New Mortar and Pestle

Wow this is amazing! I have never used a mortar and pestle before, but yesterday I was making a quick salsa to go with our dinner and needed to crush the coriander seeds.  It worked like a charm and that salsa was pretty tasty too! James bought the marble set a few weeks ago but this was the first time for it to be useful.

Books & Back to Work!

I finally finished John Man's historical travelogue, Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, which was a fascinating book. I was inspired to read it after reading Conn Iggulden's Conqueror Series (Wolf of the Plains, Lords of the Bow, Bones of the Hills, Empire of Silver, and Conqueror) -- historical fiction about Genghis Khan's rise and events down to the rise of Kublai Khan (Genghis' grandson). Some exciting books!  Now, as well as getting back to some other books I was reading (Kurt Vonnegut, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, to name a couple) I have also started Penguin's collection of Van Gogh's letters. I read Dear Theo when I was in art school, but that was a long time ago...

And what is this a picture of? I did some work today as I want to continue with my Moments series. I want to do some medium scale paintings, but don't want them on regular stretched canvas and don't want them on paper. So I have half stretched some canvas on old wood frames, and will just cut them to size when I am finished. Because they are half stretched they should have a bit of bounce while I am painting, and I will just cut them off the frames when finished.

The eggs are gone, so now I have been catching up on other stuff!  I finished reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens), a whodunnit that I thoroughly enjoyed.  I have also just finished reading Steal Like an Artist  for the second time in 30 days!  I have been preparing images for the update of the lorjames art website, including the following:

The above is entitled Chicago Thumb Wars from the Moments series of paintings on raw canvas.  I started this body of work last year (for more details go to ART link on right bar).  Below is Auspices -- both of these paintings were inspired by our visit to Chicago in 2010.  I'll be starting back to work on this series next week.

Eggs Cartoned!

Before packing up the eggs today, James took some closeup details of my egg "Wild Roses".  Here are two of them:

James puts the last bit of tape on my egg box.

And I helped wrap his egg too. :)

The eggs are ready to go, and this is me now at the computer doing one of my favourite things -- that is, planning a vacation, hahaha.

Eggs over easy!

Well it wasn't actually easy.  It was a lot of work, but now it is done; it was also lots of fun to do and a great way to start the year off.  Here I am yesterday, almost finished!  I felt like I was painting continents and oceans...

Today James was taking proper shots of us with our finished eggs.  Here's me and mine!

James put images of the four sides altogether.

Eggs-austed!

So I have been very busy since last Tuesday, working on this egg.  A little more detail after blocking.

 With the blue background it is starting to give more of a sense of what it may look like when finished. 

Since I'm up in the attic (my studio garret) my working soundtrack is provided by the dvd player, which means one cd at a time.  I alternate between 2 cds all day long -- PJ Harvey's "Let England Shake" and Tindersticks's "The Something Rain".  They are both fantastic cds, energetic and thoughtful - perfect for painting to.

Eggs-citement!

Yesterday was a very exciting day as the giant eggs arrived...Okay, I will start at the beginning. Last Thursday night James (my husband) saw a facebook posting calling for artists to decorate eggs for The Big Egg Hunt in Dublin in aid of The Jack & Jill Foundation children's charity. We had been talking of getting more involved with things going on and saw this as an opportunity. Enquiries were made on Friday and by the end of the day we knew we were going to get eggs early this week, especially as there was a very short deadline involved (unknown to us, this event was launched in October last!).  So here I am after gessoing my  egg yesterday.

Today of course, I set to as soon as my daughter was off to school.  Here I am blocking in the flowers, leaves and the rosehips of my design (based on Irish wild roses). I always start a painting with a ground of quinacridone violet, and use yellow as a block. I will be very busy until this is finished, so just about everything else is on hold!