Lindsey Carr Blog

Ibis Print

That's the Ibis print up for sale on Society6 now - Artist's proceeds go to the Audubon Society's Gulf Oil Spill Recovery fund (Which works out as $20 per print).

Don't forget, ML4U's Art Auction goes live on Monday! Can't wait to see what art there is and try to nab something for myself! Details on the auction, sneak peeks, and a complete list of participating artists can be found here.

And, for no real reason, here's a sneak peek of something part-finished in my studio at the moment

I love these old chinoiserie frames, the monkey probably won't go in this frame actually as it's part of a larger triptych.

I found out there's a special word for the chinoiserie/monkey paintings called Singerie, meaning 'monkey trick'. You can see a complete 360 Degree view of the 'Grand Singerie' in france here....it's absolutely stunning.

Hope you're all having lovely weekends. It's so hot and muggy here...but you can't complain about heat when you live in Scotland.

Gulf Fund Raiser

Meighan over at My Love for You is a Stampede of Horses is holding an art auction fund raiser for The Gulf Restoration Network. There are currently 83 confirmed artists donating works of art, all of which will have 100% of their price donated to the fund, there are some great artists taking part and some great pieces are already emerging.

Prices range from $15 - $350+, the sale starts on June 28th at 12 pm PST (3 pm EST) in this Big Cartel Shop.

The Ibis painting I posted a couple of weeks ago is going into the fundraiser for $600.

If you want a version of this but can't afford the original then I will soon be offering digital prints of it via my Society6 store and all of my profits from the print will go to the Audubon Society Gulf Recovery. Will post when this print is available.

Although i'm keen to give to the effort in the only way I know how at the moment i've got several mixed feelings about it - and most people I speak to have as well.

Firstly, BP should pay the full financial cost. Secondly, as Naomi Klein says in this excellent interview Obama can't order Brown Pelicans not to die and money can't heal the earth. And thirdly we're all chronically addicted to oil and its derivatives, BP provide us with some of the oil we're all so bent on consuming and our governments bend over backwards on our behalf to deregulate the conditions under which they operate.

So there we are, I have mixed feelings and feel ashamed and embarrassed about my own casual reliance on oil.

Winner!

Hello all!

Thanks for the responses to my open question of how to capture large paintings....It seems like there are pretty straightforward ways of doing this which don't involve massively expensive pieces of equipment..which is quite surprising. The one thing I do lack is space, but....more on this in a later post.

The job at hand is to pick a winner for the brooch! So, I put all the comments into a random number generator...

And number 16 is the winner - this is 'Crystal' or in fact Mike Maxwell the link says - who happens to have some awesome bearded and tattooed paintings. So, get in touch with your email to me or else I shall have to hunt you down and try to wrangle your address from you.

Thanks everyone else - for reading - for being artists with advice to give - for everything.

My birthday was wonderful. First I went to my best friends house to find herself and husband and 3 wee children dressed in their finest (bow ties!) and party food. I burst into tears. Then I went home to find the house laden with flowers and later in the afternoon Robin and I went walking through Dundonald castle's surrounding forest. We're all blessed if we have friends like these and a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs. I hope you have them too.

Now i'm off to watch movies and stroke the cat. X

Decorative Brooches & a giveaway

Yesterday morning I inexplicably got up at 3:30 and immediately started making something...does anyone else ever do that? I mentally came around at about 6:30 to get dressed and washed and go to work. 

The fruits of my witching hour labours are some rather large brooches which turned out to be lovely (even if I do say so myself!). I painted bits of gold detail by mixing up the lacquer with gold dust. 

One of the brooches is based on the Georgian practise of painting a lovers eye onto a brooch

 

The other is a little homage to the bee

Anyone who's read my blog for long will know i've done these before, but if you haven't been reading long then you can see the whole process as a tutorial over at my old blog here.

I'll be keeping one each for myself and some are going into the shop but, since it's my birthday next weekend i'm also giving one away (Whichever one the winner prefers).

 

All you need to do is leave a wee comment - anything you like - before my birthday next Saturday.

The winner will be picked at random

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Regarding the Ibis, I wanted to say thank you for all your kind words. It's painted in acrylic inks with a little watercolour staining. It's gone away to be scanned properly since my own scanner is tiny. That's the trouble with large paintings, my photography skills are terrible and I don't know how else I could capture such a large piece?

