries, cook, clean the house, and do the barn chores. Imagine what I could accomplish! All that uninterrupted time, no outside obligations or responsibilities..... Well, that ain’t gonna happen. Shaved head or not, I’d venture a guess that for the foreseeable future I will still be doing the laundry and driving to the Co-op on Saturday mornings to buy animal feed. I don’t know many artists these days who would have the luxury of putting their lives on hold for eight months in order to complete a painting. I certainly couldn't.

Allocation of time and consistency in work habits are probably the toughest things to handle when you are self-employed. It’s pretty much a commonplace observation that modern life is hectic and distractions are everywhere. If you don’t have a definite deadline looming over you or somebody supervising you, it can be even more difficult to stay motivated and “on task”. Unfortunately, creative work pretty much demands that you work every day. Although a lot of people think that making art is about inspiration and being in the “right mood”, creativity actually requires consistency to develop its full potential. It’s like a muscle that needs to be exercised regularly to strengthen it.

In my own case, I deliberately have to make time for art and try to keep the distractions to a minimum. I find I work best in the mornings and like to be in the studio from 8:30 am until noon, Monday to Friday. I don’t always succeed, but this is the goal. To produce good work, I like to know that I have consecutive days in which to work. I hate to start and stop and start again on projects because I completely lose my creative flow. Some years back, largely out of financial desperation, I worked for a year as a substitute teacher. From day to day, week to week, I seldom knew what I would be teaching or where. The phone would ring at 6:00 am and off I would go, hoping at least for a lesson plan. The money was good and I certainly gained some valuable skills in the classroom, but it nearly killed my art career. Not having a consistent work schedule for my own creative work was unbelievably frustrating. An artist needs a groove. And when you have a good groove going, nothing is any better than that.

What’s on the Easel

2010 is shaping up to be a busy year art-wise. I have a solo exhibition of my collages coming up in March and I plan on submitting paintings to several group shows. Now that the holidays are over and I can get back to my regular schedule, I am finishing up some commissioned work left over from last year, most notably the Cocker Spaniel portrait that I mentioned in a previous post. I’ll put that one up when it’s completed. Today when I was tidying up in the studio I found this still life, part of my ongoing “Peonies” series. Or maybe this one falls under the “Things I have Painted on My Kitchen Table “series. Either way, I rather liked it.

Vive le vent d'hiver!

2009-12-30T12:08:00.010-05:00

Alright I confess. I love winter. I suppose this puts me firmly in the minority among my fellow countrymen and women, but there you have it. You might think that in a country where we have winter for at least four and a half months of the year people would get used to the weather and learn to enjoy it. Sadly this is not the case. To confess to loving winter is a bit like saying you love paying taxes: people generally look at you like you're out of your mind. These are things to be endured, not enjoyed and, whenever possible, to be avoided completely. And yet, strangely enough, when you ask Canadians what makes them Canadian as opposed to American (or something else) the answer is almost always: a) our insanely cold, snowy weather, b) a love of hockey, and c) our social programs. There you have it folks: Winter, a winter sport played on ice, and taxes. Welcome to Canada!

I think it's a Norwegian saying that goes: There is no bad weather, only bad clothing. I'm in full agreement. If you're properly dressed, you don't feel the cold. My sheep don't seem to mind the cold one bit and will go out in almost any weather. Nature has kindly equipped them with water resistant wool coats to keep them warm and dry. I have been busy knitting their wool into useful woolen hats, socks and mittens for us to use. Bye-bye cold ears, toes, and fingers!
What's on the Easel

During the holidays I find it almost impossible to get any serious artwork done. Most of my creative energy goes into baking. For the past couple of weeks my mornings, evenings and afternoons have been measured out not in coffee spoons, but in cookie and bread dough. If I'm not producing any artistic masterpieces, at least we are well fed.

Here is a winter landscape from last year. This one is entitled "Bush Road", 24X20 oil on canvas.

If it walks like a duck....

