Studio Notes no.41

recent sketchbook pages

Hello - yes it is May - month of rosebuds and sudden rain showers?( to make up for a very dry if cold April)

Here is part two of Gouache… This is quite a long piece but I hope you may enjoy this as a further introduction to my use of colour. Please read beyond as I have a special announcement……

GOUACHE

Mixing It - a child’s perspective

When they were very young, my children attended a local playgroup and as a parent I was obliged to be an occasional helper. I would park myself by the back-to-back painting easels and watch how individual children tackled the paint. I helped with aprons and took a step back, not wishing to make a child too self conscious about their painting prowess. Paint colours and brushes belonged to each other like mother and child, and were not to be muddled. A child learned this. A child invariably started with anything and moved on to something, before getting distracted by a commotion on the sand table….

I was fascinated by the tiny children painting because as a tiny child myself I never painted. I did not experience that early first scrubbing and randomness, the constriction of apron and the discipline of brush to paint. My paternal grandmother had attempted to get me to attend a nursery school but I had been so afraid of the place - the other children - I had refused to go back. When she told my father to take me I refused to get out of his car. And that was that. When I did start ‘proper school’ it was a term late and everyone had got way beyond the messy easel stage. 

In my first days of school the class of bottle green clad children were told a story of Jesus and his disciples walking up a hill. We then had to make a drawing or painting of this scene. I made, I seem to remember, a crayon drawing with a vast black hill and could not understand how I was supposed to draw a person. I looked over at other children making their work and felt I was in an alien world of expression. I did not feel any joy in drawing, or understand the purpose of it, only that I had made a hill and hoped I did not have to climb it because that would be rather tricky. I did not like hills, I decided and for a time following this I refused to draw at all.

Yes I was and still am quite stubborn. But I was a child lost in a frightening world of change. The marriage I had been born into had broken down in such a dramatic and hostile way that there was no knowing who, what or where I was. Much of the time I was lost in my own bubble.

Our Grandmother had always tried her best to keep us girls busy. Granny with her short, big-bosomed shadow moving across the kitchen, cigarette on the go, crimson lips and curled dark hair. She had not chosen to have two small girls suddenly always at her kitchen table. My younger sister and I  entertained ourselves with play-doh, broken bead jewellery and magic painting books. The magic painting books required no actual paint, of course, just a little teacup of water and dab-dab, the colours appeared. It was a great idea and a lot less messy than actual paints. 

Why did school not have magic painting books? Because, of course, that was cheating.

As a young child I had all the random experiences of art not art: picture books, television, shop displays. I was often overwhelmed by colour and found brightly coloured things too chaotic and even oppressive in some ways. I could not now articulate why this is. I still find bright colours, a gathering of,  too much for me. It makes me a little giddy, like a kid who has toothache from simply stepping into a sweet shop, I will admire and then need a breather.

*

sketchbook pages from 2017

My family homes had a mix of prints and some ‘real art’. My grandparents had purchased several ‘real paintings’ - large canvases featuring mostly seascapes. My Grandfather quite liked the sea, water and boats. He owned various small boats over the years. There were also a few more land-loving landscapes. I liked the suggested details in these loosely painted works. There were people who could be birds and birds who could be people. There were sort of houses and dark, dark trees or endless sunsets. I liked the dinginess and the calm of these paintings. I could stare at them for hours and see nothing very much, and yet so much, and feel quite content.

Years later, when I was a teenager, my grandparents had moved home. Placed in new surroundings, their paintings looked ‘off’, a bit shabby. It was decided to get the paintings professionally cleaned. So the paintings were sent away. They came back looking remarkably altered. Years of nicotine (my grandparents were both chain smokers) and grime had been removed. It was almost like looking at different paintings. The colours were quite altered. New details were visible. I was not sure about them and from that point onward decided they were not good paintings at all, somehow they had lost their dingy glamour, they had no tarnish to suggest they had been around for centuries. 

It was as a teenager that I became seriously interested in making pictures for myself. I became fascinated with many different ideas of what makes a good picture. I particularly liked art deco design and fashion plates. At the same time, I was fascinated by what modernist artists could ‘get away with’. I had no big attraction to colour. Black was very much my thing.

*

Years on and I mix my gouache paints with always just a speck of black or brown or yellow added. I rarely use a colour neat. I discover ways to mix colours and recollect them like paths through a landscape. There is no safe knowledge, always a little uncertainty as to how a colour will look when dry. I like muddy colours, muted tones, earth and green and sky.

