A Short Break

A Short Break

It is over a week since I did any work on Bentley, the portrait in Turner acryl gouache. 

The reason is that I have a new border collie puppy. I was expecting to take a week off to establish house training. She is very good in that respect. But my week is getting longer. 

The problem is she torments my poor Jasper. He doesn’t mind when she pulls his tail. I do. I have to keep cleaning long clumps of hair out of her mouth. But Jasper objects to the way she bites his legs. 

He is so kind. I always knew what a lovely nature he has but his degree of tolerance astonishes me. 

So I am spending a lot of time rescuing Jasper. Luckily I bought a nice soft “cage” for my old cat to hide in when he wanted peace. So the puppy gets fastened in the cage when she gets overtired and hyper and starts leaping at Jasper. And I can only do jobs (like writing my blog) when she is asleep. 

She has woken up again now, so I will add a cute photo of her and go and put her out in the garden. 

By the way, the garden is no longer green. The first game she discovered was digging, then the rain started. I will leave the rest to your imagination. 

Jasper

Jasper

I have been reading a new article about dogs dying young of cardiomyopathy when they are fed on grain-free dog food so I want to add my tuppence worth. 

First let me tell you about the portrait of Jasper above. It was done in 2011 the summer before Bryn came to live with us. It is drawn in Derwent drawing pencils in black, white and touches of other colours on grey Canson Mi-Teintes paper. I gave the portrait to Jasper’s biggest fan, my friend Annette. 

To get back to the issue of grain-free dog food: Jasper has a severe problem with both rice and corn. 

Rice gives him such bad diarrhoea that he quickly becomes severely dehydrated. Corn gives him the added symptom of blood in his diarrhoea. And no. He has no problem with gluten. He can eat wheat or rye without any trouble as long as there’s no rice or corn mixed in. 

The trouble with ordinary dog food with grain is that they don’t specify which grains are in the ingredients so Jasper has to have grain-free food to keep him safe. 

However I choose a food with a high animal protein content. 

Many grain-free foods are high in legume types of protein including beans, peas and chickpeas. I learned at school that peas don’t have all the amino acids essential for animal life in the protein. Grains have missing amino acids too but they are different ones. I remember my teacher telling me that if I eat my beans on toast I would get all the amino acids I need. 

So clearly a dog food with peas but no grain is going to leave the dog with malnutrition. 

I have to watch out though. I had been buying one brand for a while and they brought out a more expensive recipe and I bought a couple of bags. (I had 2 dogs and there was a reduction in price for buying 2 at once.) I didn’t think to check the ingredients until both Jasper and Bryn seemed less well than they were. It had a lot of pea in it. I quickly ordered the cheaper stuff and, once the dogs were well again, I admit that I added small quantities of the expensive stuff to the regular food so it wouldn’t go to waste. 

Bryn was a cross breed Irish wolfhound. Irish wolfhounds tend to have a genetic heart problem and die suddenly with no symptoms when they are about 6 years old. I think it is a form of cardiomyopathy. Well Bryn was 15 years old when she died, so clearly a grain-free dog food with high animal protein content didn’t do her any harm at all. Jasper is 11 now and you wouldn’t believe it to look at him. 

He is a bit depressed since Bryn died and is clearly looking for a new girlfriend. I am getting him a little girl puppy. I am depending on him to teach her how to make friends with everyone she meets like he does. He taught Bryn.

Bentley is Progressing

Bentley is Progressing

I am still busy trying to organise my kitchen. It is important because I am getting a new puppy soon and I want everything to be hygienic for her. But I have been able to do some useful work on Bentley’s portrait. 

I have gone over the hairs where the dark and white meet on his head, and gone over the bits of his nose that were too dark. I used white and beige for that. It needs more touches of white when the paint has dried. Turner’s Acryl Gouache dries after 24 hours but the paint can be softened and lifted which is so useful at times for blending. I want clean flicks of white for the hairs so I will give it 48 hours. 

But tomorrow I will be able to work on his muzzle which had a wash of pale pink this morning. Also I will work on his nose which I dotted with beige this morning to bring out the texture. 

