Monday, October 30, 2006

Having a Cold

So sorry, been bedridden for a week and it looks like it will not go away, stuck in chest. So unfortunately no new art for a few days.
Trine

Sunday, October 22, 2006


This is a unfinished portrait I made in my first classes in portrait painting by using model. The artist teaching was Per Lundgren, a student of among others Odd Nerdrum, a famous Norwegian artist.

I will not take credit for it alone because quite a bit is done by the teacher when showing us how to do things, but I thought I would share it with you anyway :-) I do not yet know whether I will work much with portraits but the techniques can be used in other kinds of paintings. I learnt a lot but it was exhausting.


Trine

Tuesday, October 17, 2006


I have to enjoy my students' work instead, their texts both in English and Norwegian. Many nice poems in the stack today :-).

Well I'll show you one of my earlier work instead :-)

This one I made about 2 weeks ago. It is on a hexagon canvas with painted sides so it does not need a frame. I believe it will do well on the exhibition next month.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Being a Mum

Being a mum is hard when you get a call saying your son is admitted to hospital with breathing problems after being hit in the chest. No matter how old or how big or how grown he is, right then he seems very, very small to a tender mum's heart.

Waiting is hard, so very hard when you walk around, to and from, to and from while the seconds last like hours, waiting for more news.
Questions are many, very many when the information is limited and the possible results a mum can vision are way too many.

At last, another call. He is in for x-rays. the mum relaxes a bit. He is in proper care. They work on finding out. X-rays, that does not sound too scary.

Then JOY, he calls himself. He will be all right, no broken bones and he is able to breathe and talk. Then the mum can really think it will be ok and try to bring her shoulders down. But the anxiety still sits in her chest and shoulders and stomach. It will be hours, even maybe days before it is completely gone and her nights will be tormented for a while. Because he sounds so little and she wishes he was at home, with her, so that she could see him, and cuddle him, and pamper him, and make everything all right as she did when he was 5.

Finally, an sms saying he is ok, he will be sent home, to his home far away. And the mum turns to her computer and tries to write away some of the thoughts and anxieties. And share her joy.

It went well this time too.

Mum

Sunday, October 15, 2006


I had planned for a combination of mountain area and trees this time but the mountain would not have any competition so It would not let me. The result is here. I really hope you will enjoy this series.


As I said I plan to make a series of paintings called Blue Winter where I limit my palette to Blue together with black and white - mainly white since this is winter images.

So here is no 2 in the series. This one too is oil on hexagon canvas with painted sides 10" or 25,4 cm sides. As you can see, most of it is painted by knife.


And a bigger one 50x60cm where I more wanted to focus on the colour than the shape of the leaves. I hope you end up having thought about what lays hidden. I had originally planned to have lots of leaves both in the background and one the two trees but like characters tend to take off with the writers, this painting would not allow me that so the trees are bare and there are little detail in the leaves. What do you think? If you create yourself, do your works go their own way?

Autumn Lake


This is an oil painting I did earlier this week trying to capture both the cold and half bareness of autumn more than the lush colours. I myself like the transparency that having so few leaves on such thin branches create. I hope you like it too. A pity the photograph does not really show how wonderful the sky is and how nice the reflections are.

It is made on a 30x40 canvas box which is painted on all sides so I can be hung without framing if someone should want that.


I'd better show what I made in oils yesterday as well. This is oil on a hexagon canvas box. None have seen these hexagon canvases, which I bought in UK this summer , here in Norway so I'd love to show them off at the November exhibition. This is the first in a series of Blue winter oil paintings I plan to make. It is stunning in real life. Reflections on the wet paint and taking it last night without natural light makes the photo not show it off properly, but here it is. each side is 10" or 25,4 cm. Enjoy

Glass on Glass


I made a very simple light catcher just to try out different kinds of transparent glue. It is not very good at close up but WOW it makes me smile when the ligh goes through it. I used only scrap ieces of artistic glas on this one. recycling you know :-)


I have been playing with glueing glass mosaic on boxes and glass objects. It is sort of recycling stuff which is very nice. The boxes were leftovers from my kids craft projects years ago and the glass bowl one that was from my youth that my mum put away on a major clering out of old stuff. I'll need I see to add a rim to the glass bowl and add some grouse to the edge of the lid of the multisided black and white box. Will keep you posted. I plan on using the glass bowl when finished for candy on the next exhibition in November and the blue and white hexagon one for my cards. No one im my area works with mosaics or glass except for painting on glass so I'd like to brin some objects just to show that playing with glass and mosaics is also an option for craft interested people.


Well I finally felt confident after the "animal" to really try out varied shapes and here is the result. i am very happy about the brick pattern for the sky. As you can see I combine brick patterns with basically using the squares diagonally for the mountain and more free forms for the trees. next I will show you it used on objects.

More mosaics



After the failure with the mosaic flowers, I wanted to try to make something very non geometrical and serched the net for patterns. Founds loads but they all had thousands of pieces. I then thought about crochet patterns which use limited squares and serched again and printed out some which looked very small. LOL when counting them out they too had way too many pieces even it I had cut every glass tile square up into 4. So I just started playing around and voila and animal appeared. My mum kept calling it "the cat" but as you can see this is more like some kind of australian desert rat related to kangarooes or something. What should I call it. All in all I was fairly happy with it.





For the past weeks I have explored different ways to combine and break glass mosaic. Here is the results.

For this one I put a brown tile in some cloth and broke it. I restricted myself to using tha pieces as the were without adjusting them at all, as you can see. Thus challenging my creative skills. But still most of it is just using the basic squares








I then wanted to explore furter effects: It did not turn out well. I first tried using white grout but that made the image boring. I then tried using grey but that "killed" the image as you can see. Well, I promisded you I would show you the failures as well as the successes. More in next entry.