Compositions in Time

What a summer I had!  In my summer studio in Duntara, a small community on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean,   I work almost exclusively in reclaimed wood and wood assemblage.  The whole series is called Compositions in Time.  I scour the  beaches in my area for finds, chat with people about my love for the old and discarded, and forge interesting friendships that often result in finds coming my way.  Everyone want to get in on creation.


It was one of my most productive periods in years.

 With two shows slated, one a group show in July at 2 Rooms Contemporary Art Projects in Duntara,   and the other a solo show in September at Two Whales, Port Rexton,  I knew I  didn't have time to waste.

Here's my  art summer in pictures....

 Looking across the  Duntara harbour at our house (it's the little speck on the far shore)

Our garden that rolls to the sea with views that inspire. 

Our new pristine workshop (shared with my husband)  was completed in early May after a fire demolished our old one the year before.   Thanks to a kitchen reno in our St. John's house this space has mega counters and storage and always looks so organized and pristine.

Showtime 



Two Rooms Contemporary Art Projects, Duntara .  This is not your ordinary gallery.

And this is not your usual opening....  What a beautiful day we had. 

Some shots of my work in the gallery

And then on to Two Whales in September.... 

 Two Whales Coffee Shop , art John Hoffstetter 

I loved how my work looked so comfortable on the walls of this old house/ coffee shop. 

And there you have it.  This fall I started posting  on Instagram in earnest as a way to be accountable.  While I miss my wood pursuits, I've been experimenting with encaustic monotype and collage.  I seem  have a great need to create, decompose and recompose, where's it going I have no idea. 

Endings and beginnings

Yearly transitions have marked my life since I first began teaching in the early 1970s.  September still remains a month for new beginnings and untold possibilities.  I need that this year after a dismal summer of cold weather,  unexpected house repairs, and then a fire in our Duntara workshop.

The way it was....

Now....

Summer is my time to create art and our workshop was where it happened. My summer art pursuits changed over the last three years.  If you aren't familiar with my new work you can read about my Compositions in Time here and here.

I lost most  of my salvaged wood  gathered over the last three years,  2 partially finished assemblages, encaustic medium, my lovely band saw and lots of small bits and bobs.  As a result the sum of my  assemblage creations this year was 2, one of which has smoke damage. That might not be so bad if I weren't getting ready for a group show in July and a  solo show September 2016.

Samples of past compositions  ( better composed  than photographed)

                  2014 (Private collection)                                   2013 (Private Collection)

2013 ( Private Collection)

 The pressure is on.

It's not like you can order my materials from a store.  I came upon them in dribs and drabs, and I was so proud of my collection of "specials",  the objects/woods that usually prompt a composition.   I loved them so much I had them standing along the work benches to ogle them.  Ah pride goeth before the fall.  These were the ones that were damaged beyond use with smoke and noxious gasses.   They're gone now, and with them all sorts of possibilities.  Interestingly, the insurance guy describes them as scraps of wood with no monetary value.   Really?

 Up to this point all my wood came from the  areas around my summer house on the Bonavista Peninsula.  I liked the colour consistency that automatically happens when you are working with a palette limited by location.  Some of the work was obviously sourced from outside buildings as the third one above and others were woods used  inside. It's clear that the wood controls the composition and the feel of each piece.

 September: Begin chapter 2

Friends have taken up the cause and are bringing me any salvaged wood they find.  My criteria of must be worn and have paint on it is seems to make it easy to find these gems.  If it has bits of wallpaper even better.

 An artist friend began my new collection after hearing about our plight.  I now have a new colour and the compositions will be from the Avalon peninsula,  specifically  Bay Roberts.  Thanks Peter!

 I've collected some new wood myself while walking.   I'm getting calls from other friends who have things for me.

 My husband is getting worried because all of this is ending up in our small workshop in St.  John's, his domain, not a shared one.   I am not allowed to take over, and I have to store the wood in my studio.  The ground rules have been laid.  Many I not end up consumed by creativity and forget my place!

For the first time in a month I feel optimistic.

Making meaningful art

Have you ever watched as you back up your IPad photos?  I just saw my life over the last four  years flash before my eyes.  My IPad 2 turns 4 in nine days.  It just won't hold its charge any more.  I see parallels with my own life especially with art production.  I am all intention and I quickly dwindle.

