Laurelines

New house, new studio, new work, and a new poem from a friend

 

As I've written here before, I'm researching the history of our new house and its people.

A quick background recap:

The one-story farmhouse was built in the 1860s in Smithfield, NC, by Burkett Jones, a cotton farmer and entrepreneur, an exConfederate soldier, who had been injured early in the war and sent home. The structure was moved to its present site in Hillsborough in 1997 to prevent its demolition at the expansion of the Smithfield airport.

Since the house's story is now part of mine, I want to weave its history into my art life. First steps in this process have been making loose portrait drawings of the original owners, drawing a cotton plant from life, collecting red clay soil to turn into paint for use in the coming weeks.  Below are a couple of early examples.

Cotton bolls and stems bought at the state farmers market. Acrylic, ink, soft pastel on paper.

Drawing from a copy of a copy of a copy of an original photograph of Burkett and Mary Ann Jones, provided by the Johnston County Heritage Center in Smithfield. No doubt these faces will appear again in different format and media. Graphite, water-soluble crayon, and soft pastel on toned paper.

Recently, Rachel Victoria Mills, a local poet and a new friend, as yet unmet in person due to Covid restrictions, saw on Instagram my image of cotton above, and, in her words, "the fields opened up", and, after a long period of quiet, a new poem emerged. 

Here are Rachel's own words as they appeared in a recent blog post of hers:

On the nowhere road between home and office, those 18 years I lived in the Eastern part of the state, this time of year the fields flatten and turn to short-haired flax, much like the farmers driving their loads along the highway next to me.   Along the road, the cotton workers go about their work, hatted and gloved, darker and more serious as they gather the seed-specked balls in combine-waves across the landscape.  Trip by trip, I must have absorbed that common scene until years later it has impressed itself indelibly in memory.

But it is Laura Frankstone's Instagram photo of her painting, yesterday's "warm-up" (as she calls it), which brings that vision back to me.

 

Cotton, in its various envisionings, has been a sort of opening of the field, to borrow Robert Duncan's phrase. Laura has been writing about the slow work of getting back to art after a long time of personal trials and removals, and her days finally in her new studio,"warming up" again to the field of making.  Whether, like her, there is now a new, big bright space to work in, or like me at this small table before a window which looks out, just as brightly, to garden beauty, insights come from all the windows we look out of.

 

I feel happy and deeply moved by Rachel's response. Who knows what will prick the creative spirit and when? As for me, I have light and color, rich stories, new energy, and lovely new studio windows to look out of. 

Colors! It is not only red clay that is warming up my world. Christmas flowers in the new place have thrilled me. Ink and wash on paper:

Quick sketch of flowers I'm adding to my new garden. I will document this new creation of mine in the next blog post. Ink and watercolor wash.

 

And last, a glimpse of my beautiful new studio, until recently a two-car garage. In 2021, may you, too, have new windows to look out of and opening creative fields.

Happy new year!

Here. In the new/old house, with before and after photos.

 After a wrenching several months, we are here, in our 160-year-old house. Our renovations are mostly done, with the art studio last to the finish line (and still not quite there.)

The meaning of a house with deep history like this one has seized my imagination, turbo-charged as it has been by 'Here,' a sublime, a peerless, a brilliant book by Richard McGuire (2014, Pantheon Graphic Books), with its illustrations of the same house, mostly the same room, the same land, over hundreds, even thousands of years. I bought 'Here' the year it was published, little knowing the importance it would have in my life. I now see the wainscoting, the fireplaces, the 12' high planked ceilings and heart pine floors of MY 'here'  through McGuire's kaleidoscopic vision and imagery, two examples of which follow:

Note the years the images derive from are noted in these McGuire spreads:

So now, here, our narrative, with some before and after photos. The before photos come from the MLS listing, our introduction to the house that was to be ours.  Those photos show a very handsome house, well-loved, well cared for, but not one, I admit, I felt particularly attracted to. It didn't seem us. Our old house, designed and built by my husband and me, was spacious, with many windows, lots of light, and perfect traffic flow, all things that mattered greatly to us, and not qualities I saw in the photos of the listed house

My friend and real estate agent, along with two of our daughters and my longtime best buddy, however, urged me to see the potential in the house.  "You have to buy it," said my hitherto-skeptical daughter, minutes after actually crossing the house's threshold. "It will be our new family home!" said her sister, who had felt the loss of our old house very acutely. "It will look totally different with your furniture and artwork! You will love it!" said our agent.

