Colour and emotions

When teaching drawing and painting I am generally quite articulate (or so I hope): I am confident when I explain different  exercises or talk about elements of the painting/drawing process such as mark-making or perceiving with the right side of the brain. It can be more tricky to find adequate verbal descriptions for the non-verbal language that is artmaking, though there exists vocabulary that comes very close, and language stretches and can be wonderfully accommodating. I love reading books on art and the aha moments when a writer manages to convey in words what a certain arrangements of brushstokes or a line evokes.

There naturally has to be a limit to what can be said; visual art speaks for itself, and no amount of verbal description can conjure up what presents itself in lines, shapes, colour and composition.

I encounter that boundary regularly when it comes to colour combinations. This is when words fail me in class - a few weeks ago one of my students had chosen a palette that worked beautifully and that I had a strong emotional response to, but I couldn't say what that elusive quality was.

Of course there are the easier combinations such as 'autumn colours', 'candy colours', 'fresh/springlike', 'berry colours', 'retro', etc. that are familiar and that we immediately recognise. But others, when for example the perfect dusty blue is juxtaposed with a muted pale pink and naples yellow, and the atmosphere this combination creates is sublime, leave me wringing my brain for a verbal match that will do it justice. Colour is endlessly fascinating to me, and even though an intellectual understanding or analysis may well take away from the magic, I want to be able to talk about the ways colours relate to each other and learn more. Our emotional response hinges on our individual make-up, our history and preferences, but we share our humanity, so how we perceive colour is also universal.

Colour combinations are everywhere: In fashion, design, the natural world, the way someone has placed a few books together on a shelf. Created deliberately, intuitively and by accident, unintentionally, just by how and where things are in the world. I tear out corners of magazine pages in which the colours speak to me for whatever reason. While there are certain individual colours I always gravitate towards and I have my favourites (plural; I could not just pick one), the way these work with others and the endless number of combinations possible between all the colours that exist make this an area of interest that will never cease to fascinate, that will never be exhausted.

I read this piece by Andrew Marr on the artist Howard Hodgkin recently (the day after marvelling at my student's colour composition), and it was extremely rewarding, as he talks about the effect colour combinations have on the viewer:

"Layering a vivid orange across an arsenic green, crouched under a line of cobalt, sends messages to the brain; and those messages can be communicated, however inadequately, in language.
[...]
...dark greens, particularly dappled with apple greens, and strong verticals may produce a feeling of security in a hominid species that emerged relatively recently from the protection of forests."

He warns against using these ideas as a "handy visual grammar", but says there must be some truth in these colour-coded evolutionary messages. "Hodgkin uses colour in ways that may be at times highly personal and autobiographical but are more often in a long tradition, fully alive today."

Marr's article also captures something of the essence of Hodgkin's art. The first painting of his I saw (only in reproduction, but still powerful) was of a crowded hall (the audience at a concert or in the theatre - I can't find it online). It was almost abstract, but you could make out heads and the venue and how the figures filled the space, and you felt you were there with them. With just a few brushstrokes he had made the atmosphere of a crowded space palpable.

P.S.: The Howard Hodgkin page on Artsy.net is a brilliant resource.

Scenttrack

Even though I am very much a visual person and have a good memory for faces, colours and scenes - I can recall a huge amount of detail from a room I have only been in for two minutes, though I admit it can be quite selective - scent seems to have a more visceral and immediate attachment to memories, a bit like music. A particular holiday when I was fifteen smells of the probably rather sickly kiwi fruit deodorant I was using then. On a recent road trip I ate a cookie from a petrol station, and the bakewell-like alchemy of the sugar and butter in it transported me to my late grandmother's biscuit tin and afternoon teas in her apartment.

There are scents I use so much they are a constant backdrop and therefore rarely connect to specific events in my mind; they are comforting in their familiarity - geranium, rose, jasmine, chamomile essential oils. And then of course I go through phases with particular teas and cosmetics, because I also like change and variety. Sometimes it follows the seasons, albeit not always consciously - I don't give up my spring and summer scent once autumn arrives; it's not suddenly all pumpkin spiced latte in my world, although I do like to mark the change of seasons in a lot of different ways. I just love when it's time for a new soap or when I pick up a tea I haven't had before or try a new recipe; it helps with getting out of a rut in other areas of my life. It's like that new-stationery feeling at the beginning of the academic year, a new start. And later those scents will be a big part of remembering certain occasions and events or simply that phase of my life.

