Tag: watercolour

Leaf of the Day: Flaming June and some Moorhen Chicks

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The first day of June, “flaming June “and the temperatures are rising. It is also the Roman festival of Juno Moneta, the goddess who is in charge of issuing warnings.
Here in Orlando it is the official start of the hurricane season and the TV is warning us to “be prepared” and Kmart has huge stacks of emergency supplies to stock up on.

It was irresistible to put this beautiful image on today’s blog. It is of course “Flaming June” by Lord Leighton, bastion of Victorian painting and painter of languid classical figures. This beautiful painting has an interesting history too as, rather than residing in some august European museum it now graces the walls of the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.

This article comes from Victorian society of America’s Newsletter 2005

“Flaming June was painted c.1895 and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. It was not sold however, and, as Leighton died the following year, it came to reside with his family. By the 1930s when Victorian art was out of fashion, and Leighton’s work could be had for £200, Flaming June ended up in a hairdresser’s salon in Albemarle Street, Mayfair. There were surely other owners, but eventually the painting was so unappreciated that it was walled-up, hidden behind paneling in a house on Clapham Common, S. London. This wasn’t known until 1962 when, during demolition work, the painting was uncovered. The revelation however, was not to be the painting’s salvation. The demolition contractors were clearly modernists and naturally thought nothing of the artwork, so they sold the piece for the value in its frame. This was not an unreasonable notion as Victorian subjects were not only unfashionable by this time, but distinctly passé. Yet the frame was of Leighton’s distinctive tabernacle style strongly influenced by Renaissance altarpieces and Greek architecture.

A Polish frame-maker in Clapham concurred and priced the painting
at £50 and the frame at £60. At this point the original frame appears to have been lost. As for the painting, £50 proved too expensive for at least one potential buyer, who saw Flaming June in a shop window without its frame with a £50 price tag on it – and didn’t buy it. “I was 15,” he said, “and I didn’t have fifty pounds”. That young man was Andrew Lloyd-Webber, now one of the world’s leading collectors of Victorian art.
The painting finally arrived for sale in London’s West End. The interest in historically correct framing and the centenary exhibition of Lord Leighton’s work at the Royal Academy prompted a reproduction of the original frame to be made by Arnold Wiggins & Sons. Information from the Wiggins Picture Frame Archive and drawings and casts made from Leighton’s original frames made it possible for an accurate reproduction to be made.
The painting fell to the Victorian picture-dealer Jeremy Maas, who
tried to persuade every museum director in England to buy it – without success. Mr. Maas eventually sold it to the Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis A. Ferre, who presided over a most astonishing increase in the picture’s value.
Sotheby’s and Christie’s visited Puerto Rico every year for two decades, lavishing lunches and dinners on Mr. Ferre and trying, and failing, to persuade him to sell.
Of course, by now, in 1996 to be precise, Lord Lloyd-Webber had managed to scrape together his fifty pounds. He offered six million for it. He sent letters of appeal. Nor was his offer the only one. It is wanted by Isabel Goldsmith, John Schaeffer and Jerry Davis, the big hitters in this market; and wanted by every art collector who sees this as the most luscious Victorian painting. Charming, smiling, Don Luis resisted more than 50 offers and kept the picture for 40 years until his death three years ago at the age of 99. He left a large art collection, much of it hanging in the Museo de Arte in Ponce, but his trophy is Flaming June.”

However, despite the hurricane warnings, the weather is set fair, and I went for a quick visit to Leu gardens and it is, just as it was, tranquil and beautiful. Some things have changed in the last 4 weeks ..some plants have completely disappeared and others are in bloom. I am now on a very tight schedule to get the next unit done for the course, so I collected a few leaves for inspiration but that was as far as I got, well after all it is Sunday…the sky is blue the lake is limpid and hours can drift by watching the lizards and the squirrels and now the mallard with her ducklings who are almost nothing more than stripy balls of fluff with a beak.