So, thus persuaded, we leapt. And here is the beginning of this new chapter in the house's life, and ours.

BEFORE, the living room: 

AFTER, our living room:

BEFORE, the hallway:

AFTER, our hallway:

BEFORE, the dining room:

AFTER, our dining room, still very much in progress:

 

BEFORE,  the family room:

AFTER, our family room:

 

I can imagine the stunned bewilderment the original owners of this house, a mid 19th-century farmhouse from Smithfield, NC, would feel were they able to see it now. French furniture?  Modern art? Shocking pink chairs? But the glory of this house, this beautiful house the Jones family built all those years ago, is how generous it is. It has opened its arms to us... I do feel that.

We are not finished with our changes. I have more rooms to show you. I have the garden transformation to document. I have my studio just on the cusp of being a useable work space and I canNOT wait for that.

Now that I am fully ambulatory again, I'll go back to Smithfield to collect soil, that deep red clay, to make paint from. I have images of the original family to explore. I'm not sure how this house will make itself seen in my work, but it will. It will.

I am out of the woods now, recovered from my leg injury. I've rolled up my sleeves and I'm ready to work. See you soon!

 

Laura Frankstone podcast with Kick in the Creatives

I so enjoyed my recent podcast conversation with UK artists Sandra Busby and Tara Roskell, who started a lively and stimulating website called Kick in the Creatives a few years back. I had known Sandra for at least 12 years, known her the way we often "know" people now, as cyber friends. Sandra and I have kept up our cyber friendship for all that time, with frequency of communication ebbing and flowing, as it will in any friendship. 

I am a few days late in sharing this here. House selling, house buying and the attendant frenzy have been in full swing.

The podcast is an hour or so in duration and I hope you will have a listen! Let me know your reactions in the comments, if you feel like it.  I myself am always curious to hear the voice and the stories behind the work and lives of cyber friends, fellow artists, buddies of all stripes! But then I'm curious about most things!

Speaking of houses, I am collecting information about the mid 19th century farmhouse we are moving to at the end of August ( see previous post), and I will lay it out for you when I have enough to share.

Happy summer!

New/old house, new garden, new studio-to-be, new life!

I have felt more or less stuck in amber since my leg injury in February. It has been a challenging time.  Since March, of course, we've all been in a stuck-in-amberish situation with the Covid 19 pandemic. 

But now, big new life changes are in the offing and I have shaken my torpor of these last months!

I have mentioned here that my husband and I plan to downsize and leave the beautiful house and garden that we designed and built for our blended family 26 years ago. We have loved it, but it was time for a change.

We have now found our new dream house for the next phase of our lives and it's all a surprise to us!  I did not imagine we'd live in Hillsborough, much as we love it, and much as we love our many friends who live there! But since nothing had come up in the areas we targeted for house-searching, we added Hillsborough to the search parameters. Within two days, this house came on the market. We went to see it and that very night, we put in an offer for it. Our offer was accepted. There is work to be done on the house, so it will be about eight weeks after closing that we will move in. 

Let me show you something of the new place!

This is the Burkett Jones House, aka the Simon B Jones House, built in 1850 or 1860 or 1880.... sources vary in dating the house, though most say 1850 or 1860. 

A farmhouse from Smithfield, NC, it was moved in 1997 to its present location, about 30 minutes from our house in Chapel Hill, to escape demolition at the expansion of the Smithfield airport. 

I love the emerald green lawn, typical of houses in the area, but I will switch to organic maintenance methods as soon as I can. I LOVE the fact that the house has vast open sky, with a perimeter of mature trees. Soon I can stargaze to my heart's content, simply by stepping outside and looking up!

Above is a closer look at the front of the house. And below is the front porch.

The area I will establish for the main garden in is a narrowish strip stretching from the back of the house to the property line, bordered on the eastern side by deer fencing and mixed shrubs and trees. I have lots of ideas for plantings, as you can imagine!

Below you also see the two-car garage that will be made into my studio! I am ecstatic! I have never had a full-sized studio. Now I can make big paintings, I can hold workshops, I can be free in my movements!

Below are raised beds made by the current owners, along the northern edge of the lawn. I will eliminate those to have that space for my new design.

Below, we are standing at the northern edge of the property, looking back to the house, with the garage/studio to the right. 

A two-story log cabin, seen below, is on the western edge of the 1.4 acre property. 

If I were a writer instead of a painter, I'd have my workspace already, as you can see above!

