We are all pretty tired of 2020! This year has played some nasty tricks to the world, we have enough, we are tired! The new disjointed routine that fell on us made me feel like I was trapped, it reminded me that there are still challenges I want to face and things I want to accomplish in my life, especially as an artist. Now I am also a middle age woman, I can say I am lucky in many ways, I have a lovely family, my clever and sweet husband, and my daughter, who is now 15, is also an artist and she is rapidly developing her own individual style. I am still scared of not being good enough and I am at times confused about my artistic identity, if I want to be a painter or an illustrator or both, and I am exploring how I can better combine my research work more with my art. Step by step I tried to work further at my art to make it more official So I have:
At the same time, I am working at my research, trying to get a clearer direction that could also combine my art interest and I had the privilege of teaching a course in animation and prototyping for game design, it was pure pleasure, I have engaged with a bunch of 30 enthusiastic students in sketching and clay modelling. Writing down what I have done with my art in the past few years has been better than I thought. I did not do it in purpose as one of these "feel-better thingy" that are so fashionable nowadays. However, it made me feel better to realize that I was able to make a sort of kick start for myself, in spite of my insecurity. I still have many ideas, which I did not dare to realize, in particular about creating illustrated story books and this year I am going to try. I also have to finish my portrait projects for celebrating my friends who are accomplishing great things in their life as my personal little battle against the empty notion of celebrity we are dealing with, which I find intolerable. Among the many ideas-projects that are buried in my mind, I have tried before to make a calendar with a selection of my watercolors, I will make it as a printable give-away downloadable as PDF from my website. The pages can be used both as independent poster or they can be bound through a spiral or with a ribbon, I have placed an oval shape top-middle of the pages to indicate where to make a hole. So, I am wondering Will my Wings make it? as in the painting above and then I tell my self to aim high as in my second painting above, Arms to the Sky, inspired by a beautiful tree from Taiwan, let's aim high and let's see what happens. I decided to use these two paintings in the cover of my calendars as a hopeful message for 2021. Botanica - 1-page calendar.
Botanica - Art Calendar - 1 Page A3 The calendar is called Botanica and can be downloaded in PDF above here.
Here are three calendars, one is an A4, another is an A5 and the last one is a one-page A3 landscape, which can be hang as a poster, as shown in the picture.
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This is a little present for my dad, who is a master pastry baker, he is not online so I won't spoil the surprise ;)
This watercolor depicts a traditional cake from my town, Vercelli in the north-west of Italy in the Piedmont region, and the cake is called Tartufata, which can translate in English as Truffle Cake. Tartufata is a layered sponge cake, covered in thin and broad chocolate foils, covered in powder sugar on the top, the sponge cake is wetted with liquor and filled with Chantilly cream, not a cake for faint of heart or healthy obsessed people indeed ;) It is a very elegant cake though, with delicate tasting cream spiced up by the liquor, it is a cake that you could imagine in the baroque courts of Europe, in fact I found it also in France in the area of Grenoble. As a child it was a typical weekend treat, my dad brought it home as a few cakes were left over from the pastry shop where he still works, as semi-retired now. When I was a child, I loved to dig in the creamy heart of the cake, and I really dreamt that the top of the cake was a snowy mountain landscape. I imagined small dwarfs and chocolate fairies lived in the chocolate snowy landscape :) I must confess at time I found Tartufata boring, as it was the cake I saw and tasted the most, being a traditional cake, the pride of my town, it was very popular at the pastry shop. But as the spoiled daughter of a pastry master, I would often dream of more exotic cake as the St-Honore, another specialty of my dad, even more elaborated, maybe too much, but extremely luxurious and delicious. I have made a watercolor painting of a ST.Honore for my dad a few years ago and I had it printed on an apron. Unfortunately the print was not good quality :( But he appreciated the painting. My dad has always been very supportive of my art interest, he himself loved to look at paintings, sculpture and the theatre, he himself is an artist. It has been more than a year since I have met my family in person and I miss them more than ever. I am looking forward to the time when I can again visit them in Italy or that they could come to Denmark to visit me, In the meantime I have sent a package to them, with my little painting as a surprise for my parents, I hope they will love it :) Bertie |
AuthorFreelance illustrator and painter. Archives
May 2023
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