Ducks and Days

The end of July has turned out to be as busy as the rest of it. The art show season is finished, but I'm now in the throes of preparations for Herts Open Studios - for further details click here. During the week I've had off work, I've wrapped & labelled photo cards & posters and mounted originals, painted and wrapped cards, and received so many art-related packages (including that linocut set that I wasn't going to bother with until later in the year . . . ) that I've started my own bubblewrap mountain! I'm also now the proud possessor of a card rack, folding camping table and two collapsible chairs, although that has quite a lot to do with a visit to the open-air theatre at Tolethorpe, which involved eating a picnic sitting on a slope in a howling gale. Luckily the play was excellent.














Flying Ducks
© Teresa Kirkpatrick 2009

I haven't been entirely idle on the painting front in July, however. I finally got round to doing two cherished projects - my Flying Ducks, which is supposed to be a pastiche on the ceramic ones which everyone had on their walls in the 1950's - and The Days are now Short, which I first thought of doing during a performance of the Merry Widow at the ENO last year. I fell in love with the lighting and it has stayed with me ever since. It shows Elrond and Arwen in a scene which we don't actually see in Lord of the Rings: waiting almost desperately for the outcome of a battle in which they can take no part. The full quote is: "The days are now short. Either our hope cometh, or all hope's end." I like Tolkien's word-play here. Aragorn, who is fighting the battle, is also known as Estel (Hope).



















The Days are now Short
© Teresa Kirkpatrick 2009

I have plenty more Tolkien-related paintings in my head, and many non-Tolkien ones too. Eventually I will get round to completing them all!

What does a Mallorn look like?

and other questions which arise when illustrating scenes from the work of JRR Tolkien!



















Spring Surpassed his Wildest Hopes
© Teresa Kirkpatrick 2009

Amidst the mad March flurry of painting (which resulted in seven pictures, only one of which has been consigned to the rejects pile) I've produced one Tolkien-inspired work which is good enough to take to this year's Oxonmoot. Spring Surpassed his Wildest Hopes is based on the scene in Lord of the Rings Book Six Chaper VIII (The Scouring of the Shire). The title is a quote taken directly from the book and Sam is standing in front of "the only mallorn west of the Mountains and east of the Sea" which has just burst into bloom in the Party Field next to Bag End.

For the layout I consulted a map of Hobbiton in Karen Wynn Fonstad's Atlas of Middle Earth - you might not be able to see the river running through the horizontal line of trees beyond the village, but it's there all the same LOL. The large house in the middle of the picture is The Grange. I decided to base the mallorn sapling on a silver birch which grows on the green in front of my house; Tolkien describes it as having long silver leaves and bursting into golden flowers in April. Elsewhere in LoTR we learn that full-grown mallorn leaves turn to gold in Autumn but they do not fall until "the new green opens . . . and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers". So I figured the "new green" would be a bit like the silver foliage on our own garden plants, and that the sapling's original silver leaves would have fallen already . . . Oh, and the figure of Sam is based on me standing hands on hips with my back to a mirror. Although his legs are better than mine LOL.

I was really keen to portray a gentle spring day so I used the same colours as for my spring flower paintings: indian yellow, cobalt blue, alizarin crimson. I laid down a wash of raw sienna first so that the finished work didn't look too cold (I failed to do this with a previous Tolkien painting of Tom Bombadil's Wedding and have come to heartily dislike it!). During the couple of weeks I painted Spring Surprised we actually had some gentle spring weather which helped tremendously! For example, my first attempt at the trees in the background was far too green - I had to take a lot of the colour out and overpaint with yellow or pink to prevent it looking like Summer. And I knew this was necessary by taking a look out of the window!

A lot of the ideas I've had recently for Tolkien paintings have been based on his descriptions of colour rather than action in the book. Here's a clue to the next one . . . I've downloaded several photos of runner bean plants . . .!?