Harbinger of Spring (sold)

llll

I am glad that I painted this forsythia when I did. This morning we woke up to find it covered with snow.

Nature can be such a tease

March, oil on wax primed panel, 12x36in, 2012, available

I was dying to pick up a brush this week and forsythia was just what the art-doctor ordered-such a blast to use pure, juicy, high chroma cads.

Ireland residency & published image

aaaa

This is a sheep in the Scottish highlands that followed me around one day. I’ve been feeling rather sheepish myself as I prepare to embark on a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Southern Ireland.


 Now that time is drawing near, between the packing and preparations, I must remind myself to breath deep and relish in the unfolding. I am honoured and humbled to soon be living and working in an environment so rich in history and culture, amongst artists of all disciplines.

Needless to say I am chock full of emotion. Preparing to travel is always stressful but this is the longest I have been away and my first residency, although not my first application. So upon receiving this letter of invitation from the Tyrone Guthrie Centre I scrutinized it just to be sure it was me they wanted, before jumping up and down, gleefully shouting, etc etc.

I have also been fretting over materials-as most travelling artists do, because of possible confiscation re oil colours by customs. As well, there are weight restrictions on luggage and astounding overweight fees are strictly enforced. While at Annaghmakerrig I intend  to work on the land as much as possible so have  been researching new easel set ups (3 options so far). I  will share in an upcoming post once I decide what might work best.

When my friends travel I envy them. It must be so easy to just worry about packing clothes. I suppose I should figure something out along those lines as well..?

 Three Sheep to the Wind, oil on canvas, 16x20in, 2009

On another note, one of my paintings has been featured in a well know Canadian art magazine, called Arabella. The work coincides with a feature about artists who paint snow. Grand!

January, a time to keep silent, oil on canvas, 30x36in, 2008, sold

encaustic carry ons

As often happens after teaching an encaustic workshop, my students so inspired me that I kept working long after they left. A warm sunny day meant wide open windows and voices wafting through were such 'carrying ons' of my feathered friends..how could their shenanigans not affect the outcome?

close up- carry on

Carry On (March), encaustic on box, 5x16x5in, 2012, available

close up-murmur

             March, Murmur, encaustic collage on panels, 10x15in 2012, available

*am thinking worries re flight restrictions on what I carry on the upcoming Ireland trip might have influenced this just a wee bit...

A little Madness in the Spring

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown --
Who ponders this tremendous scene --
This whole Experiment of Green --
As if it were his own! 

Emily Dickinson

Waiting for May, oil on canvas, 11x14in, 2011

How many million Aprils came

before I ever knew

how white a cherry bough could be,

a bed of squills, how blue

And many a dancing April

when life is done with me,

will lift the blue flame of the flower

and the white flame of the tree

Oh burn me with your beauty then,

oh hurt me tree and flower,

lest in the end death try to take

even this glistening hour...

-  Sara Teasdale 

May, soft pastel, 16x20in, 1999

Listen, can you hear it? Spring's sweet cantata.

 The strains of grass pushing through the snow. 

The song of buds swelling on the vine. 

The tender timpani of a baby robin's heart. Spring. 

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

May, mixed media on canvas, 8x10in, 1999

happy spring!

Nesting Rights (new encaustic works)

 

A lot of artists depict birds-lately the trend seems to be birds on branches. I guess I am no exception. Living here on the Niagara Escarpment I am privy to their company every day and to be with them (not on branches) in their natural environment is something to behold.

And this is the best time of year as my far-away friends are arriving from their winter vacation - the air is swelling with little voices.  

 Murmur

encaustic on panel

7x10in, 2012

I've already witnessed some territorial wars involving Robins here on the property- the coveted prize? A grapevine ball on the studio porch. Apparently it provides the ideal digs when it comes to nesting..perhaps it is because they can swing back and forth...I know I'd enjoy that.

June, encaustic collage on box, 11x8inx3in, 2012

Murmuration

encaustic on panel

7x10in, 2012

A Branch from the Lightning Tree

we are story carriers

‘storycarrier’ - someone connected to the wyrd beauty of their own walk in this world.

I have been immersed in Martin Shaw’s ‘A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness. I was inspired to do so after reading a review in Earthlines Magazine. 

Have we fallen out of our own story?  ‘Where does the story land within you? ’asks Shaw. ‘We all need stories. We also need nature to bring out the stories. Nature holds a series of mirrors much the way stories do’  

March

oil on waxed panel, 12x40in, 2012

Earthlines review:

 ‘Martin Shaw gave up a three-album recording deal with Warner Brothers to live in a tent in the Welsh mountains for four years, during which time he learned to live outside in ‘the kingdom of wood lice, badgers, elder, nettles, brambles, roe-deer, and ivy that gave feral lectures endlessly into my fool ear, the shattering cold of the waterfall that was a morning shower, [while] bellowing out ancient stories from the black hills of Wales, the source of the stream.’ If there’s a better qualification for a rites-of-passage wilderness guide, let alone a storyteller and mythologist specialising in initiatiory experiences, I haven’t yet found it. Martin is now based in Devon, and runs the Westcountry School of Myth and Story (http://schoolofmyth.com) in between teaching in the US, UK and Europe and serving as a visiting lecturer in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Leadership Programme at Oxford University. ’
 

A Branch from the Lightning Tree explores the relationship between myth, story and the wild in prose that is beautiful, poetic and vividly alive. It’s a book that is both entertaining and scholarly, and if you like your Barthes, Derrida and Heidegger leavened by Trickster and Baba Yaga, then it’s a must-read. The heart of Shaw’s thesis is that we have forgotten how to be wild: we have exchanged the old longing, the old call to a deeper knowledge of the world for ‘a trance state, engineered by clumsy media spells’. And so the essence of this book is a rediscovery: the psyche’s journey from the civilised world back to the wild. We can, Shaw tells us, regain a Culture of Wildness through rites of passage, through necessary initiations into the wild that is still within us. And we can be guided through this process of initiation by myths and stories. ‘The heart of ecology is mythology,’ Shaw says. ‘With this in mind, it’s possible we could re-vision through story a kind of curious genius that wraps us back into accord with the great tapestry of earth. In short, we could remember what story we are actually in.’