They have to be very high on the cute scale, rivalled only by three little black fuzzy moorhen chicks and then, at sunset, Chris and I sat beside the lake to watch the sun roll down and the light the clouds.

These quick sketches are done on wet paper after pencil sketches .. but I couldn’t really see their feet very well but I do know that they are huge. (Long grass or water are often the artist’s friend.)
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Moorhen Chicks

Leaf of the Day: Greater Celandine and a different way of looking.

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It is the last day of May, the blue Florida sky is dotted with clouds, I have been swimming in the pool, the shuttle launches today just over on the coast and I have been thinking about the last three weeks in the the UK and what I have achieved or learnt.

Foremost in my mind is Liz Leech´s course. She opened up a world of close and informed examination of plants and flowers and help in getting to grips with understanding what things are, and why they are the shape and colour they are. Stripping away the layers and looking at the underlying structures did not lessen my appreciation of flowers, quite the contrary, it just increased the fascination. I can now draw with a little more understanding of the architecture and purpose of flowers and plants, not just make a record of their superficial beauty.
Also, just having this knowledge means I can approach the drawing with a greater sensitivity which in turn gives me a greater satisfaction. It is not, of course, an easy route to better draftsmanship but it really helps and, (as I do, and will, keep saying in this blog) it all comes back to the value of to drawing from life. Photographs while being a very useful tool, can just reduce things to distorted 2 dimensional cyphers of the real thing and can be endlessly misleading.

Another way of looking
This way of looking was botanically analytical, but a couple of years ago I experienced a completely different approach to drawing plants. I attended a short course run by Hibernia College in Stroud which is a college running, amongst other things, Art Therapy courses. The weekend class was devoted to the study of just one medicinal plant.
In short, the idea was to see if by studying the form, the habit and the “spirit” of the plant, through drawing, writing and discussion, we could come to some conclusion ( without first knowing its name ) about it’s medicinal properties.
For a practical northern girl this seemed a bit airy fairy to start with but my initial scepticism was won over by some very interesting work that was produced.
Our first encounter with the plant was with closed eyes, just to limit the senses to start with. Then we studied the plant for only a few minutes, before it was taken away and we drew what we could remember. Then with the plant in front of us we made continuous line drawings without taking our eyes from the plant. From there the exercises and discussions branched out, working in monochrome, colour, and words and looking at every characteristic of how and where this little plant grew, roots, stems habit and habitat and perhaps most revealing of all, the startling bright orange sap which bled copiously from it cut stems.
Before we actually got to know what the plant was, we pooled our observations and drew up a profile of the plant. Those more in tune with natural remedies were the keenest observers, noting vigour of habit, sinuous wiry roots, the branching patterns of the stems and the vital searching orange sap as being keys to its use.

The little plant we got to know so well turned out to be the greater celandine Chelidonium majus a plant used historically as a valuable remedy for conditions affecting the liver, gall bladder, and stomach, a variety of skin diseases and a folk remedy for cancer, gout, and jaundice. A stimulant and purgative.
Other participants in the course were mainly teachers herbalists or therapists rather than artists and their work was by far more interesting and experimental than mine. I (ever the commercial artist ) was too bound up in the look of the thing.
I wonder what the drawings would have been like if we had had prior knowledge of the plants medical properties.

I am not sure what conclusion this exercise draws in terms of medical significance. Making associations about the way a plant looked and what it could cure, as laid out in the wonderful “Doctrine of Signatures” theories ( worth another post in itself ) was an extremely unreliable way of dispensing medicine but, for an artist seeking maybe a more sympathetic than scientific approach to analysing plants, this was a fascinating exercise.

