A ridiculously good day

The weather is incredible right now...I know it gets hot and sticky in not too much longer, but right now sunny, slightly breezy days with temps in the low 70s are sublime.

This has been a fun day. I had my first painting class with a woman about whom everyone speaks with affection and admiration, found her personable in that jolly encouraging fashion. The class was at and near her studio in St. George's (enjoy some of her work at her website, www.featherbedartstudio.com), joined by another woman who until recently was going at it 24/7 at a teahouse/cafe she owned at the Gibbs Lighthouse. They encourage joining in on the Sunday plein aire painting group, never mind that I am clueless, which by itself was worth going to St. George's to hear.

Emma provided a good demonstration and talked us thru setting up for a sketch and painting - Heidi in oils, me with watercolor pencils. Her studio is on the grounds of the Mitchell House, a museum in St. George's. The house and grounds allow for a good array of possible subjects themselves - I'd visited the museum when I had come to the Island in September, and took loads of photos then, so taken with the play of the lights and darks, shapes and shadows, flowers and greenery. It was fun to have the grounds to ourselves.

Playing with the water colors certainly reminded me that it had been a long time since I had done this. I suspect water color is the proper medium for me right now - I do tend towards the detailed and focused, and watercolor just doesn't work that way, so this forces a freer, more generous approach.

I 'accomplished' little - I got a rough sketch started, played with brushes, worked at getting a feel for the relative proportions of color and water on a couple types of paper. I came away jazzed to jump in to this in as big a way as I can manage, given time and talent restraints. Since part of the reason I am doing this is to preclude the usual taking-over-of-my-life by work responsibilities and chores, that interest and enthusiasm is a good and necessary thing!

Heidi gave me a lift back home, and then to Collector's Hill, as I wanted to - sorry - visit a couple sites for work but mostly to go to Verdmont for today's Culture Fest, with the manor Verdmont open to visitors (for free, always a good thing in my chintzy book!) and practitioners of traditional Bermudian crafts providing demonstrations - the stone cutting/masonry work the roofs and all rely upon, the cedar woodworking, the palmetto frond basket-weaving, the beekeeping and agricultural products. Members of a quilting guild were needling away, the Audubon Society was talking about blue bird boxes, and there were Colonial age dress-up outfits for try-on by the half-growns among us.

More photos - St. George's is ridiculously photogenic, things are flowering, and I may include one of chubby-looking me in painterly array...

more photos

The system seems to hiccup if I post a lot of things; hope it has recovered now!

Lovely Saturday

(I had to split the photos across two posts - below is all the text you're going to get this time!)

It is only 2 in the afternoon, and I feel like I've done so much today! It is a lovely sunny day, nice breeze, and the colors just pop - something about the light, plus, of course, all this color...

Buses this morning seemed to be screwy, but I caught a #3 up the hill on Harrington Hundreds to go to Kaleidoscope and its Elliot Gallery. They offer some adult classes (as well as providing a lot of arts education for kids), and I'd been interested to see what all was there - they carry some art supplies, they have a cafe on site, just sounds like an interesting spot. (And they will order whatever I want from Dick Blick, an on-line provider I've used in the US, tho the price is double what Blick lists, to cover shipping and duty. But knowing I can get the stuff easily enough is nice!) Their prices on papers and canvases were much better than the one other supplier in town.

Plus - the show presently on view is by one of the islands more respected working artists, these pieces being from his shift from water colors to acrylics. They are very different mediums (media?) to work in, acrylics having some of the characteristics of watercolors and some of oil paints; Chris is a master in watercolor. If I had a spare $1200, there were two small pieces I'd have bought. Various water and beach views, some views down streets or pathways - very Bermudian, but in a soft-focus, evocative way.

Have to admit I still prefer his watercolors. Some of these seemed like he had attained a level of comfort, others didnt work so well. Brave, tho, to put it up for exhibit and comment!

I'd gotten off the bus at the Old Devonshire Church, an Anglican church. With the very blue sky, the very bright morning sun, and the very white old church, it was startlingly beautiful. A few photos - nothing fancy about it, just simple elements in contrast given the strong light. (Also, I don't feel I see that well, and react to light/dark, pattern, shape, texture and color, and this is mentioned to explain why I seem so hypnotized by the very rhythmic shapes in the roofs and gable ends here, and the colors now becoming so apparent.)

Then I walked along Middle Road, down Tee Street to Berry Hill Road and into the Botanical Gardens for the Agricultural Show. I stopped off first at Masterworks to see the two shows on right now - one on black Bermudian artists and their works, one of contemporary mosaic work by a woman with an interesting aesthetic. I got kind of stuck there - one of the volunteers struck up a conversation on the mosaic work that carried on for a while, but one of her kids is a professional painter, presently in France, and another a local architect, and it is always interesting to hear things...She had volunteered at the Ag Exhibition and insisted on literally taping her volunteer band on my wrist so I could get in free, as one ex-pat for another.

I didn't use it - I left it on, but I bought admission, which seemed only right. I wasn't overwhelmed by the Exhibition - not nearly as fun as our State Fair in Raleigh, but in its relatively innocent way was a boisterous, happy place. Kids were showing, and oohing and aahing at their animals - goats and horses today, lovely horses drawing those small one-person carriages, can't think what that is called, a sort of racing. They were gorgeous animals, and colors. Rabbits and roosters (ever so glad the ENORMOUS black roosters on display are not part of the feral chicken crowd out here - I've never seen such big chickens!), quail and pigeons, geese, ducks, guinea pigs...Then, on to the fruits, veg, orchids and 'market basket' displays...then the cut flowers...And, after a stop for a ginger beer and fish cake sandwich, a nice wander thru the gardens and out to the bus stop to come home.

Photos of bits and pieces of all of this.
Enjoy!!