Happy New Year all!
What a wild and stormy start to 2018! Here’s hoping you’re warm and dry, and haven’t been affected by the wind and rain too badly!
I wonder how many people out there started this year (or any new year!) feeling a little anxious? A whole 365 new days stretching out from here to what feels like eternity, full of expectations, resolutions and challenges- a certain desperation in feeling you HAVE to do something new and exciting this year while still fulfilling all of your previous commitments? I’m sure it’s most of us!
In the past feelings like this have overwhelmed me- there’s so much that I want to do, that I’ll take on too much at once, and feel bad because I didn’t finish everything I wanted to. Now, I’m trying my best every new year to think of something specific to focus on for the coming months in order to better my practice (and myself) to really target my weaknesses!
For example, I’ve never really liked drawing buildings. As a child, animals, humans and landscapes always caught my attention- they seemed to offer so much more in terms of colour, texture and movement to work with. As my love and skill for drawing more organic subjects grew, the frustrations with drawing buildings just multiplied. Perspectives of streets confused me, windows and bricks just always came out looking so … boring. Much like you can often tell an artists’ mood by looking at their artwork, you could tell a lot of my relationship with drawing buildings from my project work – a hope, a desperation to make it look perfect, then a flat, dull finished piece where I’d once again given up.
A couple of years ago, on a resolution-making day, I thought a lot about drawing buildings. I thought about my university course, and my wonderful tutors who had always seemed to know how to help me out of my comfort zone into something I was really passionate about. It’s been at the back of my mind ever since- when I went to Dublin and Edinburgh I took hundreds of pictures to help me study oddly shaped and colourful buildings, and dedicated a section of my external hard drive to artists who had drawn or painted them.
I discovered two key things during this ongoing study.
a) My buildings didn’t have to be architecturally perfect. Not every window, door and brick had to be identical- in fact, the more I embraced the different shapes as opposed to getting bogged down in the detail, the more improvement I noticed.
b) The interest in buildings for me doesn’t necessarily lie in how they look… Their relationship to outside effects- eg. age, weather, daily routines happening around them is where their appeal lies.
In November of last year, my brother and I organised a surprise trip to Cornwall for my Mum’s birthday. Despite my previous studies, I realised during this visit that I’d never completed a project solely based around buildings. So, over the next couple of months, I documented our journeys around Marazion, Penzance and St. Ives through the buildings we came across, as often as I could completing a piece per day as a warm-up. One of my official New Year’s resolutions was to complete this project, and this post is designed to share it with you!
Kernow- A Visual Diary – © 2017/2018 Carina Roberts Illustration
I’m slowly improving in my building painting- in that I’ve learned a huge amount about why I always hated them as subject matter, and how I can apply the skills I’ve enjoyed in illustrating other things to making them interesting to me!
As you can see from some of these pages, I’m also actively doing a lot more work with different types of lighting (which has also scared me in the past) – another of my resolutions this year! There’s a post I would like to write soon about a very showery walk I went on recently up quite a steep hill- the patches of cloud and sunlight dancing across the blustery sky made for some really impressive lighting, which is my next challenge to have a go at painting since finishing this mini-project!
There’s a lot to look forward to this year, and a lot of work to be done… But that’s how I like it!
The AutumnHobbit
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