But back to the photos.  There were a lot of photos of my work and vacation pics.   As they flitted onto the computer I understood why there is so much blue in my recent work, and why water and sky have begun to dominate my imagery.  Many of the pics were of a Mediterranean cruise out of Venice and various shots from the south of England = sky and water.

Minack Gardens, Cornwall

View from Doc Martin's House, Port Issac, Cornwall

Grand Canal, Venice 

And of course my summer place is always about the scene in front of me, sky and water.


And from those experiences work springs forth.  Some make it to the Leyton Gallery and others are experiments....

 Above and Below 10 x 12 in. 2012 encaustic and paper on cradled panel

Lost fishing nets floating in the vast ocean under a moonlit sky

Experiment...  Water on sun lit pebbles in a shallow pond, encaustic monotype, later chopped into squares and rearranged into a grid

 Experiment (Gulch Duntara), encaustic, just to the left of my house looking down from the road into the water

On the bay, 2012 encaustic monotype applied to hardboard

This work is a direct response to sitting  in my rocking chair looking out the bay for hours over many days.  An artist friend now has it on his wall.  That makes me very happy.  Of course having his work on my wall makes me even happier.  

So my work is becoming more landscape oriented.  I didn't plan this; it just happened. 

Some artists are  very focused and develop a "look" that is recognizable. They strive to achieve this and many buyers like this predictability.   My work is not like that;  I am an intuitive responder to all that is around me.  One of my friends often points out  (not in a negative way) how different my work looks from year to year, but I admit, it makes me feel like a bit of an artistic fraud at times.

 While these land and sea pieces have a coherency, they are very different from my  Remnant series and my Reading a Garden work. But, when I stand back and consider this I realize that to the untrained eye it might appear that way, but woven into everything I do is my response to the passage of time, and no where is it more obvious than in nature.

How about you?  Is there a tight coherency in your art making or does the work evolve without your planned consent?

Full moon series

Whew!  Just got back from a whirlwind trip to close up the summer house and say good-bye to my wood assemblages until May. Living on the edge of the Atlantic this time of year is cool and noisy. The sound of the sea's movement gets louder and more ominous.  Winter there is not for the faint of heart. All those things help me pack it in  sometime around late October or  mid November.

And here I am, officially a townie again.


It's been a busy couple of days getting  ready for a group Christmas show at the Leyton Gallery. The series of work in the show is called Full Moon, Duntara.  Living in this magical place  in the summer months  puts me in tune with landscape and nature.   I rarely paint landscape, but it has been creeping into my work in different ways over the last several years.


All five pieces in this series to date are mixed media encaustic.  They are small snippets of reflection about one of my favourite time-when a full moon rises over the hill across from our  summer house. The whole harbour lights as the moonlight  plays across the hills, water and grass.  It's pretty spectacular.

Margaret Ryall, Full Moon, Duntara #1 (2014) 6 x 6 in. mixed media encaustic

Margaret Ryall, Full Moon, Duntara #2 (2014) 6 x 6 in. mixed media encaustic

Margaret Ryall, Full Moon, Duntara #3 (2014) 6 x 6 in. mixed media encaustic

Margaret Ryall, Full Moon, Duntara #4 (2014) 6 x 6 in. mixed media encaustic

Margaret Ryall, Full Moon, Duntara #5 (2014) 6 x 6 in. mixed media encaustic

And now I have to wait until the opening to see them again.  

A summer's work

  Over the last two summers I have devoted my time and creative energies to installations from reclaimed wood and other found materials.  I wrote about my initial interest here and posed the question... Is this art?  I've decided it is.

This summer I realized that I was compartmentalizing  my art making by location.  I paint in  the city (St. John's, NL) and I create installations at my summer home in Duntara.  It makes perfect sense really.  My head is in a totally different place in the summertime.  I spend my days looking at the ocean, prowling beaches, seeing the effects of the passage of time on buildings as they slowly sink to the ground or are blown into the ocean only to wash up in another location.  I watch summer people lovingly restore old homes that would otherwise have fallen into disrepair.  How can I not make work that references my most immediate  summer life?   Added to that is the practicality of not having to drag all my painting supplies and supports  back and forth.

Composition in Time #2, 18 x 28 in., Margaret Ryall, 2013 (Private Collection)

Thanks Carol Bajen-Gahm for loving #2 and giving it a home where I can visit it whenever I want!