More Work in Progress

More Work in Progress 

Building the kitchen cupboards tired me more than I expected. I am still having afternoon naps so I haven’t been able to work on Bentley as much as I thought I would. But I am getting on well with the work I have done. His nose now has texture, dark hairs are positioned in his fur and I have started on his muzzle. I don’t use black. I used sepia overlaid with dark grey. 

I need to touch in lots of white hairs. He doesn’t really have those dark lines over his nose. They mark the shadows of the cute little puppy folds of skin. Once I have dragged some white, light grey and light beige fur over them they will look like folds and not stripes. 

First I am going to lay some pink skin on his muzzle. Then I will get out the white paint and work over all the fur on his nose to get the shading right. 

Tidying my Workspace

Tidying my Workspace

Last week, including last weekend, I was improving my kitchen storage. I bought the Welsh dresser and the drawer unit from IKEA, and, yes, I put them together myself apart from the top of the Welsh dresser which I had to remove to make the top half of the dresser light enough to lever in place. Then I couldn’t lift it back into place because I have a problem with raising my arms above my head, so I had to ask a friend to do it for me. But I did the rest.

I had to move a lot of furniture around to make space for the new cupboards, so I had to find good places to put it. One trolley ended up in the catio. I don’t know what will happen to it in the end but for now it is something for the cats to play on.

I thought that life would be back to normal once I had had a rest, but it took much more resting than I expected. 

Today I have been cleaning the front room including my workspace. I have put the drawers with the pastels back behind the easel to make more space though the boxes of pastel pencils are still there. They don’t cut out so much daylight of course. And the light is the best thing about my workspace because it is a northlight. Talking of the light, I have clamped my light to the shelf behind my easel. I will move it back if it doesn’t work but clamped to the window sill it tended to foul the blind when I wanted to close it at night. 

I have added a metre ruler across the worktable to show how small my workspace is. 

I am waiting to get back to the portrait on the easel until I have finished the portrait of Bentley which I am working on upstairs (also with a northlight aspect).

Here is a photo of the two new units in the kitchen. Don’t be surprised at the cat barrel on the kitchen worksurface, or the cat bed on the dining table! I am not a crazy cat lady, but when I take an animal into my home I do my very best for it. And I have to have somewhere to keep them away from my easel. 

Latest Work in Progress

Latest Work in Progress

It is nice to get back to this portrait of Bentley in acryl gouache. The photo is of a small area to show how much more work I have to do to finish. If I show the full image you would think it is nearly finished but the minute I sat down and looked at it I could see that I still have a lot to do. 

When I am working in acryl gouache I use very small spotter brushes and lay the strokes of paint one at a time in layers. You can see a medium grey at the bottom right waiting for strokes of sepia and dark grey to build up the effect of fur. The difficulty is where there are white hairs lying over dark hair. 

Acryl gouache is lovely to work with because the paint doesn’t dry hard for a few days so mistakes can be lifted. Also it is opaque which means that I will be able to layer clean white hairs over the dark areas.

The nose is a completely different kind of texture. I expect that the spotter brush will live up to its name when I get there!

I should mention that the strip of white thick paper is to rest my hand on to protect the paint from grease.

Exhibition 2019

Exhibition 2019

I have been busy trying to finish as many portraits of Gypsies as I can.

It has been a difficult year but I have managed to have seven oil on canvases in this year’s exhibition. 

I have introduced myself as the artist to everyone who took an interest so I could explain why I had painted these portraits and why I feel that I have a mission to fight against prejudice. You would be surprised at the interesting people I have talked to. One was an American pastor but I didn’t tell him that I was a Buddhist! 

A lot of people love the portrait of the deerhound and wanted to buy it so I explained that I work on commission. I may have a commission coming. 

One man walked in and said “That’s Walter” (behind the dog) before he saw the label. You can imagine how pleased I was that I had got that good a likeness. He knows Walter’s friend Sue so I was able to arrange that someone can pick up the portrait on Sunday and give it to her. Walter died a few months after I took the reference photos. 

The furthest portrait is a “work in progress” of the deerhound’s owner so it was a nice talking point. I told people that the dog was gazing into the boy’s eyes. 

I have another portrait that I would like to finish enough tonight to add it to the exhibition as another work in progress. If I can get the second boy’s face painted and leave their clothes as the underpainting, it will look fine.