With this move, I can return to an idea I'd had a couple of years ago, to make paint out of soil in the places I love.  Unfortunately, I was not able to fully realize this at the time, because the places I love were/are northern Norway, Wales, Alaska... hard to collect soil in large quantities, absent a long stay in one place.

The painting below is a study I made on corrugated cardboard, using paint made of Chatham County soil, acrylic paint and medium. This will be a point of departure for a new series I have in mind, using soil from Johnston County, where our new house was built, as well as soil from Orange County, where our new house now is.

Analogous to my desire to use mostly native plants in the garden, is my interest in drawing and painting with local, natural materials in some of my work, such as here below. I drew with charcoal made of burnt blueberry bush from a fire pit and two kinds of pigments made from different soils, both collected at the Alamance County farm of two good friends.

Below is a sketch I made using soil found near St Non's Well near St Davids, Pembrokeshire, Wales and the juice of blackberries growing on a hedge nearby.

I'm eager to know as much as I can about the history of our new place, so David and I will drive east to visit Johnston County Heritage Center next week. We will ask the researchers there to help us discover who exactly built the house and who lived there over the 170 years following.  In my own research, I have learned where the Burkett Jones family cemetery is and I want to go and pay my respects to these intrepid 19th-century North Carolinians, whose home an improbable, gadabout, traveling eurocentric 21st century couple will claim as their own.  I will take a bucket and trowel and hope to get permission to dig up soil on the property, now near the airport, where my house lived for most of its life. I want to make of this an art piece to honor our predecessors in the house.

I will post what I learn about the house in the next installment of the story of our new life. 

I'd love to have your company.

 

The Canary in the Coal Mine: Sheltering at Home

On February 20th, I badly injured my left leg while at the gym. It's a long story, but the bare facts are that I was in driven pursuit of a goal and I was careless. I was not paying attention to my immediate surroundings. 

Afterwards, I was basically bedridden for two weeks and then I had to have surgery. In all the weeks since my injury, I've worn a full leg brace and now it's been seven weeks that I've been confined to my house. 

I posted bits of my story and some sketches I made on social media. People were lovely and sympathetic, of course. They urged me to have patience and fortitude. Life went on as usual in the world outside my own.

Then, the pandemic hit and soon, everyone was confined. My personal story blended in with the world's story. I had a four week's head start for sheltering at home, so I knew what it meant.

Now we are all trying to be patient and have fortitude. We are all trying to stay whole, healthy, and sane. 

I've on and off felt like drawing throughout this period. I've had some really down moments, as have we all.  I miss my family so much. I miss my friends. I miss walking. I miss all sorts of physical activity. I miss being in my studio and working on my painting project. Under these circumstances, both personal and societal, sadness is normal. 

But this will pass. All things do.

Here are some sketches I've made in these past weeks.

As soon as the pain medications diminished, I felt like drawing. The bedside table was handy.

As days went on, I found myself obsessed by the bottle of hand sanitizer on my table. While I was drawing it, I realized that the bubbles in the bottle, frozen as they were in viscous liquid, sheathed as they were in harsh plastic, felt like me, my spirit, my ability to move. I was drawing self portraits.

Bored with my bedside, I drew faces from Netflix screen captures. It was something different to do:

 

Kind friends brought food and flowers. These gorgeous sunflowers captured my longing for vitality and the sun:

Well, and there was always, and again, that bedside table. It grew crowded with jostling objects. It still is.

Tulips from a beloved friend seemed to yearn for freedom after a few days in a pot on my bookshelf. They became another self portrait.

Eventually I was able to sit in my garden, in a wheelchair, and draw a bit.

So here I am and there we are. Together, I hope. Patient, I hope. Blessed with fortitude, I pray. I send my best wishes to all and my deepest hope for a brighter world waiting.

Janus, the god of beginnings: my 2020 version

My birthday is very close to New Year's Day, so I am in the habit this time of year, like the god Janus, of looking both ways, to the past/the old year and looking ahead to the new. I am a frequenter of liminal states and this time of year is a such a state for most of us.

These sketches from my Norway trip were made on my December trip to that sublime wintry country. They are from my recent past, but I have them in the studio now, as sources for paintings I've begun and will continue working on these next weeks.

This time of year in those far northern climes, the light is blue. For me, the light is not at all depressing, but celestial, ethereal, magical. It is everywhere and it changes everything.