The drawings were done on newsprint with charcoal, biro, and powder paints.. the drawings were not important here.. the method was. ___________________________________________

Greater Celandine Sketches

Leaf of the Day: Glass and Stone

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I have spent most of today scanning images and completing the posts from my UK trip. I have been back one day and am still feeling completely disorientated but I am almost up to date now with the blog.
There are just a couple sketches left .. the first one is of the beautiful little panel of stained glass that was set into the window of my room at West Dean. Having so recently seen all the Tiffany glass in the Orlando museum this old glass is is quite different, fine and delicate by comparison. I think the panel has been assembled from fragments of old glass as the pieces don’t seem to fit well within the leading. I always sleep with the curtains open because I love summer mornings and each morning this strange enigmatic figure playing its silent music was the first thing I saw. This mournful angel or saint with its delicate curls and sad mouth is accompanied by symbols of building of some kind and a flaming sun. It is quite beautiful. I wanted to paint it in order just to look at it more closely, more than that would be a waste of time I think. It is impossible to improve on the original.

The other sketch is of a lovely chunk of flint that I found on the path by the woods. Flint makes up much of the fabric of the buildings here. It is irresistibly drawable with its black smooth heart, the chalky white coating and bleached bone sculptural form.

These are two items which I would have happily put in my suitcase… there were many others.

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Glass and Stone

Leaf of the Day: 1 hour Poppy

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The last day at West Dean and I am so sorry to be leaving. It is the most beautiful place and I am thinking of stowing away in an attic room.. I could help clear the tables .. they would never notice.
I spent the morning finishing off the leaf and packing and taking some more photos of the park and the gardens. Yesterday as a break we did a quick and very useful exercise, working out of doors to collect information for a study to be completed indoors. There are times when you cannot pick the plant or flower that you intend to work on, so it is essential to be able to make studies in the field.
We had an hour to make a good tonal sketch with water soluble pencil and then, without using pencil a colour study. The theory is that you should be able to make a good finished painting with this information. ( I w0uld take photos as well! )
The self seeded oriental poppy I chose was quite impossible to colour match in the brilliant sunshine, its vivid orange-red petals so very vibrant. I don’t think I have ever seen a painting that has ever really captured this colour…. to be honest nature’s colours usually have the edge over any painting. The artist has to bring something else to the image.

The course has been excellent and fun, and I hope I will be able to put some of Sandrine’s beautiful and apparently effortless technique into good use.
You can see some of her lovley work on her website here Sandrinemaugy.co.uk and she is a regular contributor to the Artists and Illustrator’s magazine.

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Oriental Poppy Sketches


Leaf of the Day: Calla Lily Leaf

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Today I move on to the calla lily, Zantedeschia black, but just the leaf. Bearing in mind that when I return to Florida I will have only 4 weeks to prepare the next unit of the SBA course, which is 8 leaves in watercolour, I need some practice.
This plant is big and very handsome, and so are its spotty leaves. In considering how to do this I decide that I will have to use some masking fluid for the spots, so drawing, tracing and masking takes most of the morning… (hesitating is also filling up lots of my time at the moment too!)

The full size of the leaf is too big for the sketchbook and is, in its finished state, about 14 inches tall. It is a very beautiful curvy shape and I am creating some nice opportunities for light and shade which I then manage to obliterate with some clumsy colour work.. maybe wet in wet is not for me.. but I persevere and I am not too unhappy with my first botanical leaf.
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Leaf of Calla Lily, Zantedeschia Black

Leaf of the Day: Pansy 2

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I am a bit disheatened by my lack of progress yesterday so I decide to try to learn from my first pansy mistakes and try another one.. this time a little different with a pale edge and a beautiful pink to burnt orange colour.

Laying the washes seems fraught with problems of drying too fast or too slowly, the paint creeping into forbidden areas or just refusing to budge and making horrible hard edges. I do a drawing first and then start painting, sketching a little spray of yellow rattle with beautifully shaped leaves while the layers are drying.
It’s all a matter of practice I guess, and I think I now know what I should be doing .. doing it is another matter.
I also make some colour notes before starting this time.
I am a bit quicker today.. that’s all I can say.
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Pansy 2

