We’ve been having a lot of heat lately. I guess it’s mother nature’s way of telling me that I complained too much when spring didn’t come soon enough. Anyway, the result has been a lot of growth in our new vegetable gardens.
One result is that our butternut squash is attempting to escape. It jumped the wall of the garden and is now running along its edge, using the garden wall to hide its actions. I had to sketch quickly because it is growing fast, but here’s my capture of the action.
It’s said that you can’t step in the same river twice, alluding to its transient nature. I wonder though. Can you see the same river twice? You can if you sketch it first.
I’ve always chosen my sketching locations first by the prime directive, can I sit in the shade, and only secondarily make decisions about the subject. These days, the “COVID days”, a third criterion has injected itself between these two parameters. Can I be isolated from anyone walking nearby. Normally I like people talking to me but not right now. I want to be alone when I sketch so I can drop my mask and draw.
And so it was on this day. If I exited the path through Parc Cartier-Brebeuf I could hide myself behind a tree and draw this little scene, with the Riviere St. Charles meandering slowly by. I made the mistake of trying to draw the end of the big rock to depict the fact that it had been slabbed off at some point, making it look weird. Guess what? It looks weird in the sketch too 🙂
Clairefontane watercolor book, DeAtramentis Document Black, Wing Sung 3008
I’ve got to say that COVID isolation is both positive and negative for me. It’s great that both my wife and daughter are home all the time, a real bonus for a retired old guy like myself. It also gives me some time to get a bunch of house repairs done, a long list of which has accumulated during my two years of bad health. And COVID isolation my wife time to rebuild and work in her garden which was neglected as she ferried me to doctors for those two years.
In spite of my telling her that it’s “not my hobby,” I’ve been spending more time with garden tools than with my fountain pens. So I apologize for the lack of blog posts, but all this stuff is just how we’re coping with the stress of life in 2020. COVID isolation has disrupted my “daily sketch” regime in a major way. Oops.
Here’s a sketch of our garden staging area. By that I mean that we went to a garden center, filled our vehicle with a jungle of plants and many of them are shoved into this area as they wait for garden beds to be created for them. I drew this the day we finished a couple raised bed vegetable gardens and moved a whole bunch of plants from this area to their new home. Hope you like it.
The COVID stuff has caused me to be somewhat apprehensive about spending a long time in one place while sketching and I’ve got to walk a lot each day as I build strength in my bad leg. These two things combine to have me doing very quickly, fairly sloppy scribbles where I capture something in a couple minutes.
As time has gone by, however, I’ve gotten a bit more comfortable being out and about and so the other day I slowed down a bit. I’m still capturing subjects quickly but I’m choosing smaller subjects so I can be a bit more careful with my lines. On this day I drew a couple tree bases. I think I’m going to draw a bunch of tree bases as these were fun.
While I’m posting, here’s another one I did in my backyard. Chantal tells me they are snowballs… in summer (grin).
Weather for many of us is weird this year, but I suspect we need to get used to weird. We’re in the middle of another heat wave, with records set in Montreal and everyone crying that their beaches are not open due to COVID.
Have you ever thought of how different a plein air artist views weather from the rest of the world? I have a love/hate relationship with sun. Love it for shadows. Hate it for how it blinds me when it reflects off my sketchbook. Gardeners, on the other hand, want every photon our stingy sun will give us.
Generally rain limits my sketching opportunities and right now we aren’t getting any (should be thunderstorm time), but farmers are in dire straits for the same reason that I’m happy.
Wind…yuck from my point of view, though a slight breeze on a hot day is welcome. I doubt the the windsurfers being dragged across the Ste Lawrence River by brightly colored kites see it that way.
We’ve been a couple degrees luckier than Montreal and while it’s blistering hot today, we had an absolutely perfect day a couple days ago. Jodie and I headed to the small park that’s just south of our house, her with a book and me with sketching gear. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve sat on my stool and let the world drift away for an hour or so. From a nice, shady spot, I sketched this old brick residence. I think the building complex may be part of the church that is behind it but I’m not sure. What I do know is that I had a perfect day. We even made milk shakes in the afternoon.
Fabriano Artistico (7×8), DeAtramentis Document Black, Platinum Plaisir