Sharon Blackie

Two Ravens Press

Westcountry School of Myth and Story

More Murmurations

mmmmmm

 

Murmuration

part 1 of triptych, 10x10in

mixed media on aluminum primed panel

Jan Yates, 2012

Murmuration

part 2 of triptych, 10x8in

mixed media on aluminum primed panel  

Jan Yates, 2012

Murmuration

part 3 of triptych, 10x10in

mixed media on aluminum primed panel  

Jan Yates, 2012

Murmuration

10x28in

mixed media on aluminum primed panels 

Jan Yates, 2012

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

• “Starlings are great virtuosi, wonderful mimics as well as splendid singers, and incorporate so many different sounds into their songs that a flock of them is called a murmuration.”
  Simon & Schuster: Birdology
• “A murmuration occurs when many thousands of starlings flock together in preparation to land and settle for the night.”
  Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
• “murmuration' make fantastical shapes as the flock wheel and dive through the air.”
  Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph

Encaustic Workshops coming in March

 

 

The upcoming month will be crazy busy but I did manage  to arrange two encaustic 'mini' workshops and possibly a third full day workshop-still fleshing out dates/time on my calendar for the latter.

I enjoy conducting these shorter workshops and my students, some never having picked up a paintbrush, quickly become excited and inspired-shedding any pre-conceived notions of how intimidating art-making might be. 

 For returning and practising artists that are familiar with the medium, these sessions offer time and materials to explore new and challenging ways of working  and enable them to expand on ideas and approaches. 

Participants will thoroughly immerse  and engage  in a variety of techniques, or if they wish, can focus on one or two. At all levels, there will be  lots of hands-on time to play.

Encaustic Workshop @ the Grimsby Public Art Gallery
Wednesday March 7, 2012 (1 session)
From 5:00pm– 8:00pm
$30 + $20materials
to register
phone:  905 945 3246 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting            905 945 3246      end_of_the_skype_highlighting 
email: gpag@town.grimsby.on.ca

Ancient and intriguing, this method of painting originated in Greece, where it was used for the earliest easel and mural painting. A heady combination of colour, melting wax and heat, encaustic mixes dry and oil pigments in hot beeswax. Artist & educator Jan Yates has been working with this luscious medium for over 15 years and will share techniques including image transfer, photo collage, colour, glazing, layering, drawing, mono type and cold wax techniques. Classes are enjoyable for those with no previous art-making experience as well as returning artists who want to further explore this alluring and tactile medium

 

                                           

Encaustic Workshop @  my studio (Grimsby)

Tuesday, March 13, 6~9pm

$65

to register: jan@janyates.com

studio sale

Even though I have expanded the studio, I am running out of space so am offering a few original works at a reduced price.

winter plein air & random show images

This week I have been working in the studio -still drawing - but I needed to get out and paint from direct observation. For the last month I have worked in either encaustic or dry media and have been craving the sensation of painting with oil- in it's fluidity, immediacy and movement. So I packed up my gear and set off late afternoon when the light was interesting, but didn't venture far from the studio. I wasn't sure how the weather would hold and in feeling so rusty only brought one small canvas. (which is NOT what I tell my students-always have at least two surfaces, no matter what!)

This painting is merely a study-an exercise. It was good to be back out there-felt like home-which I was, I suppose.

February (study), Niagara escarpment, oil on panel, 8x10in, available

Below are some random images from the exhibition 'This land is OUR Land: the Greenbelt Dichotomy

As usual I forgot to take pictures at the opening, but it was packed and a LOT of fun! Thanks to all who came out-your continued support is deeply appreciated.

Planting by the moon, encaustic on panel, 10x10in, 2012

Fallow, encaustic and aluminum on panel, 12x40in, 2012

Greenbelt Dichotomy

Tired Eskar, installation by Jefferson Cambel Cooper, portraits by Michelle Teitsma

greenbelt dichotomy close up 2012

Almanac Moons

May, Supply & Demand

Oil on canvas

30x36in
Collection of J & K Barrett

Statement

‘Niagara’s very limited fruit lands are the best in North America, and they are much threatened by development despite the Greenbelt protections. Fruit farmers are aging and are increasingly under huge financial pressures, and neither their farm expertise nor the land can be replaced elsewhere. And, crucially, if the government is not prepared to save this unique part of the Provincial Greenbelt through a substantive investment in the land and the farmers, through payments for easements, we will be left not too far in the future, with a “token” fruit belt having blossoms but no real farmers on the land. In fact the very success of the Greenbelt will be totally undermined, as after all, if the government cannot save the best lands in Canada what other part of the Greenbelt can they protect for farming and for feeding Ontarians?’

Val O’Donnell, President,

The Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society (PALS)