Piet Mondrian - Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue - 1921

A very charming student from a local college visited me in my studio a few weeks ago, as they had to choose a living artist whose work they liked on whom to write a paper. She had literally twenty questions to ask me. One of the questions, the last one, stopped me in my tracks because of the response it engendered from me.

The most ordinary little question took me stumbling down a new path of understanding about myself, my art, and how it felt to be an artist.

She asked me, “Where do you get your inspiration?”.

I answered immediately with the first words that materialized, and as I said them I knew they were, for me, completely true: “Inspiration is irrelevant”.

She looked somewhat surprised, so I went on to explain my assertion to her. Each painting I create is a distillation of my experiences of perceiving and existing, they are my answer and reaction to simply being. My creative process requires me to cull and sculpt my possible artworks down to the chosen few that I can achieve in a day/week/month/year/lifetime. Being an artist fulfills every aspect of who I am and I am an artist every second.

Matisse, Joy of Life, 1905-6

There is a section in the book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark where the author describes Nature as writing questions and answers continually in the skies, and stones, and trees and grasses for those who can decode the language.
My ‘inspirational’ or creative process feels like a dialogue between the collection of experiences that comprise myself as well as my immutable core, and the lines, form, colors and light in the natural world.

She speaks, and I answer. I question, she replies.

I have no idea what she has told me or what I have replied on any conscious level, but each painting is a record of our conversation.

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>> Artist Deborah T. Colter has written her response to this post. Please visit her site to read it!<<

>>Artist Roslyn Dames has written about inspiration in response to my post. <<

Work in Progress ~ "Al Fresco"

This week, I’ve continued my work on my largest work in my series exploring the motif of the tree, and trees. This latest work has officially been named, an important step for me as expressing in words for me is almost as beautiful as in paints. When one names something, for that moment one captures something fleeting. Those words do not define it, and hovering around the painting are an almost infinite number of other possibilities.

All art is, simply, a series of choices the artist makes. The choices may have gone otherwise, and I sometimes muse that perhaps the ones that were not conjured into life were, in some parallel universe, actually created. Consider the infinite possibilities that raises, as every moment a new artwork springs into life, somewhere and somewhen in a universe.

As an artist, I try to make sense of these choices by carefully sifting through my ideas and emotions, cross-referencing them, trying to catch them by surprise from a new angle, burying them and then digging them up to uncover perhaps the “truth” of what I want to express, and why I think it is worth creating, or saying, and how to express it.

Consider the way the number of potential meanings explode when other observers enter the picture, from a “nothing” that contained all the possibilities, to a selection of definitions in the mind of the viewer. The rush of connections that are provoked by artworks is a profoundly human experience, as far as I know.

What It Is So, in naming my new work Al Fresco, I am on the surface referencing certain things. I am, obviously, referencing fresco art which is the visible cherry on the cake. Obviously, the style is fresco-like, with peeling, faded patches, mottled surface like plaster and so on, and the idea of being outside, as in a picnic al fresco, in the park.

What It is Not In this work, what is not in the words of the name is the exquisite balance of the Japanese adoration of cultivated and uncultivated nature. The refined appreciation of the ability of a colorset to evoke human memory and emotion. The ultimate death of the fresco as it fades, inevitably, over time, and the fact that even this most solid of wall will be gone in the blink of a Universal eye. The repetition of beautiful Spring, each year, and the rebirth that comes with it, the phallic branch. The rhythm and patterns on the surface of the canvas that views like music in the human mind. The first time a child sees and appreciates a Spring day for what it is.
I could go on.

But, when finished, it will be the viewers mind that goes on, that loops in references and ideas. Ultimately, the aim of this work is to summarize all these experiences as one image, for the viewer to uncover and continue creating. By choosing to paint my expression, I leave the physical experience of the object as an image on a canvas as the final definition, not the words of the title.

How much should I express in the title, just how important is it? For me personally, words are important and therefore maybe the titles should be important to me. They are important. Can I, and should I, consider the titles of the works more carefully, with greater craft? What would does a ‘good title’ of an artwork look like?

After all, what’s in a name?

I am hosting an Open Studio Sale, offering works of art from just $100, ready framed! They are the perfect recession-busting way to give the gift of fine art to yourself, or your loved ones.

Please come and visit me on December 11th at 6pm till 9pm, and December 12th at 11am until 4pm. Refreshments will be offered.

I am located just east of the intersection of Northwest Hwy and Lemmon/Marsh, next to Bugatti’s restaurant.