2009-12-04T12:05:00.021-05:00

My original idea for this post was to write about an interesting story I had recently come across in Art News concerning some forged Warhol "Brillo Boxes". The title "If It Walks Like a Duck... " was meant to apply to this topic. But instead of following through with the Warhol idea, I got to thinking about ducks. And not just any ducks mind you, but our ducks, or perhaps to be more precise still, our former ducks.

Last June, my friend Anna-Maria from Pinehill Farm asked me if I would like to keep two female Muscovy ducks, along with their eight ducklings, for the duration of the summer. She would take the mothers back in the fall and I could do as I pleased with the ducklings once they were mature. Because I like a roast duck, I readily agreed. How much trouble could ten ducks be? I had experience raising ducks- Peking ducks which were docile and not terribly smart. These Muscovy ducks were a different breed in every sense: cunning, devious, strong willed and fierce. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.
The ducks arrived on a Sunday and I put them in the barn. By Wednesday, I figured they had been in long enough to adjust to their surroundings, and since the weather was nice, I let them out into the yard to enjoy the sun. They stayed close to home at first, eating grass and bugs, splashing in the tubs of water I had given them. Everything seemed fine. I don't know if ducks can smell water or how exactly they know it's there, but somehow they figured out there was a river nearby and they set off to find it. The problem with this plan, a problem I knew about but they didn't, was the highway that runs through our land, a highway which they would have to cross to get to the water. I spotted the ducks about halfway down our 500 m driveway. I'll spare you the details of their eventual recapture, but I will say this: Running in rubber boots is difficult. Running in rubber boots while carrying an angry duck should be classified an extreme sport.

The next day I let them out again, but this time tried to limit their freedom by putting them in the back pasture; I thought the fence might slow them down a bit. A minefield would have been a better choice. I knew they had reached the highway when I saw several cars and large trucks stopping at the end of our driveway. Having learned my lesson from the previous day, this time I skipped the rubber boots and took the car.
The following day, I let them out for a third time, hoping that the experience of of being chased down, yelled and honked at would deter them from their efforts to reach the river- and it did. They spent the day out back with the sheep. And yet, when I went out in the evening to feed and shut everybody in the for the night, there were no ducks. I knew they hadn't gone to the road, because I had been watching, so I did my chores and waited. No ducks. It started to rain and I continued to wait. Still no ducks. Suddenly it occurred to me that the ducks, unable to reach one body of water, had decided to make do with another. I grabbed a pan of grain to use as a lure and set off for the beaver pond at the back of our farm.

After I had walked through some distance of wet vegetation and brambles, I got to the pond and, of course, there were the ducks. They had taken up residence on a small island in the middle and looked to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. I shook the grain pan to get their attention and in hopes of enticing them threw some grain on the ground and set the pan down. Let me tell you, the look of contempt I received was not something I will soon forget. By this time I guess it would be fair to say that my relationship with the ducks had pretty much deteriorated. If they initially regarded me with suspicion, now I had become the object of profound avian scorn. Grain? They were having none of that. I went back home and got some stale bread and tried again. Bread? You've got to be kidding. As it was getting dark and I feared the ducks would be eaten by coyotes or foxes if left there over night, it seemed there was nothing else to be done but to try to catch them or at least "flush" them out. I went home again, and this time can back with my teenage daughter.

For several hours in driving rain, in the dark, we tried with little success to round up the ducks. My daughter slipped and fell into the pond and I discovered the answer to the ontological question: When is a rubber boot not a rubber boot? Answer: When it has a hole in it.

At one point we had caught both females and got them into the barn, but the ducklings continued to elude us. Feeling very foolish, I called my friend Anna Maria to apologize for having lost her ducklings and she said to just leave them there, but to put the mothers back. Soaking wet, tired, and covered with mud, one last time I made the trek to the beaver pond and left both female ducks there to find their ducklings. I returned home fully expecting that I would never see any of those ducks again.

In the morning, I walked up to the pond and braced myself for the carnage and piles of feathers that I assumed I would find there. Instead, I found two mother ducks and eight ducklings all happily swimming in the muddy water, all eyeing me warily. They remained there for three days and then, for reasons known only to themselves, they returned to our farm and stayed there.