Leaf of the Day: Pansies again

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Day Two of the botanical painting course and I only feel able to tackle a pansy. I take a deep blue one with a heart of black velvet.
The drawing I now approach in a Liz Leech fashion looking hard at what is underneath and sacrificing a flower in the process. Sandrine is no doubt hoping I won’t be doing this on the gorgeous chocolate coloured calla lilly she has brought for us to draw.
The watercolour technique that she makes look so easy is very different from my normal style of brushwork onto dry paper. It is watercolour carefully overlaid, one wash at a time into wet paper. She makes it look effortless. It is nothing of the sort.
For a dark colour, really dark, like the inside of my pansy, up to 15 washes need to be laid, carefully darkening the colour each time taking care not to disturb the colour underneath. On this first attempt I keep forgetting to wet the paper, get wobbly edges and not enough colour, but I persevere.
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Pansy 1

Leaf of the Day: Lincolnshire Sketches

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In between gardening and having my second dentist’s visit I have been able to do a few sketches.
These three are of the village, one the huge horse chestnut tree by the village hall, an evening sky against the white may hedges and a clump of hedge with may and cow parsley.
It’s the prettiest time of the year… These are done on a small Kilimanjaro watercolour paper sketch book . Its the first time I have tried it and its a nice landscape 10″x 5″ with 140 lb paper. Very good for small sketches.

Leaf of the Day: Garden Sketches

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My plans for the next few days have been rather severely disrupted as I have had to make an emergency visit to the dentist today. The prospect of a triple root canal filling over two days has rather sapped my enthusiasm for life but the garden is pretty and I am trying to forget the pain and do some sketching.

First the old apple tree.. now, I think, almost completely hollow but still clinging onto life, the old village well, and the 5 sticks near the crab apple tree which I drew yesterday. It’s still practice in mixing green but I must admit that this miserable toothache has made me indifferent to what I am mixing. These are small sketch book pages 5 x 8″ on rather poor quality paper but it’s OK for sketching. I really like the 5 sticks.

Leaf of the Day: Titan Arum

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I am just over half way through my Uk visit and am currently at lovely West Dean College in West Sussex for some botanical art tuition. After two days of extremely enjoyable and intense botany lessons and drawing with Liz Leech I am taking a break to make a back dated post. We do have (albeit intermittent) Internet access here but not much time spare to use it. I have missed the drawing and the writing but will slowly now be able to update.
This post is backdated to the day I did the drawing and is concerning the astonishing Titan Arum which I was so lucky to see on Friday 9th May. I had gone to Kew mainly to see Shirley Sherwood’s collection of botanical paintings in their new dedicated Gallery, and while looking at the all beautiful work, feeling both inspired and dismayed, a Kew lady popped her head round the door to say that if I was interested the Titan Arum had just flowered and was at its peak in the Prince of Wales Glasshouse. (and non smelly at this point). To be honest I was not quite sure exactly what this Arum was, but when I arrived at the glass house there was no doubt I was in the right place.
The Titan Arum is monstrously beautiful. A stunning 9 foot high creamy green spike thrusting up out of a fleshy frilled cup of purple red. It is the biggest flowering structure in the world. The Kew website has a couple of photos, taken the morning I was there and a couple of days previously, and lots more information.

The first European botanist to stumble on this monster in the rainforests of Sumatra was the Italian Odoardo Beccari in 1878. He sent seeds back to Italy and one of the young plants which grew from those seeds was sent on to Kew where the British had their first encounter with the “flower” in 1889.
The flowers of the Titan Arum are actually at the bottom of the spike and it attracts pollinating insects by emitting a nauseating stench which some say smells like rotting fish, or meat. Luckily, when I was there, it had not quite reached the peak of ripeness but there was just a faint uneasy whiff about it. The Indonesians call it the “Corpse Flower”. We don’t like it but the little pollinating carrion flies love it.

Here is a photo of the amazing Titan Arum and for a short time lapse film of the opening from 2003 see the Kew site here

and two beautiful prints from Volume 117 of Curtis’ Botanical Magazine 1891, depicting the first flowering at Kew

…. I did a quick sketch too !

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Titan Arum