Exhibit Announcement: Earth Day in Balboa Park

April 18-19, 2015

Earth Day Exhibit, theme: water
In this group show, Billie will be hanging a 36" X 72" pastel tryptich featuring ocean and cloud references.

Centro Cultural de la Raza
Balboa Park, 2004 Park Blvd, San Diego, CA

Billie Hamilton: Tryptich: Rain-Voice in the Humpback's Song, 2014
soft pastel on hardboard panel, 24" x 36" each

Greenland is Melting*

And still
you ask, Why? and

even more, Whether?
Where’s the hard proof? and

anyway, What can I do?
And still

Greenland is melting.
Get ready.

*dedicated to Dr. Richard Somerville, climate scientist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

new book

Just bought
Carter Foster's Hopper Drawings (Whitney Museum).

Pastel Painting In Progress

work in progress, 42" x 42" (detail)

It's merely a study at this point, but I'm thinking it needs scale: 42" x 64" seems about right. On paper. Arches Reeves BKF comes in a roll that wide. I want a fawn or kraft color, which I'll over-wash with a thin cerulean blue ink with mercurochrome edges (!) Then I'll coat the paper with a clear sanded pastel ground. It should be mounted on birch panel with a 2" box edge. 
The first layer will block in quickly--probably Mount Vision stick pastels for good tooth. The stippling and sgraffito will take quite a lot of time--at least a month of steady work, but I'm looking forward to it. I think this one has legs.
 

Carbothello pastel pencils worn to stubs

Time to order more Carbothellos!

Exhibit Announcement: "La Mujer" at Centro Cultural de la Raza, 3/17 - 4/12

Billie Hamilton has five pastel paintings in this exhibit. 

Billie Hamilton: Dyptich--Guadalupe 43 & 44, 2014
pastel on hardboard panel, 18" x 24" each

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk. --Paul Klee

Spent the afternoon studying this compact and critically important primer. I first read it in the mid-'60s, a tattered and poorly translated "mimeo" copy borrowed from a teacher at SFAI. I was less impressed then than now--too young, I suppose, to appreciate such basic basics. This is really about the heart and spirit of drawing, of rendering both emotion and reason. 

I believe Paul Klee has influenced me more than any other teacher--his timeless pedagogy fills my head with ideas. And then, of course... Kandinsky.





Wow, I just found a free PDF download of both volumes of Klee's notebooks: The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature.  I just saved $400. Get your own copies here: http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/tag/art-history/

So much to learn, so little time . . .

Dolphin and Hawk show, 3/7/15

Last night's show in La Jolla:

On the easel

New pastel painting (detail):

Here's a new study (in progress) with stippled passages, rendered in pastel on paper. The under-painting is a cerulean and cobalt ink wash on Rives BFK paper. I coated the blue wash with a transparent acrylic ground impregnated with marble dust--gives the substrate enough tooth to bind heavy pastel layers. I'm using a combination of Carothello, Pitt, and Conte pastel pencils for the stippled details. Under-layers are Unison, Schmincke, Sennelier, and Mount Vision sticks. Wish I had some Henri Roche deep cobalt orange-red . . . saving my pennies.

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist. --Georges Seurat

 
Today I pulled one of my favorite books* from the shelf, and spent the morning musing about the Seurat drawings I'd seen as a teen. I was living with my grandmother in San Francisco and had just started art school. That exhibit of mysterious black Conte drawings changed my life, expanded my perspective on art and its imaginative possibilities! I realized then I must become more serious in my studies and commitment to art as a vocation, as a calling. Ah, to be 15 again . . .

*Hauptman, Jodi, et al. George Seurat: The Drawings, 2007.