 

In a lecture on polar explorers, I sat and drew. Their stories were deep, often disturbing, sometimes, of course, triumphant. These men took themselves to the far limits of human coping... and sometimes they couldn't. Here we learned about Fridtof Nansen, Roald Admundsen, Hjalmar Johansen

 

 

More blue light, inside and out. My wonderful husband reads by the light of the sky and fjord and a small Christmas star.

Fellow passenger, reading.

And now, speaking of thresholds, I want to tell you that David and I will be moving this year from the house and gardens that we designed, built, lived in, and loved for 26 years. We are moving houses, but will stay in this area. It is exciting and anxiety-producing all at once!  I will tell more once I have more concrete things to tell.  I know this: in 2020, we will find our new happy home. It will be an adventure. I will have a new garden! I will share the story and images with you.

  May Janus, the god of beginnings, thresholds, and transitions, watch over us...and you.

Surfacing from the maelstrom

Or as I like to call this period, My Cuisinart Life! Ouch, there are way too many, big and life-changing things going on.  I do feel like I've been tossed in a giant Cuisinart and chopped and mashed and swirled for several months. I assume I'll emerge relatively intact, but I know I'll be transformed. In many ways, it's been an exciting time. It's been stressful. It's been necessary. It's not over yet.

Anyway, I will tell more when I can, but for now, let me share a bit of what I've been working on in the studio and to say I'm so looking forward to a return, with my husband, to Norway in December!

I've got several paintings going in my Places Project, as I mentioned, and some of them are even finished! I'm applying for a show of this first phase of work, excluding, unfortunately, my Caledonian Orogeny drawings (they can't be exhibited in the place I'm applying to,  because of their unusual format.) But I've got several paintings, acrylic on board, of various sizes, and I will keep working on this series in the next year.

My trip to Norway is part of this Places Project... it's been several years since I was in Arctic Norway in the winter and I need to go back and get an inspiration re-infusion. And, my husband and I love that part of the world anyway, so it works out well.

Here are some of my finished pieces. I won't hog your bandwidth with photos of all of them.

 Polar Twilight 1. I've attached a number to this one, because I plan on making several more in this sub-series, after our trip to Norway. I can't WAIT.

More Norway:

Wales, a painting of a stormy scene from Anglesey I have shared only a detail of in the past:

More Wales. This painting was inspired by my polar swim on Whitesands Bay last New Year's Day:

On Whitesands Bay, one cold and damp day last January, the sky was covered in a network of chevron-shaped clouds:

Just to show there are blue skies in even my cold places, here's a painting I made of Dulas Bay in north Wales, after a recent autumn trip there.:

After Norway, I still have northern Scotland to go to, my last place in the work inspired by the Caledonian Orogeny. Not sure when that trip will happen. 

I'm now turning to that age-old question: which art supplies should I take on my coming Norwegian trip??!  This is an issue we traveling artists always wrestle with, but for me, who travels only with a carry_on (that has also to hold my winter gear!!) it's a real puzzler!

I'm so glad to have resurfaced and I send thanks and love to all who (still) follow my wanderer's (recently subterranean) life.

 

Québecois Detour!

In the midst of months of painting and family events and obligations, a dear friend and I took a liqhtning quick 4-day holiday to Québec City last week. I had been to Montreal and Mont Tremblant, but never to the oldest (founded in 1608) city in Canada. Friends who had been had raved about it and since it was much easier to get to than my usual places (arctic Norway, anyone?) I decided to go.

Robyn and I stayed just outside the walls of the old city and it was a lovely 9-minute walk there. We walked everywhere, in and around, up and down, 7-10 miles each day. We sketched, we ate delicious food, and we drank an Aperol spritz or two (not quite the national drink of Québec, but still ;D.) We were charmed by this vibrant, small, deeply historic place.

The sketches I made are all over the place, stylewise, mediumwise, and subjectwise and just as I was getting a feel for being there, it was time to go. Fortunately, I'm going back for another short stay in August, but this time with my husband and two of our grandsons. I look forward to seeing the child-centric parts of Québec City and I hope I have time to make a sketch or two then, too!

I had long had a passion for sketching fountains. It felt like coming home to sit down and sketch this lovely Fontaine de Tourny, near l'Assemblée Nationale!

I'm not a great one for sketching architecture, normally, but in such a city, with such architectural richness, wouldn't it be churlish not to!  

And, on the other hand, I AM one to sketch people and flowers, so voilà! Me in my element with brush pen, ladies, and geraniums, after eating a delightful mushroom and ham crêpe at le Petit Chateau.

More architecture, but Chateau Frontenac... need I say more?