They lived out the rest of the summer pretty well without incident, and while they never came to like or trust me, we entered into a pact of peaceful co-existence. They would not, as a matter of principle, do anything that I wanted them to do, so I asked them to do as little as possible. And while I don't suppose you could say that I ever really got my ducks in a row, I did in the end manage to get them into the freezer.

What's On the Easel

Ducks! What else.

Some of the Nicest People I Know Are Dogs

2009-11-25T10:24:00.007-05:00

I love dogs. I love dogs and I have three of them. And while they sometimes drive me crazy, usually I find them charming and entertaining. Happy, optimistic, and easy going almost to a fault, they truly make the best companions.

Pretty much anything you would like to do is ok with a dog: You're going to the store? Hey, can I ride in the car? You want to get the mail? No problem, I'd love to go for a walk. Roast chicken for supper? Great! I'll just sit here beside you, you know, in case something falls on the floor and that way you won't have to clean it up!

Just as my love of horses and my need to create often converge, so too does my artwork with my fondness for dogs. From time to time I get asked to paint a portrait of a family pet, usually a dog. Painting an animal portrait, just like painting a human portrait, is a tricky business. The most obvious problem is the question of getting a "likeness" - making the animal look the way it actually does. Photos supply most of the information required, but it is nice to actually be able to meet the animal, to see it move and to touch it. Dogs, like people, have character, and catching that individuality, that spark of life, or soul, is the hardest thing in painting any portrait. A painting can be accurate in representation and still fail to capture the "essence" of the subject. The result is a dead looking painting. Unfortunately, I've painted my fair share of those.

Once in a while though, I do get it right. I remember one particular case where I was commissioned to paint the portrait of a dog. The dog had recently died and I was given a stack of family photos to use as reference material. The owners told me a bit about the dog's personality, the things he would do, how he behaved, and even how he had died. They then left me with my task.
I wasn't sure how much success I was going to have: I hadn't even met the dog! Nevertheless, the portrait was painted and when I had finished it, I invited the dog's owners back to studio to see and assess the results- I was expecting to do a lot of touch ups. I had set the painting up so that it was the first thing they would see when the walked in. They were surprised to the point of silence, and then openly wept. Somehow, and I'm not sure how, I had painted their dog.

What's on the easel

One of the projects I'm working on in the studio right now is a commissioned portrait of a cocker spaniel. This dog, thankfully, is very much alive and I was able to take the photos myself, so I had the pleasure of meeting him. He's quite a guy: funny and goofy and full of mischief. The owner came here this morning to decide on the final pose for the painting from the three preparatory drawings which I have just finished.

She has opted for the pose directly below, as she wanted a full body pose, but she loved the head study above so much that, as a kindness, I offered it to her as a gift. Happy owner, happy artist. Now I just have to do the painting!

Dentifricio!

2009-11-17T11:19:00.010-05:00

Yes, I know it means toothpaste.
Inspired by Duane Keiser's A Painting A Day movement, I sometimes like to set myself the task of producing a small oil painting in a limited period of time, usually three hours or less. Still lifes work wonderfully well because I can choose one or two simple objects to paint, and then set about quickly recording their appearance in light, shadow, and hue. It's a fun and challenging process that doesn't allow me to get too hung up on tiny details, forcing me to work as a more "painterly"painter. In short, I guess you could say it helps me keep my work fresh.

Cat with Still Life

But a tube of toothpaste? Well, why not? We happen to have a couple of tubes of Marvis toothpaste in the house at the moment. Marvis is an Italian brand which comes in a pretty, old-fashioned tube. And the tube is SHINY - a definite plus as far as I'm concerned. I saved this empty tube from the garbage and set it up on a sheet of medium gray paper on the counter in my studio. You can see it above, next to my lovely, feline studio assistant, Tabitha.

Work in progress

The colour scheme is simple: essentially just gray and blue. I limited my palette to four colours (ultramarine and manganese blues, naples yellow, raw umber) plus white. I usually try to go without black entirely in my paintings, but this time I relented as it truly seemed to be needed to get the silver of the tube just right.

The finished painting: Dentifricio! Aquatic Mint!

