Figure Drawing UWW Summer 2018

One of my summer pleasures since about 2012 has been attending the Community Figure Drawing open studio at UW Whitewater on Monday evenings.  There is no instruction, just three hours with an undraped model for participants to draw or paint.  The fee is reasonable, and nobody minds if anyone comes late or leaves early.  I enjoy driving the back roads there and back, and treating myself to frozen custard on the way home. 

It's a joy.

Last summer, because of my cancer diagnosis, surgery, and chemo sessions, I did not attend figure drawing, and I felt the loss.  But this year I am pretty much back to my real life (with asides for CAT scans and check ups), and I have had cataract surgery so that I am no longer fearful about driving at night.  So anyway, I went back  to figure drawing Monday night.

I will admit that I was uncertain about whether I could still draw worth a darn, but just told myself that this activity is not a contest, and that the pleasure was in the process, not the results.  Sometimes I have to take my attitude aside and lecture it about these things. In the end it turned out OK, and I enjoyed getting back into drawing from direct observation, and a little larger than I do in my studio or journals.

These are some of my drawing from Monday evening.  I have a special fondness for the five minute poses, since they force me to really concentrate and go for large shapes instead of details.  The last one, the face, was done in fifteen minutes, because I needed to leave my 8:30 p.m.

What Was Lost, Now Found

Altered photo, Caribbean Sunset

In April my dear husband and I went on a week-long cruise to Grand Cayman, Cozumel and Havana, Cuba.  The Havana part was the main reason for the trip, that plus wanting to get away from the cold and wet spring, and cautiously celebrating a good three-month check up at the oncologist's office.  Havana was a "bucket list" destination, a place that during most of my lifetime I was forbidden to visit.  What is it about forbidden fruit being the sweetest?

The cruise was good.  We flew to Fort Lauderdale, got on our Holland America ship, the Veendam, and sailed off into the impossibly blue Caribbean.  We ate and drank too much, and I enjoyed just sitting on our little balcony watching the flying fish skittering away from the ship.  We toured rum distilleries in Grand Cayman, explored a Mayan ruin in Cozumel (one we had failed to find on our own twenty years ago), and we lunched, listened to music, and smoked Cuban cigars in Havana.  And, as always, I took photos.

When we returned home, I hooked my trusty old Canon Powershot up to the Mac, and POOF!  The photos all disappeared.  Now I realized when we got home that there was a problem with the date and time function on the camera.  A little flat watch type battery had expired, and a Google search helped me figure out how to replace it.  What I didn't realize was that because of that dead battery, all our trip photos had incorrectly been time stamped for 1980.  And that's where I found the photos this week, back in 1980, where I was looking for something else altogether.

So, I am thrilled to discover that the pictures were not lost after all.  So here are just a few to highlight our lovely spring fling.

Upcycle Collage

11x14 inches

collage elements and acrylic paint

I worked on this small piece yesterday and today.  All of the elements, except the paint, were upcycled.  I bought a really awful acrylic painting, just for the canvas, then gessoed over it.  All the papers were found - bits of blueprints, paper bags I painted, notes tucked inside old text books, an old calendar, old diary, stamps, sheet music, and so on.  There are lots of layers here, which was fun, because the piece changed lots from beginning to end.

Considering it was pure experiment, I like it.  In a way, besides getting the chance to use up some of my saved ephemera, I was psyching up for a workshop tomorrow, something called Collage Cocktail, With a Splash of Paint.  I may have signed up just because I liked the title - no alcohol will be involved.

Truth - I wanted to take another workshop, because the last one I took, two years ago, was something of a personal disaster.  It was far away, expensive, from a person whose work I admire.  But she took an immediate dislike to me and had nothing but criticism, and I came away badly shaken, and dispirited.  Recently I decided that that disastrous workshop would not be my last.  I would take a deep breath and try again.  Tomorrow.