All articles filed in Pigments

Have not had the time to post much in the past couple of years. So here goes…

Clay, in one form or another seems to keep popping up in my artworks.

Here I was getting ready for the Turanga library workshops in January. Some of the tools of the trade, including at the top right my first muller in 2007 – a stone with one flat side to it. You can still see the colour of the last pigment that was ground with it – it worked ok, but you can get a finer powder using the glass muller to finish the process. I used a concrete tile as the grinding base. I now use a stone pestle and mortar to initially grind the shattered rock or clay. Making paint is the art process I seem to want to return to. To see what colour will appear during the printmaking process.

Pot and vessel shapes are another obsession. I like the quirkiness of painting images of ceramic pots in my clay-based paints.

But I do also use ‘ordinary paint’ – see what happens when I follow one of Peggy Dean’s Skillshare classes! (‘Discover your creative style’.)

But there’s more… like actually making ceramic objects which I have been doing over the past year with Ruth Stanton McLeod’s guidance. It is a tray, not a pot this time however.

A few objects in front of Janie Porter’s landscape painting: My daughter’s papier maché bird; a horse’s leather shoe (used in Victorian times to protect the grass when grass cutting being done, so I was told); pebbles and a slice of rock; an art nouveau pewter pot; and one of my first ceramic pots. On the left is more Oxford chalk and clay watercolour on board.

Below is a rock (kindly given to me and collected by my dear friend June Inch) from near the top of Mt Oxford – and the paint. The colour comes through as a little too green in the photograph, and I’ve tried to correct it …

Finally, here is a ceramic-watercolour combo: one of my pottery efforts – works great!