Faye Hoffman

I’m still here! However, I haven’t been making art for a good month or two. The exception was a paint-out one Sunday in Metchosin which had been booked a while ago. I made it through that day but it was a real challenge. You see, I’ve been very sick for a while and it came to a head recently. I do now have a diagnosis, preliminary medication and an appointment with a specialist, along with a few nasty tests. I was kicking myself about not having the energy or interest to get back into the studio until I took a look at the very long symptom list and right there in the middle was “lack of focus”. So I have an excuse!

But now that I’m feeling a bit better or at least more stable, I am eyeing the Thanksgiving Weekend Monday to dip my toes back into the studio. Softly and quietly, I think.

I once didn’t create art for 7 years, so this is just a teeny blip in time.

Summer holidays were coming to a close and I had a few days left to spend however I wanted. I’d done a couple botanical paintings early in the vacation because I just felt like doing something other than landscapes. I’ll probably go back to the botanicals after I finish a bit of drawing, which is what I want to do… now!

I’ve been pining to life draw for a while now and I knew I had some great 360 degree profile shots of a friend of mine so I cleaned my work table (!) and set up for charcoal work. If you are a Facebook friend of mine, you will know that I post these “What’s on the easel today?” pics which show the various stages of a piece I’m working on right up to the finished piece. Sometimes it feels rather self-involved but what it allows me to do is to view the work objectively as it is in progress. This is much like physically standing back and pondering it to see where to go next or viewing it backwards in a mirror. You can better see the generalities of shape, composition and value at a point when it’s easy to get lost in the details and excitement of finishing a piece. Here’s the full series of the first portrait drawing I’ve done in years:

It is not unusual for me to prefer the earlier stages of a drawing rather than the finished piece. I intend to do a series of portraits of this model from various angles so perhaps I can be self-aware enough at some point to have the finished piece contain the qualities of the mid-way work. What are those qualities?

The work at mid-way point is gestural, loose and suggestive rather than definitive. Of course, it would be great if I was able to have her whole face done at that stage and to have still retained that loose quality. That’s what I’m aiming for in the next pieces. My thought is that a series of the same person from different angles should allow me to get familiar enough with the subject to be able to focus on the treatment rather than the physical features and measurements.

I’ll post more of these drawings as they come, which may be slow because I’m back at work now so it’s evenings and weekends in the studio. I’m sure we’ll get out plein air painting here and there as well… but for now, back to work!

Andrew and I recently spent about a week up island at a somewhat remote campground on Moutcha Bay. This was our first real foray into the world of tent camping and it was a bit rocky with a few lessons learned about camping and painting. We discovered:

• Camping is dirty business
• Don’t forget your camp stove and if you do, make friends with the locals
• The line between relaxing in the silence of nature and boredom is very thin
• I’m not one of those people who want to paint 24/7. Sitting in silence at the campsite didn’t mean I wanted to fill that space with sketching the fern I was admiring. It just meant I was re-energizing for the next plein air session.
• I need to sit in silence a bit before launching into a plein air painting so I can feel* the scene. *I don’t know any other word than “feel” for what happens when the right scene, colours, values occur to me and I know it’s the right moment to start. I discovered this when I had made a bad start to a painting, had wiped my canvas clean and just sat there in silence. Andrew had gone off to forage for something and I was alone with the rocking of the dock on the water. I started looking and my eyes rested on a colour and shape in the water and then it started to make sense. The result was my best painting of the trip:

Including the above painting, we had a couple fantastic painting sessions on the docks of Moutcha Bay Resort. The weather varied so we were able to capture different moods and colours.

We also had the opportunity to experience a working fishing marina, which was a whole new world to me. This place is out there along a steep and windy dirt road and yet there they are; going about their business and pleasure, fishing and guiding and boating. We never felt like strange interlopers. Everyone was more than friendly and just a bit surprised when they found out we were there to paint, not fish. They silently noticed us and went about their business, carefully docking their boats out of our field of view and painting spots. So nice!

A secondary goal of the trip on top of painting was to take lots of reference photos for studio work. And we captured a few gems:

I suspect I will be posting more about this trip and other adventures as we move through our summer holidays. For now, here is what a plein air set-up looks like on the furthest West Coast of Canada: