artwanderings

I have a collector’s mindset. I think most artists share this wonderful affliction. It all started with office supplies. I love coloured pens and pencils, yellow-pink-blue-purple highlighters, and markers. I could never get enough of those multi-coloured stickies. To this day, I always feel a little bit surprised that those square, yellow (boring) stickies still fill the aisles.

And art supplies… Paint of all types and colours, brushes, paper, stamps and stamp-pads, markers, glue sticks, pastels, crayons, paper, canvas and sketchbooks. Sketchbooks are my latest lure… wherever I went I would seek out the sketchbooks. Friends started to give me sketchbooks. I now have a really nice collection. And I do use them.

I also collect stuff that doesn’t appear to be useful to anyone but me. It all started on my canoe trips. Most lakes are connected by a portage, and during those slow, arduous treks, with a heavy pack on my back, I would spend the time taking in the surroundings. I love the boreal forest, especially in the Canadian Shield country of northern Ontario. The rotted out shells of birchbark resting on the forest floor were like found treasure for me. There was something both beautiful and fragile about these relics. I would pick one up, strap it to my pack, fiercely protect it from the campfire that night, and somehow find a way to bring it home. It was a bit of an obsession… I just kept on collecting birchbark. The birchbark sometimes made it into my paintings, but for the most part, it acted as a muse for me in the studio. For a while I created paintings using the birchbark.

I also made amulets for the forest. Smaller shells of birchbark became bracelets and rings. I imagined these as magical totems that could take one back to the forest.

This past year, I made drawings of all my collected birchbark, and I think I am now ready to send them back to the forest. The book of drawings is part of the Art House Co-op Sketchbook Project. You can find out more about this project at http://www.arthousecoop.com/sketchbookproject2011.

I wonder what I will collect next.

I didn’t always draw trees. When I started to explore my interest in the natural world, I spent a lot of time drawing everything around me. A couple of years ago, I took a fine arts course called “Representations of Nature”. We explored artmaking using the themes of the four elements of nature: earth, water, fire and air.

I spent about four months drawing and painting the sky. I live in an apartment that faces east, and nearly every day I was greeted with an amazing sunrise.  I made many drawings and paintings of the sky. I created a photo time-lapse series of the sunrises I experienced. And I made an artist’s book dedicated to the sky.

Here is a painting I made during that time, inspired by the spectacular sunrises of Autumn.

Eventually, I returned to Earth, and began to consider the world around me. I am a hiker and canoe camper, and I love spending time in the forest. The forest became the muse for my artmaking, and I began to focus on the trees around me. At the same time I was thinking about the trees, I found myself drawn to collecting ephemera from the forest floor. I just loved the birchbark and brought it back to my studio space.

One of my first forest-inspired pieces was a painting on a piece of birchbark.

And, that’s really how it started. Stay tuned for more on my tree-inspired art.