Grunt Work

2009-11-12T10:54:00.012-05:00

It has been something of a slow week for me in terms of actual art production. This does happen from time to time and I try not to let it worry me. As a matter of principle, I try to work no matter what my mood, and approach going into the studio as I would going to any other job: it's just something I do everyday. Fortunately, when I do really hit a dry spell I can usually find some studio work or some other art-related task that needs to be done but which might not get done if I'm busy with an art project. One such necessary job is the preparation of the supports for my paintings and collages. At left are examples of MDF panels which will be used to make oil paintings. These panels required several coats of acrylic gesso, topped with a layer of neutral gray diluted oil paint, which I then leave to "cure" and harden for several days. I don't like to paint directly on gesso as I find it sucks up the oil in the paint, causing an annoying drag under the brush. In addition, I prefer not to paint on a pure white ground because the startling white makes it difficult to accurately gauge the value relationships between colours- my palette is not white, and what looks correct on the palette might look wrong on the panel.

What's on the Easel

I did get a little creative work done this week and have just finished another small collage (shown above) which I will add to my list of small works for small prices. Also, here are a couple of small, recent oil paintings which fall into the same "small and cheap" category.

Sought and Found

2009-11-10T10:15:00.018-05:00

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of taking a little trip across the Ontario border to visit The Arbor Gallery in the town of Vankleek Hill. The occasion was the vernissage for "Seek to Find", the solo art exhibition of my long time friend and fellow artist Erica Taylor.

Erica and I met when I was about eleven and she was twelve, and she demonstrated to me her ability to whinny like a horse. Not only could Erica whinny, but she could whinny so convincingly that horses would answer her. In my horse crazy eleven-year-old's mind, that was a truly awe-inspiring talent. That gift of equine communication, along with our mutual love of art, cross-country skiing and all things horses, formed the foundation of a friendship which has, to date, endured for thirty years.

Erica's work could not be more different from my own, which no doubt is the reason I find it so delightful and interesting. She is an artist who works in a variety of media, from fairly traditional oil painting and printmaking all the way to wild and whimsical found object sculpture.

I have often wished I had the courage to just let my imagination run wild the way that Erica does. She can look at a box of metal odds and ends, a pile of old barn wood, pieces of an old pipe organ and see the artistic possibilities.Out of that process of creative imagining, Erica makes works of art which are beautiful, sometimes funny and often quite provocative.

Whether it is seen in representations of the archetypal feminine, childbirth, or the exploration of the common girlhood fantasy of escaping on the back of a horse, the female experience is a thread that runs through all of Erica's work. Attempt to Quantify (seen above) grew from experiments Erica made striking a wooden plank with antique metal number stamps. She describes the work as the linear, scientific masculine attempting to define the vague and mysterious feminine. Indeed, to me, it looks a lot like sperm surrounding an ovum. It may have begun as unconscious experimentation, but Attempt to Quantify developed into a thought provoking piece of art.

Baa baa white sheep, have you any.......ear tags?

2009-11-02T12:59:00.010-05:00

I was born in the country but didn’t grow up on a farm. Being surrounded by farms, dairy farms for the most part, meant that the general routines of farming were familiar to me. As a kid, I mucked out stalls, stacked hay, played with piglets and witnessed the birth of calves.

Since my husband and I have had our own farm, I have come to realize that my knowledge of farming was somewhat lacking in specifics. We are currently in our second year of raising sheep and have accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge about things like animal nutrition, parasite control, breeding and birthing, all in a relatively short period of time. I have also had to learn how to give injections, dock tails, do castrations, lance abscesses and dress wounds. I guess none of this stuff is really surprising; these things are pretty much the things one would expect to have to know.