Going off piste

This is a large study piece called 'Oiled Scarlet Ibis' - it's inspired (if you can call it that) by the BP oil spillage in the gulf of Mexico and the classic image of Audubon's Flamingo.

 

Beneath the main title it reads 'Notes from a disaster' - in my head i've already planned several notes from disasters.

Claude Glass

For ages i've thought it would be good/interesting to have a claude glass. A claude glass is a small convex piece of glass painted black at the back. It serves to reduce in size and also simplify colours and tonal range and was used primarily by landscape painters in the late 18th/early 19th Century and is named after Claude Lorrain the landscape painter.

In any case, you won't find them boxed in an art store, and people don't seem to have much use for them now...So anyway, I was sitting wondering how I might get hold of some convex glass when I realised I had an old postmasters clock front - it has convex glass and a nice simple brass frame, so I dragged it out of the heap of boxes where it was stashed and painted the back side of the glass with black tempera. Glued the brass frame shut...and presto!

 

It's especially good for reducing if you're working on something close up but which is quite big. All the standing back and moving forward can get tiresome, so the Claude Glass (or indeed a convex mirror) solves this problem.

Extinction and a sense of scale

 I stumbled across some exceptional photos by a man named Jonathan Singer in his Botanica Magnifica of single rare flowers - many of which are close to extinction.

The original copy of the volume of photos is apparently a Double Elephant Folio sitting in the Smithsonian, but there is now a retail version, 1/3 of the original size which is still pretty damn impressive.

I've also been marvelling at the botanical works of William Bartram.

His father John Bartram was also a botanist, and took his son William 'botanising' with him from the tender age of 14. 

I love the fact that he has no interest in scale or perspective, everything becomes otherworldly

See the heron in the bottom left?

I think I like him so much because i've never had much passion for proportional scale or perspective, it always seemed irrelevant to our way of feeling about the world. In that way it makes complete sense that Bartram, a botanist, draws a world full of enormous flowers dwarfing tiny creatures. 

A lot of chinoiserie has the same disinterest in scale - Moths and butterflies as big as birds, flowers bigger than people.

  

 
Anyway, all for now - the rest of the day will be painting packed, and I can't wait! Hope you're all well.

P.s also there is an interview with me in Coveted Mag this month which can be read online. Many thanks to the ladies there who chose to interview me.

P.p.s There is also now a Fox Confessor T-Shirt available here.

Brassic Lint

Just a wee note - i've put some things into my Etsy shop which I haven't done for ages. There's a suede Elizabethan inspired collar and some brooches of varying price. 

Elizabethan inspired collar

I'm hoping to do this a bit more often in future - as often as time will allow. I had hoped to pull off a sculptured brooch of my own making (it was to be a a feather) but the materials I used just weren't hard enough and the poor thing crumbled. I'll keep trying though because I like the idea...and well, I want a feather brooch.

Porcelain eye set into sterling silver brooch

Otherwise things are coming along well - setbacks are now lessening as I struggle onwards with the paintings. I'm finally finding paper really quite wonderful to work on - now that the horror of 'no mistakes' has revised many of my working habits. 

I hope you're all well x

May day

I am working like the clappers (strange phrase that isn't it?) to make progress with all the work for my show early next year. It's quite a strange process because I have several things all at a mid-stage. I hop around from one to the other, nothing ever finishing.

This is totally unusual for me, I normally work a piece from beginning to end and then move onto the next and I feel a wee bit uncomfortable having nothing quite finished. Still, it seems to suit my restless mood at the moment.

I have nothing finished to show but since the first swallows of the season arrived last week, many of them have made their way into one piece

I tend not to be planning very much in these pieces, only the broadest of compositions. I noticed over the christmas break that detailed planning of pieces had become anathema to me. Which was again, very unusual given my previous reliance on planning. 

I hope you're all enjoying the beginnings of May x

A bit more detail

Well, I still haven't managed to get hold of more batteries for my camera so I might as well post more detail of the Alice toy since it has to be sent this morning.

It is her hands which are unfinished, she ought to be holding a tea cup and pot.

With more time I think i'd have extended the window down and made it into a full house - with her legs coming out further down.

Whilst we're about it Rima Staines has just posted what she will be sending for the same exhibition, a mad hatters clock which runs anti-clockwise! She's captured the mad glint in his eye to perfection - have a look-see here.

Nacho has one more appointment at the vets today, hopefully the last for a long time and then the rest of the day looks set to be glorious again.