Day One: composition & color balance

I am working on this new still life, showing the bottles and cans on my table. This table is a large glass tabletop on two trellis legs. It is incredibly versatile for me, as I can use it directly as my palette, and it is a huge surface for me to spread out my paints on.

Day Two: shapes emerging....

This canvas will be composed of patterns, grey, blue, gold, black, white, that seen from a distance will form a recognizable image. Inevitably, it expresses my feelings about my subject ~ my warm golden oils that seem to glow with an inner light; the moody, complex overlapping glass; the can of Gamsol that has a skewed perspective, wrapping around the left of the composition; the balancing terracotta pot in which I keep my brushes being the compositional balance.

This canvas is, as all art objects truly are, a self-portrait.

Bottles and Brushes, compositional sketch on canvas, first stage.

A pastel sketch of my brushes in their terracotta pot

Today I began sketching out the composition for a new oil on canvas still life, showing the bottles and brushes on my glass table that I use as my palette. These bottles sit transparently toning the light that slides down their glass sides and passes through muted, overlapping and creating new and subtle greys, greens, blues and browns. They transfix me with their unity and the loss of individual shape as they merge into a single mass, and I hope to capture this still life both in terms of the individual complexity of the items and as a skyline-like whole, a city of bottles and brushes rising and casting half-shadows.

There is more work to do on this composition before I begin to paint it, but the basics are all established.

I also sketched my terracotta plant pot that serves as my brush holder in pastels, with gratuitously brilliant and joyful color. This was a 30-minute sketch that also served as an exploration of the way the individual brushes merge into a ‘crowd’ of lines when so many are together like this.

These paintings are part of my daily painting project. A mixture of landscape (en plein air), still life, abstract and figurative, this page will feature daily paintings that are for sale for just $100 (excl. shipping).

Email me at ali_Jardine@hotmail.com if you would like to purchase one. It’s a great way to own or gift an original work of art for the price (or less) of a print.

Alison Jardine

Little Brown Leaf, oil on masonite, 8″ x 10″

Leaf Love, oil on canvas, 12″ x 14″ /SOLD

Winter Grass II, 14″ x 16″, oil on canvas

Winter Grass, 12″ x 14″, oil on canvas

Yellow Apple, 8″ x 8″, oil on canvas board

Riverbank in Dallas, 8″ x 12″, oil on canvas.

Future Trees in the Fall

My new series of works is laden with emotion for me as an artist. Stepping into consciousness of the flow of time in my own life can be tormenting and exhilarating, a seeming contradiction. One the one hand, there is the recognition of achievements, of survival, of love, the accumulation of knowledge and to some degree wisdom. On the other, the reality that we all must face at one time or another, that of our own mortality, and perhaps worse, the mortality of those around us.

Work in progress ... The Painted Tree

These current works are some of the brightest and most joyfully celebratory works I have ever made. They are the joy I feel just because I am here. In creating these artworks, I saw the world anew, a fresh creation, a wonder. Tones are relative in painting, as Van Gogh wrote about in his letters to Theo while creating the Potato Eaters, with the brightest whites being created only by the darks that surround it. What an accurate metaphor for life. In these paintings, I am standing in the sun that the darkness created.

Sunshine & Honeysuckle

In these artworks, I see the world like a child before the world is defined for her, before words explain and by explaining limit our perception and before the child is laden down with others’ disappointments and griefs. In their color and energy, they are defiant and ever hopeful.

This is a self-portrait, that may or may not be finished. The colors are inspired by Matisse, and this piece is nearly a homage to that great painter of color. I say almost, because it has other themes too. It is framed by music art, and by the art of political posters, in the posture of the figure. The figure is almost confrontational, fierce (not unlike me, sometimes). The beautiful patches of light through the honeysuckle captivated me, and burn off the skin. They show on the outside what is within.

More to do perhaps, but I love it so far.

One thing in particular I appreciate about the Dallas Museum of Art is how often ~ and creatively ~ they change their exhibitions. Today, I decided to spend a few hours there with my notebook, to refuel my creative juices. It is always a particular delight to visit on my own, when I have no need to talk, or move on, or ‘find somewhere to have lunch’.

Today, their main contemporary exhibition was part of the revamp of the Dallas Arts District, an ambitious project that will transform the Arts district by, among other things, constructing a huge, park-strewn walkway over the existing road system, so pedestrians will be able to walk around from gallery to venue.

