Wednesday, May 30, 2018

"Rose Melody" by Lynda Cookson

Okay so I may have told a little porky last time. I said "back to oils" ... but I still have this compulsion to tackle watercolour, with the added inspiration that my four climbing roses have started to blossom in profusion. Who can resist roses?!

I must say I find them extremely difficult to paint but hopefully by the end of summer, having tackled a rose painting as often as I can - in both watercolour and oils - perhaps it won't be so bad.

It's amazing how many petals roses have. When you're trying to sketch or paint a full blown rose the eye tends to get mixed up as to which petal you have just put in place and which one folds in or under the next!

Colour is another challenge because no roses seem to be the same colour as the paints I possess. I've never been one for colour mixing and prefer to put pure colour next to or on top of another pure colour to see what magic they can perform. With watercolour this is very different to working with oils.

And so I continue to battle on! LOL

"Rose Melody" by Lynda Cookson




Sunday, May 27, 2018

Back to oils for a while

My website is now revamped and up and running (smoothly, I hope!). You can find it here and I'd really appreciate comments on how you think it looks and works. Please and thanks :-)

Wild Summers. The Art of Lynda Cookson : https://lyndacookson.blogspot.fr

In the background I continue to wrestle with watercolour as a medium but for now, I'm heading back to oils.

I have a commission to paint the home of my Loney ancestors who used to live in St Martins, St Peter Port, Guernsey and will be getting on to that this week. This is the beautiful farm house, known to be dated back at least as far as the early 1400s when it could have been the Pastor's house.

There's another house in St Peter Port my ancestors occupied and it's evidently the most haunted house in Guernsey. The house, on Tower Hill, sits a the junction where the road splits into two and is one of those which has a skinny end wall. It was against this end wall where witches were burned at the stake! Plenty of witchy ghosts abound.

Right opposite the house is The Cornerstone Pub, the favourite haunt of Victor Hugo in his time living on Guernsey. We had a snack and a beer there but he didn't grace my ear with any ghostly literary hints I'm afraid.

I've promised a charcoal drawing of the family house as well, so expect messy black fingerprints on my next blog post! All will be posted up here when I'm good and ready.

In the meantime ....

"Henry" by Lynda Cookson




Friday, May 25, 2018

"Resist and Recover" Kyo Art Gallery Grand Opening

It's today!
The Kyo Gallery in Washington DC (Alexandria) have their Grand Opening Night with "For Faith and Country" as one of the paintings on show.
If you are in the area, or know of anyone in the area, and if you can't pop in tonight, please do so, or ask folk to do so, during the weekend? I'd love it if someone was able to take a pic of my painting there for me ... a long shot, I know xx
Your invitation is in the images .....
"For Faith and Country" 
Invitation to the Grand Opening


Thursday, May 10, 2018

The story of "Lone Tree" by Lynda Cookson

A funny thing happened with this little watercolour called "Lone Tree".

I'm using up old pieces of watercolour paper which belonged to my Mum way back when, and I mean really way back when. She probably bought the paper close to 25 years ago. I've been trying out different brush stroke techniques and this piece of paper took the paint in different ways. I liked it so I left it. There's a block to the left of centre in the blue sky where the paint took smoothly. For the rest of it, "it blotched". The effect was to make a simple brush stroke more interesting ... with a hint of weather.

I used a wet on dry technique and the paper seemed to be very absorbent either side of the oblong shape where the paper allowed the paint to be brushed on smoothly.

"Lone Tree" by Lynda Cookson



Friday, May 04, 2018

Fine Art America links

sheep metal prints