Self-Portrait

I found this in a drawer the other day:

It is a very small watercolour done in 2006.  2006 feels like yesterday, not 5 years ago.

Clean Up

This is a new sign I put up in my studio -

I wonder how long it will be before I do it?

Studio Couches

Artists need somewhere to sit down from time to time.  This summer I saw the most wonderful couch in a friend's studio:

This is my couch:

I tried not to notice this in another friend's studio:

Interview with Jonathan Forrest and Robert Christie

At my recent exhibition in Saskatoon, Jonathan asks me questions about the paintings and Bob elaborates on the relationship to my drawings.  You can see us here in this video:  Interview for "Connections and Variations Exhibition".  It was a new camera, so the interview did not really get going before the camera clicked off.

Little Qualicum Falls

In July I went to visit a favourite place on Vancouver Island, Little Qualicum Falls:

When I was a child, my family would often spend an afternoon there, walking the trails, marvelling at the drop and the roar of the water.  Many years later I tried to paint the falls:

Englishman River Falls is nearby.  I also painted them:

It wasn't easy.  The first painting is 40 x 30 inches, and the other about 3 feet by 5 feet.

Some People Sit Down on the Job

It is exhausting selling art!

I Like the Catalogue

Art Placement designed an interesting catalogue for the show.  It illustrates the tie between my sketches and the paintings.    Connections and Variations: New Paintings from Pat Service

Connections and Variations Exhibition

The opening for my exhibition was on Saturday afternoon in Saskatoon.  From the exterior, the gallery is so picturesque that wedding parties come there to take photos - even though the building is at the juncture of two back lanes:

Here is the happy artist, delighted to be the center of attention for a change:

Look at the food they serve!

"Preview" Group Exhibition

Here are some photos from the group show I was included in this past month, at Art Placement Inc., in Saskatoon.

The exhibition, called "Preview", included the artists Dorothy Knowles, Kelly Goertzen, and Jonathan Forrest.  It was a good group to 'hang out' with.

Houseboat Holiday

My family and I went to Koocanusa Lake (Sunshine Houseboats) last week, in southeast B. C.  Nobody seems to have heard of it, which is good because the beaches are deserted.  Here is my watercolour set-up where we stopped one day.

The weather was wonderful and the terrain commanding.  

Strange Mark

The other day after working on a new painting, I realized I had made an unusual mark in an area that was supposed to represent some foliage of a tree.   It was not what I was trying to do, but I found it interesting.  It is a soft, sort of round area, of a delicate blue-green colour.

I don't think I will be able to leave it like it is, but I woke up thinking about it the next morning. 

Getting Paintings Photographed

My friend Stuart McCall (www.northlightimages.com) came by to photograph some of my new paintings the other day.  Here he is, colour correcting on his laptop:

                           
Stuart is a wonderful photographer and is working on several museum shows right now.  I hope he will always have time to help me with getting good images of my canvases, however.
               

An Early Dock Painting

Back in the summer of 2009 when I was at the Emma Lake professional artists' workshop I spent a lot of time down at the beach looking at the lake.  I had simplified the imagery of the lake down to the bare bones in order to concentrate on colour in my paintings; but now I was challenged by the dock and the rowboats that sat there.  This was one of my first attempts to see if I could make that work for me.  

"Dock 2" 34x44" 2009

Does this help to explain?

According to the recent Knowledge Network programme guide, Emily Carr had this to say about her paintings:

"What do I want to express?  The subject means little.  The arrangement, the design, colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance, not one or all of these fills the bill.  There is something additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things."

I feel that some people looking at my paintings will wonder what they are all about.  I find it hard to explain;  do Emily's words help?

My "Card Players"

Speaking of Cezanne's painting of card players,

as I was, it reminded me that years ago I painted my family playing cards.  Here they are:

It is much paler than Cezanne's!  We were up at our cabin on Thormanby Island, where we had lots of time to play cards.  I don't think it accurately reflects the tension in our family at that time.

New York Visit

When I was in Manhattan over the Easter Week-end, I revisited some of my favourite paintings.  The "Cezanne Cardplayers" at the Metropolitan has a wonderful quality of rich colour and mark-making.  The Van Gogh painting of cypress trees caught the eye of my two granddaughters; the dark outline and the clear blues and greens were sparkling.

Making Mistakes

Reading a book called "The Paper Garden" by Molly Peacock.  It is about a woman who, at the age of 72, started to make amazingly-detailed collages of flowers.  They look very realistic, and yet the pictures are made by cutting out pieces of paper and gluing them together.  This is what the author says about perfectionism:  "Great technique means that you have to abandon perfectionism.  Perfectionism either stops you cold or slows you down too much.  Yet, paradoxically, it's proficiency that allows a person to make any art at all; you must have technical skill to accomplish anything, but you also must have passion, which, in an odd way, is technique forgotten."