It has been a long while since I’ve had the opportunity to draw a car. Which is a bit sad, because I like cars  One of my work colleagues has a GORGEOUS show car that I thought I’d have a go at rendering in ink and watercolour as a bit of an experiment. Here are a few “work in progress” shots and then the final. I am quite pleased with the way it turned out. Working in watercolour became more and more nerve-wracking the further into the project I got…I was very nervous about messing it up and having to start all over again!!

Hey guys! I’m giving a gorgeous book away over on my michellegeorge.net blog. This book is so beautifully designed it makes reading theology palatable Click on the photo to go and take a look!

After I’d been through the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition and made sure I got thoroughly lost exiting the gallery, I spent some time sitting in the sculpture garden enjoying the solitude.

There are some truly beautiful pieces in the garden. I was visited by a blue wren and his harem as I sat in the shade and sketched.

Oops! The Carillon has a bit of a lean to it One of the pitfalls of drawing with my sketchbook on my lap. Hope it doesn’t fall into the lake!

For my weekly artist date yesterday I went to the exhibition of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s art at the National Gallery of Australia. It was fascinating. The loose lines and bold colours, the huge lithographic posters. Beautiful.

The thing that fascinated me most though was the subject of the vast majority of the artworks … they were prostitutes and cabaret personalities. Toulouse-Lautrec lived for weeks at a time in brothels in order to do series of drawings – to capture these women in their most vulnerable, humane moments. He hung out back stage at baudy cabaret shows and painted the portraits of young men who had drunk one too many absinthe cocktails. His portraits … although sensitive and beautiful portrayals … are of a very dark and seedy underworld.

As I looked around me in the gallery halls it was easy to see that there were a lot of families and several very wealthy, high society patrons visiting and viewing the artworks. The kind of people that pride themselves on being the pillars of the community…and yet here we were all standing together admiring this deeply sensual, gritty art. Were they understanding what they were seeing? Perhaps they had abstracted themselves out to the point where they were merely looking at marks on paper. No-one seemed to bat an eyelid.

I found it more than a little ironic. Was that lifestyle no longer shocking or disturbing because it was being portrayed as oil on cardboard? Would photographs have been more confronting? Was it the passage of years perhaps? Looking at the dark side of life through the lens of history….did that make it less desperate? These were real people caught in a lifestyle that left their mouths twisted in wry little pasted-on half-smiles that hid the conflict within and with eyes that seemed to lead to a haunting emptiness.

All of those artworks collected in a beautiful, pretty, clean gallery, presented as an exhibition….it almost felt as though prostitution had been normalised and made acceptable fodder for upper-class entertainment, just as it had been in the halls of the Moulin Rouge in La Belle Epoch Paris. It felt romanticised.

It’s not acceptable of course. Would you want your child working like that? No, me neither.

I don’t know what Toulouse-Lautrec’s intent was when he was capturing these tableaux, I doubt his motives were altruistic, but they certainly made an impression on me. Good art makes us think. It makes us uncomfortable. It makes us react.

Summer holidays normally means relaxing and chilling under the air conditioner…not this year…my aircon has broken and we hare having a nasty week of extreme heat and high winds (AKA high fire danger weather). I took to painting to distract myself….

I did the drawing on location and then added watercolour when I got home. It felt a bit weird drawing in public!

I think I need to get some lessons for doing landscapes…I’m not liking how these are turning out at all :\

Sitting by the beach on a perfect Summers’ day is just the thing I needed before I head back to work tomorrow.

My work colleagues spoiled me rotten this Christmas and gave me some gorgeous art supplies. The journal is hand stamped leather with handmade paper inside…and it smells absolutely DIVINE!

I was nervous about doing regular sketches in such a special book, I didn’t want to fill it with nonsense that I couldn’t share with other people…so I came to the decision that I would fill the pages with quotes and notes that I found inspirational or meaningful in various ways.

The paper is delicate and is taking some getting used to…it doesn’t like erasers or sharp pencils. I need to take it easy with water colours too. I’ll no doubt end up with some disasters…but I hope I end up with a book full of food for thought by the end of the new year. If I counted correctly I’ll have 50 or so spreads to fill.

I finally had a chance to sit and draw some of my birthday presents. It has been a busy week, so this was a nice therapy break

I spend a fair percentage of my time on the weekends waiting for boys on bikes to come down hills. This is another waiting drawing