The scenttrack of summer and late summer was made up of gifts mostly: the Cloon Keen Atelier lindenblossom handwash and hand lotion (and there is still enough left to last through the next six months. Also their Spiced Bark scented candle), the lime oolong tea from Le Palais des Thés and a tea tree and lemon soap from the Burren Perfumery (not pictured in the photo of the stack of soaps my sister had got). The illustrations I am working on are steeped and infused (metaphorically, though it's bound to happen that one day I will spill tea on my work) with those smells; I will remember drinking a lot of kuckicha tea in one of the driest Septembers on record, lying in the garden in my bikini (and just yesterday I had an impromptu picnic outside my house with a friend and her toddler); and of course I will remember all the time spent with the person behind some of these gifts, who has been drinking late-night cups of oolong with me and who is teaching me Irish by writing a new phrase on the blackboard in the kitchen every day (see second photo).

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Interior

Ever since I painted the above for our arts festival poster and programme in February, I have been meaning to paint more interiors. And, completely unrelated, botanical illustrations. After years and years where nine out of ten of my paintings would feature a face or a figure, human or feline (the tenth would most likely be a seascape), I find myself drawn to other subject matter - though I doubt the figures will disappear.

hazy light in my kitchen

I love Hammershoi's muted, restrained interiors (and of course the enigmatic people who inhabit or pass through many of them), but my own style is much looser. This reflects real life: I like the calm a minimalist aesthetic brings, but my house is more homey than bare; I am surrounded by things, though I do my best not to accumulate stuff. Of course it does not have to be a contradiction to like both. When it comes to art I happen to also adore representations of interiors bursting with life, colour and exuberance. Like Hammershoi's paintings, they too provoke a visceral reaction (often the sense of how ephemeral everything is - not as depressing an observation as it sounds -, followed by joy, or vice versa).

So many of the objects around me carry meaning beyond their form, and I like looking at the things that fill my house and enjoy the colour and cosiness of it all and want to paint it. I will always be a bit of a clean freak and would think that living on my own for the last six years surely must have made me more set in my ways. But I find myself getting more relaxed about the level of tidiness - I no longer believe I won't be able to sleep if I leave my notebook open on the kitchen table before going to bed. I can only credit mellowing with age for this change. My hope is that this will enable me to work within a so far elusive creative chaos; my need to have everything odered and tidy before starting work must have cost me months of productivity.

Blue-green-blue-green

Seagulls

Signs of change (at Portumna Castle)

 Illuminated

Drinking tea that tastes of grass* (in a good way) on the grass

Colours are on my mind a lot right now, mainly due to something I am working on.

Ireland has been blessed with an extended summer - two weeks ago the weather forecast had seven sun symbols in a row for the week ahead, and it came true and then continued for another week. We are doing our best to keep up the swimming. Last week at Ladies' Beach there was an older woman in the water who had her long grey hair up in an elegant braided bun. She wore a necklace and earrings with her polka dot swimsuit and a smile on her face and spent a lot of time keeping herself afloat on her back (one of my favourite ways of being in the sea, and, incidentally, a great core exercise). I want to be that lady when I am older. Like in so many seaside towns there is a community of septua-, octo- and even nonagenarians here who go swimming in the sea regularly, some daily, throughout the year. They always have a cheerful welcome for us, and last week someone said "See you tomorrow!", as if it were understood that we'd all be there again the next day.

Parts of my life feel like a neverending holiday (the current combination of the weather, the swimming, half-day trips to places I had never been before, my house, the food, the company), and juxtaposed to that I am overwhelmed by how much I have to do. Taking my cue from our neighbour at home, I am banning the word 'stressed', though I am not sure 'overwhelmed' is a good substitute. Whenever I feel that way, I remind myself how lucky I am to be doing what I am doing.

So many things are in the work-in-progress state at the moment, but I am finally getting the hang of working on various projects and not losing sight of any individual one. It has only taken me about a decade to figure this out... I know it is a recurring theme here, but this time it does feel like a mini breakthrough. A lot of it is thanks to a version of the Pomodoro Technique and breaking down that barrier in my head that always seemed to dictate that if I had to be somewhere later in the day there was no point starting anything, even if I had a window of several hours. Now I think, wow, I have an hour to do some work! And I set my alarm. I shall report back next week.


* Kukicha

A little preview: Jumbo Discovers Giraffeland

I am excited to announce that the second story in the Jumbo trilogy will be out soon!

The Jumbo stories were written by Lionel Gallagher and illustrated by me. The beautiful design and layout are by the very talented artist and graphic designer Conor Gallagher. For this book he chose burnt orange for the giraffes (each group of animals has its own colour). It is a tale of belonging and friendship and adventure. As you can see, Jumbo not only discovers Giraffeland, but also encounters some zebras along the way. I enjoyed drawing the patterns on the giraffes and the zebras' stripes - a bit like working on a mandala, trance-inducing.