Kuitica's curtain, as rendered by Foster & partners.

The grand opening of the new Dallas Opera House as part of this has been hailed as a huge success, also, and the DMA exhibition called Performance / Art is comprised of architectural or performance related art objects.

The first exhibit is by Guillermo Kuitca, the artist who designed the much discussed new curtain for the Opera House. Kuitca creates canvasses and drawings with ‘careful orchestration of images’, to capture the experience of theatre and performance. There are no figures, just shapes and lines composed from the furniture, architecture and atmosphere of the theater. He also uses architectural plans or performance brochures, layering them on top of other images and using color and size to enhance them, as in his ‘Ring’ series. Many of his canvases are oils, or graphite and acrylic. These are well-ordered artworks, impressive in size and attention to detail, using the intriguing language of brochures, maps and plans.

David Altmejid's "The Eye" being installed at the DMA

David Altrejid’s “The Eye” is altogether different. Flashy and constructed of mirrors on a wooden sub-structure, this piece, inspired by John Adams’s opera “Dr Atomic” is a scintillating sculpture, a tower of mirrors, composed as an explosion as it’s inspiration would suggest. Using geometric beams, pyramids, triangular shards, staircases and shattered faces, it casts angular shadows and highlights over the room that it fills. It is a beguiling, superficially pretty glittering sculpture that expresses destruction and chaos. It is as exuberant a piece as are the the school children from whom it drew admiring gasps.

Other pieces that I enjoyed included Francis Bagley and Tom Orr’s “So Beautiful and Lost” (mixed media, 2009), which is based on Verdi’s Nabuco that was staged in 2006 by the Dallas opera. It featured different installations, such as broken mirror shards on the floor that reflected light around the room, sinuous black tubes hanging and draped from the ceiling, and vertical thin black rods, in a still, correct line, but when viewed when leaving the room created an optical effect against the thin stripes painted on the wall.

I studied stage design at an art college in the UK as a part of my art courses, and these installations reminded me again how integral light is to theater, and how much expression can be made with it. I particularly love art created by light, just as I loved the lights of the stage as I was growing up.

Video Installations

Two video installations are also featured. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s “Talo/The House” (2002) is a masterfully rendered depiction of a woman’s “gradual psychological deterioration [that] ruptures her boundary between fantasy and reality”.

The room contained three large rectangular screens, one in front, two on each periphery. What particularly worked was the way these were used to show the female protaganist’s environment, and thoughts. We see images of cause and effect, past and present, and the screens are used to show these. For example, we see her leaving the car on one screen, on the other the camera shows us a close-up of the door as she shuts it, and another shows the door to which she is walking. With this device, the artist can show the woman’s divided attention and consciousness, different points of view on the same event.

She can also show it break down. She elucidates the fact that many different points of views can be truth. On one screen, the woman looks through a window and can see her car. But, as her scripted words point out, if she steps to the left there appears to be only trees in the garden. What is the truth? Eventually, the boundary is crossed and unreal events happen: a car zooms around the walls of her room, she flies through the trees until she pulls herself to earth down the outside of her house…

I loved this piece, finding in it much of the philosophy of Hume, and other great thinkers who examined perception and cause and effect, and the subjectivity of perception. The film is beautifully shot, and composed in Finnish, and is a thoughtful, careful work.

I found this exhibition refreshingly different, inspiring and thoughtful. So did the school children, as it turned out.

Saturday was chilly. It really was. I had the pleasure of having been invited to paint to attract attention to the Plano Art Association exhibit that was on display at the Courtyard Theatre in Plano, TX. It was the Fifth Annual Plano International Festival, which is held in Haggard Park, in central Plano. The Courtyard is a fabulous, modern intimate theatre ~ I love the cutout metal walls, the industrial-style handrails, and built-in lighting of this space.

But as I was outside overlooking the Festival, I didn’t get to appreciate much of this. Nevertheless, I love working out of doors, and I am always fascinated by the effect the floodlight-like atmosphere of Texas has on my colors. Saturday, I worked on this 40″ x 40″ as yet unnamed abstraction.

I really love the light in the piece I created while there. It is from a memory I have ~ it is my perception of trees, in that I focus the viewer on particular aspects I wish them to see. But also, it is my experience of trees through time, through memory. I clearly remember the ripple glass we had in our front door as a child in the Seventies. Looking through it even today is like looking through time, a loop straight back to being three, joyously, fiercely happy, and devastatingly painful. The past is a foreign land.