The one area of farming that did come as a total shock to us was the staggering level of bureaucracy that governs absolutely every aspect of farm life. We have officially been farmers for three years and have already accumulated four different numbers which identify us to various levels of government bureaucracy informing them who we are, where we are, what animals we keep and what we do with them. My husband and I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon getting the obligatory ear tags on our lambs. Our “babies” are now in the eighty to ninety pound range which makes them more or less market ready, but before they can be sent to the butcher they are required to have an ear tag in each ear. One plastic yellow tag has a number on it; the other is a round electronic button. The ostensible purpose of these tags is consumer safety: the animal is traceable from the package of lamb chops in the grocery store right back to the farm of origin. The actual purpose of this has, I suspect, more to do with pandering to the interests of influential stakeholders and privileging certain types of farms -those which are large, industrial mono cultures- over others much more diverse in nature and smaller in scale.

It seems to me that the government is determined to badger, annoy, frustrate, harass, and bleed small farms to death. I know of several farmers who have felt forced to switch the focus of their operation, or have given up on farming entirely, out of sheer frustration.
So why farm at all? Why put up with the prying and bullying of Big Brother? We both have other jobs. I’m an artist and my husband is a furniture maker. Quite simply put, we farm because we love it. It is, so the saying goes, not just work, but a way of life; and for the time being, we’re willing to put up with the bureaucratic red tape.

What’s on the Easel
We bought our sheep originally to act as self-propelled lawnmowers, but we have truly come to enjoy them. They are generally very peaceful animals to be around, and I find they have considerable aesthetic appeal. For me, the unexpected side effect to having them has been the way that they have influenced my art. I began making oil paintings of them almost immediately, although lately they appear more and more often in my collages. Here’s a sample.

Ex Arte Equinus

2009-10-30T11:04:00.024-04:00

One of the best things about being an artist, apart from the fabulous wealth, prestige and lack of obligation to get dressed up every day, is the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want. Almost anything can be considered art, it would seem, providing its creator calls it such. The viewer might disagree, but that’s just too bad. It’s the artist’s intent that matters. If Peiro Manzoni's "Merda d'Artista"- which is yes, the artist’s own canned excrement- is art, I think we can lay the question of just what is or isn’t a work of art safely to rest.

Certain works of art appeal to a broad audience, others only to a select few. Much of what is considered beautiful art by the large majority of people is viewed with disdain and even contempt by art critics. Some of the art beloved by academics and critics is seen as degenerate or disgusting by the general public, but most of it is seen as merely incomprehensible. Occasionally the two points of view do intersect : the supporters of high Art and the consumers of low art agree. The photographs of Ed Burtynsky are a good example. Most people find them fascinating to look at, even beautiful, and the art community generally holds him in high regard as an artist. More often than not however, popular art and artistically significant Art are on very different trajectories.

So, while being an artist gives you “license” to do basically whatever you want, what you actually want to do will define what artistic camp you belong in. To be a capital A Artist, with critical acclaim and influence in the Art World, you probably shouldn’t paint pretty floral still lifes, picturesque landscapes, happy children, clowns, or Elvis. And, whatever you do, stay away from animals as subjects. Painting animals is the kiss of death if one ever hopes to be taken seriously by critics.

Sure, animals do appear in contemporary art in many guises. There is currently a trend towards taxidermy in sculpture and installation. Check out Canadian artistic team Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby as a good example. Damien Hirst famously suspended dead animals in formaldehyde. And Jeff Koons has used animals as inspiration for a number of his “kitsch” sculptures. The common thread in contemporary representations of animals in art seems to be a kind of distancing from the animal subject- a distancing which is either symbolic, ironic, or cynical. To make a work of art in which the animal appears as itself, in its natural context, relegates the artist to the lower ranks of the Art echelon. Just ask Robert Bateman.

I would guess by now you’ve figured out what camp I belong in. For most of my career as an artist, I have loved painting floral still lifes, agreeable landscapes, and, yes, animals. I have painted horses most of all, primarily because I love them. I find them beautiful and fascinating in and of themselves.In some ways, being of no particular regard as an artist is liberating. I can truly do whatever I want.

What’s on the Easel

After some time spent making art centred on other subjects, I find myself returning to my love of equine art. This is due mostly to the stubborn insistence by Art Horse Magazine that I enter their Ex Arte Equinus online art show and contest. These are my two entries and a few other pieces, both new and old.

Master of the Hounds ink/charcoal/gouache on paper