Book One - Jumbo Wants to be a Hippo | Book launch for Jumbo Wants to be a Hippo

Expansiveness and reading

"The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route, of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story." 

(Solnit, Rebecca: The Faraway Nearby, GRANTA, London 2013, pp.30f.)

As always when away from my usual surroundings, my mind was spinning with ideas, plans and general thought overload while in Germany, all of them things I couldn't wait to get stuck into, but as always this was followed by fatigue descending upon my return and the seemingly very important prerequisite to get organised before any action can be taken.

But I am also a great believer in quiet times and the need to let ideas percolate. I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking, with minimal note-taking for a change, and I am sure it will all come together at some point and in some shape. That painting for my sister and brother-in-law that was supposed to be a Christmans present...still on my easel. In my defense, I am staying at their house catsitting (hence more cat pictures!) and haven't brought many supplies with me. It's just me, the laptop, the papers, and a few books, and the expansiveness of the landscape here.

I have been following Maria Popova's wonderful brain pickings for a few years now, and I want almost every book she features. Her website is also a treasure trove for illustrators and lovers of children's literature, as both form a substantial part of her curated offerings. Thanks to her I have been introduced to the work of illustrators I hadn't been aware of before, such as Marion Fayolle.

I quit facebook a couple of years ago but rejoined it as I was required to have a personal profile in order to become the administrator of - so far - three pages (I still have a lot of reservations about facebook and  spend a minimal amount of time on it, but it is undeniably a great tool for business). When I wanted to share a brain pickings post (Einstein on fairy tales and education) on one of them, I checked whether the website was on facebook and 'liked' it, and thus have been reading and re-reading a lot of the content. Until I realised I have been consuming all this digested material online, but so far have only read a fraction of the actual books that these posts are about, and then probably in most cases because I already owned them. Whereas with reviews in newspapers I tend to buy or borrow the books that have caught my interest soon after, or at least the titles go straight onto a list in my purse. I reckon it is because online content is at one's disposal forever; newspapers get discarded (though I have a drawer full of cuttings). My online bookmarks are adding up, and I know I can always go back. But the sheer amount of all those links is overwhelming. I have been reading too much online, and it is hurting my head and eyes and making me jittery and shortening my attention span. So it is high time I got some of those books.

My new favourite writer Rebecca Solnit has been on my radar a lot, and the next book of hers I want to read is Wanderlust: A History of Walking. This will also be to mark my intention to form a habit that will be non-negotiable (as that might well be the only way to stick to it): On days I don't go for a run, I will go for a walk. And go to the beach more often, for "reinforcement", as Solnit puts it in The Faraway Nearby: "...just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories, and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore." (ibid., p. 31)

Cats, cake, colour

 

“Just do it. You’re gonna feel so great all afternoon if you get your work done today. You get to not do it, but then you’re gonna feel really sad; you’re gonna really feel regretful, and that begins to speak for a whole life: if you’ve wanted to write, if you’ve wanted to dance, if you’ve wanted to join a chorus, if you want to get back to playing piano, [which] you were very good at until other people found it very inconvenient for you to get so lost in your music. And you say ‘I don’t know how long I’m gonna live, but I will be playing piano the day I die!’ And I do that with my writing. I say, ‘it’s quarter of nine’... I was getting picked up for the airport at 12; I had three hours fifteen minutes, and I’d say I spent two hours and twenty of them writing, and I got something that was a really bad first draft into better shape, better shape, and that’s all I can do on any given day.” ~ Anne Lamott 

“All freedom comes from discipline [...] that's what meditation is about.” ~ Anne Lamott

These quotes are from this video, a conversation with writer Anne Lamott. If anyone reading this who works freelance or wants to make time for their art is in need of motivation, watch this video! 

I am one of Anne Lamott's many many fans, and I listened to this while working on illustrations the other day (the third picture above is a detail from one of them; two more are here on my website) - in a nice display of synchronicity it turned into one of the most productive days I have had recently, and I did feel great all afternoon, and all evening, and the feeling carried on into the following day... Then it stopped - or it would surely have turned into complacency and thus inactivity. Every day is a new day. Start again.

My creativity has also been fuelled by cake and the presence of two cats. And love and nice feedback and jogs with my running buddies (my younger sister and brother-in-law), who are also staying at my mom's house (hence the cats) while I am here. Tomorrow we will be joined by our older sister and her husband, so we will all be under one roof for a few days, a rare occurrence.