My evolution of art

I had a lot of fun this week doing something that’s been a long time coming. As the folks who read this blog and my newsletter know, I recently finished painting the interior of my house. But what most people don’t know is that I’ve had my own oil portraits waiting to go on the walls for the last fourteen years.

I guess the reason most people don’t know about my art is because I gave it up in 2005 to focus on the writing (more about that part in another blog).

 Right from when I first started writing fiction for children as a teenager, I started doodling pictures of the characters. And it evolved from there.

Black ink, The Great Adventures of Splat the Wonder Dog

Nature does not hurry and yet everything is accomplished. ~Lao Tzu
 

I started out as a writer determined I’d be one of those special hybrids, the author/illustrator, because I’d admired Tove Janssen’s work so much as a child. The next twenty plus years were spent pouring hours into the text and then just as many hours into the illustrations. Unfortunately, this only served to put more barriers between me and publication as publishers took umbrage at what they saw as my ‘taking work away from in-house illustrators’. I loved to illustrate my own stories though, so I continued putting pictures to the words.

Black ink and pencil, for The Great Adventures of Splat the Wonder Dog
 

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall never be bent out of shape. ~Anonymous

 

One day, I was showing work such as the illustration above to my friend, the great artist and sculptor, Liz Sutherland. “It’s good,” she said, “but you should take my class in oil portraiture. It’d teach you to be bold in painting and in life.”

My first two oil portraits, 2000 and 2001.

 

 

There is no shortcut, snake oil, or passwords to greatness. You just have to put in your time, fill up your sketchbooks, draw from life, say yes to scary assignments. Eventually, it starts making sense. These victories are ridiculously thrilling. ~ Zelda Devon

I committed to making the drive up to Kaukapakapa every Saturday, to take classes with the dynamic Mrs Sutherland. It was very different to any type of art I had ever done before. It was time-consuming and took months to produce one finished piece and yet it was so deeply rewarding. I understood Liz’s passion for oil paint—because of its depth and texture. As Liz said, “Sometimes an oil portrait can look better than a photograph because of the richness.”

My eldest son at 17.

 

Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~ Elbert Hubbard

 

A few years and two more babies later, I had amassed seven A3 size oil portraits. But now there were two small children to raise and I was no longer able to spend leisurely Saturdays sitting in the countryside, painting. Two of the portraits were given away as gifts. One was a commission. The others have waited for me to paint the interior of the house so that I could hang them on the walls.

My middle child, at 10 months.

 

“The most important thing about art is to work.” ~ Steven Pressfield

 

The paintings waited in bubble wrap until last week. The walls of the house had been painted. I’d purchased the ‘damage-free hanging hooks’ and spent half a day measuring the distances. The boys helped me hang the paintings and then they posed beneath their baby portraits. It was a cross-the-finish-line moment. As I said on Facebook, Victories are hard to come by so you've got to celebrate when you get them. Then I saw this comment echoed by my friend, author, Joanna Marple, who said, ‘Celebrate the small victories.’Yes, exactly!

The top right painting is of my youngest son, aged 12 months.

“The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.” ~Geoffrey Chaucer

 

And what about your art, Yvette? you say, did you continue? Still thinking on this topic, partly because it's come up lately and partly because of getting to hang my portraits and look at them again. At any rate, we shall revisit this topic in another blog, never fear.

Do you paint, draw, or craft? What other creative outlets give you joy?

Ttl,

Yvette K. Carol