This piece created last year, is totally composed of beach finds that were cut and composed (no additional colours are added. The bandsaw and PL Premium adhesive have become my new best friends.  These constructions are heavy and my regular adhesives just didn't do the job.

 I never set out with a preconceived notion for a composition;  I determine its size based on my inspiration piece/object.  In this work it was the worm eaten red piece of plywood.  The curves are a natural extension of this choice with the driftwood replicating the rounded lines.   The nails and roofing materials came from another piece of wood and were added strategically.  The yellow clapboard is a constant colour for houses on the  Bonavista peninsula and the red  is the preferred colour for sheds.  These colours creep into many of the compositions and bring consistency to the body of work without  much thought on my part.  A palette controlled by the foibles of nature, people and location is  a narrow one.  Lots of variables doing  their own thing removes a great deal of decision making for this overthinking artist.

 It was a fruitful summer.  I created 14 assemblages varying in size from 16 x 16 to 36 x 36 to add to the 4 I created the year before.  I sold three of them (always a bonus), received a request to show three  more in a group show in 2016, and organized a venue for a solo show that same year.

Yes, things are moving along nicely and now that my summer fun is behind me, I am looking forward to starting back to work at my White series.  Stay tuned for much more art blogging this year.  I'm excited and back on track.

And yes, I have to stop taking photos of art work with my iPhone, and yes I am getting a new camera and a tripod!

Interpreting landscape

 

From my summers in Duntara, a small coastal community in Newfoundland, I have learned to observe the landscape closely.  When you are removed from the hustle and bustle of regular city life and are forced to rethink how you spend your days, you realize all the small things that pass you by. My already relaxed viewing of the landscape there is further enhanced by the  ocean sounds and visual rhythms.  

 When I travel now, I  give the landscape my undivided attention.  On a boat trip  last summer up Western Brook Pond in Gros Morne National Park, NL,  I was instantly in tune with the landscape around me. A fjord is certainly a structure that makes you feel enveloped by water and land.  Here are some of the shots from this trip and the art work that was created in the weeks following my return to my studio by the ocean.

To get to Western Brook Pond you have to hike in for about half an hour on a very well maintained trail.  The scenery is stunning and although the terrain is flat it is visually interesting. When you look over this small  bridge into the water  your imagination gets the better of you. 

 Slow Drift (2012)  6x8 in.  encaustic monotype on board

Looking to the land ( 2012)  2 (3.5 in x 7.5 in.) encaustic  monotype

If I were standing in the pond looking toward the landscape this is what I imagined it would look like. You may notice that my composition of choice in may of these pieces allows the scene to run off the page.  This is intentional because I had the feeling of a landscape exploding around me and running on forever.

 
Looking back from the boat you see a merging of land and water.  The water is deep here and even on a sunny day the water remains dark and somewhat ominous.  

 Merge (2012)  3 (3.5 in x 7.5 in.) encaustic  monotype

Immersion (2012)  3 (3.5 in x 7.5 in.) encaustic  monotype

What if you were in the water looking up?

And there are so many more to show...

What an opening

 If you follow my blog, you'll know I've experienced all kinds of art opening adventures.  This is another one. Weather seems to be a dominant theme!

The morning was rainy and damp, the opening was happening on the newly built "bridge".  There were thoughts of make shift awnings and who would be the lucky contractor.  All that worry for nothing.  It turned out to be a lovely day with a great turnout for the inaugural exhibition opening at 2 Rooms Contemporary Art Projects in Duntara, NL.  I've been to a lot of openings but this one beat them all. 

 Photo:  Pat Tracey

 Photo: Pat Tracey

  Photo: Pat Tracey

 

Photo: Pat Tracey

Photo: Margaret Ryall

 Photo: Margaret Ryall

The lovely, energetic Catherine Beaudette chatting with a friend, an almost perfect composition!

 Later that evening artists and friends got together to celebrate with a fire on the beach, a celebration tradition in Duntara.  The evening had...

 lots of  spirit and spirits

 

 and good food - moose, salad, watermelon  and the like.

 As night fell we settled in for chats,

 relaxing ,

 and music.

 Of course that was a fitting ending to a day with a lot of differences. Not many openings occur in such idyllic surroundings.  Thank you Catherine Beaudette for your energy , foresight and interest.