A dark-ish interior with a little bit of red. Perhaps that is a memory of my grandmother’s lipstick in a room full of old-looking paintings?

Perhaps all my still life paintings are a re-entry into a childish past. Perhaps a memory of my sister and I arranging tins and soap bars on the side board to make a play-shop. And the colours of the room: browns, earths, bits of blue and the yellow kitchen and the colour of the radio songs coming from the kitchen: flashes of white, green, black, pink.

Or possibly we move on from our past, to some extent. I am not gripped and held hostage to my sad childhood. I can and have moved on from those colours but I love them too. They have come to mean something beyond grief. They give me a sense of comfort and home.

We are, after all, a sum of so much and so little. It feels like just a few years ago that I was mixing up powdered paint in the art room at school. How I loved that mushy, lumpy stuff as you carefully added just a little more water. Here again, a memory of how brushes needed to stay with their designated colour. The smell of paint triggers a sense of power and anticipation: I have this stuff, whether the world likes the colour or not, whether it is good or bad, or just plain old lumpy paint - I have this and I can make something with it. 

When a small child is encased in a plastic apron they can just about move their arms up enough to reach the easel and then down again to dip a brush into a paint pot. The paint might have been used up by other children, so they must dig deep to get something for their painting. In a similar way now, I often re-wet paint and dig into it with a duffed-up brush. I will work it into a workable mix and then just paint. Anything. Gouache is the ideal paint if you want to give what is left a second life. It can be re-wetted and given new energy. 

Adding fresh paint into old is one of my most favourite methods. This means I can get the slightly muted tones I desire. Everything needs to be just a little sad to feel right.

**

Next in Gouache: mixing green to find a way through

recent sketchbook pages

**

(a recent embroidery portrait - sold - shown as an example of my work - see below)

Thank you for reading this far! I wanted to let you know some important news. I have decided to re-open my waiting list for embroidery artwork. This means that if you are a subscriber to studio notes you can now add your name to a list of people interested in purchasing the stitch work I make in future weeks. You must email me only. (I will not respond to DMs on IG regarding this). Please note: this is not the same as me making a specified commission for anyone. How this works is: when I have made a work to offer my waiting list I will email the person at the top of the list, or the person I feel is most likely to be interested in the piece. I will send photos and then hope to hear from you within 24 hours. If you are interested in purchasing the work then I will send an invoice to you. There is no obligation, of course, to purchase a piece if I contact you and its not what you would like. I will simply move on and email the next person. If you have any further questions about this please do contact me via email (ccullis@gmail.com).

So, if you would like to add your name to my waiting list please send a simple email to me and include just the following basic info:

your name and preferred email - where you are in the world (so that I can work out postage cost)

what size piece you may be interested in purchasing eg. a smaller embroidery portrait or a larger piece.

I cannot of course guarantee that I will be able to offer work to everyone interested. There may be some time to wait. Possibly several months. Thanks so much for your interest.

**

Small notes from this week:

early pink sky full of magpies and crows, something is going on, the noise has woken me. More dark wing than sky. Then suddenly the day becomes blue and pleasant.

/

in a supermarket, my daughter points at a grocery bag decorated with a rabbit on a bicycle. She asks me what I think of it, possibly she thinks I will like it. I tell her it is very wrong. Why? She asks. Because, I tell her, anyone who knows anything knows rabbits only ride penny farthings or tricycles. That bike is just so… modern. Perhaps, my daughter suggests, the design team working on the bag were having a slack day. Young people, she tells me, are just lazy and ill-informed.

/

the tree at the front of our home is alive. Last autumn it looked very dead. My neighbour even very kindly offered to help me chop it down and would take its branches to the recycling centre. But now it is alive, taking over the footpath with its liveliness. And soon it will be covered with pink blossom. I think it is hawthorn and not really a tree just a shrub that has grown into a tree shape.

/

it has felt cold, I have felt cold. I try not to moan on about it. Add another cardigan. A scarf. It has been a chilly old spring but there have been good days.

/

my shoulder is a lot better this week - sleep has been welcome

**

Thanks always for reading here. Thank you for your comments, sharing and for subscribing. It does help me if you let me know if you like a post and I am so grateful for all the kind feedback. These posts are shared for free - if you would like to support my writing this would be gratefully appreciated and is easily done by buying me a coffee - thank you.

Shop News