Continuing my mixing up of mediums and styles, I drew this fantastic salade Niçoise on a sunny, warm day at lunch with Robyn. I felt this happy subject called for my Koh-i-noor Magic Pencil, with its multi-colored lead. I love this drawing tool that leaves magic behind wherever it goes!

And I can never resist drawing figural sculpture, particularly men with curling locks, knee britches, and supercilious expressions.  I'm sure my DNA is involved somewhere here.

This last sketch is actually the first I made. I'm using a small, stiff-nibbed pen here and so the drawing is a bit stiff, but I still enjoyed making it. And I loved loosening up again over the next days.

 

I feel refreshed and clear after this little trip and I hope I will be able to transfer that feeling when I get back to the studio tomorrow. Oof, what a time it's been!

Happy, happy summer! May your heart be light and all your colors Québecois!

Artist in the studio, artist in the garden

I'm really mostly in the studio these days, walking my long and slow painting path.

As I work with the cool, atmospheric palette of the littoral paintings of my Places Project, though, ( the example shown here is a poor reproduction I nabbed from my Instagram feed, but you get the idea),

 I begin to think of the colors waiting on the other side of my studio door, ready to smash through winter's gray barrier. 

The earth is turning and it's calling me as a witness. 

Last April, 1300+ people were here to see my garden, one of several on the Chapel Hill Garden Tour.  My garden was a total party girl, bedecked in many shades of pink, purple, green, yellow, blue. And, lordy, there were blossoms.

Since I didn't share with you images from our star turn last year, I thought it would be timely and fun to do so now.

First, a bit of history, a 2010 ink and wash drawing I made of the early stages of my garden,  a major redo after my life-changing visit to les Jardins Agapanthes in Normandy:

And here we were last May, many years later.

 

As of today, spring is still in babyhood. I'm tweaking the garden design, of course, simplifying and rethinking shapes and colors.  Likewise, In the studio: tweaking, simplifying, searching for solutions. I'll be back to share some of those solutions when they emerge.

Happy spring to you! 

 

PS Here are links to a couple of essays I wrote on the history of my garden, in case you missed them and are interested!  

Photo essay in Walter Magazine 

Illustrated essay in Charleston Style & Design

Starting the New Year in Wales, a glorious beginning

There's a lot of story to tell, too much to try to share tonight. 

But before I post a few sketches, I will share quickly some memories: my exhilarating polar swim in the Irish Sea on New Year's Day; seeing the Quadrantid Meteor showers on my birthday night while wrapped in many layers and sitting on the front lawn of our cottage on Whitesands Bay; with the help of a traveling professional astronomer on the same birthday night, seeing nebulae, a galaxy, the Milky Way in bright form, many constellations, the fuzzy green comet 46P/Wirtanen; at Evensong of the first Sunday of Christmas at St Davids Cathedral sitting in the choir stalls with choir and clergy, hearing hymns and the liturgy in both Welsh and English.

I walked and walked and walked and walked some more until my heart was overspilling.  My husband and I slept deeply in that quiet, safe, numinous place. 

It's been another rough re-entry to real life (like the one from Norway last year) but I have several paintings going, a few from before the trip, but several newly started ones, all inspired by Wales. This circular and multi-pronged approach has me nudging each one along until I finish one, then another, then two more, etc. I'm happy in the studio.

So, sketches, just a few. I spent more time being, being outside, walking, resting, being with my husband, taking it all in.

Looking out over the Irish Sea to Ramsey Island and beyond, from the warmth of our cottage by the sea. This is white marker and pencil on brown paper. In real life, the sketch goes across the gutter of the sketchbook, making a double spread. I will add the other side later. 

Brush pen sketch made on site at Whitesands Bay, color added later.  These rocks and the ones below are old friends. They figured in the 12' long concertina sketchbook I made in May 2017, part of my Caledonian Orogeny project!

The first thing I bought on New Year's Eve day were two votive candles and holders. With these and the wood fire burning in our cottage living room, we had light and warmth.

After the polar swim on New Year's Day, I was cold and starving, so David and I repaired to our favorite St Davids café at Oriel y Parc and had lunch. I drew the family at the next table.

Sketch of St Davids Head, made standing on Whitesands Beach in the cold and wind. This and the one above are roughly and quickly drawn (the cold! the wind!), with color added later.

I'll be staying at home more this year, finishing paintings, being with family and friends, walking and trying to get more sleep! Wales spoiled me in that way and in so many others.

A tardy, but very Happy New Year's greeting to you!