Julie McGregor's Art: A Spectral Mine

Julie McGregor's art is figurative, richly coloured, with dense backgrounds of oil embedded into the canvas. An heir of the Impressionists and the Group of Seven, she takes the palette further, exploring the nuances and depths of her subjects, their beauty, their slight asymmetries, the way they are contained in the multi-coloured brushwork she has sculpted them out of. Not just thick light revealing the features of her figures, but the surfaces glow with jewel-like dabs and dashes giving the sense of a spectral mine illumined from within by its precious ores. In all of her works an inner power emanates, as if from the energies of the earth itself. Check out her paintings. Beautiful.

Julie McGregor is a Toronto artist and jazz singer.

                                 

Tea Ceremony finished, & awaiting a poem...

The india ink sketch could have gone in different directions, left white, coloured with pencil, painted in any number of styles. It was soothing today to colour in pencil. Green, and more green. While I'm still not enamoured of her face, it's okay. All this piece needs now is a poem. When I do that, I'll crop it tighter.

I chose the unforgiving path. No pencil sketch to begin with, only India ink. Then coloured pencil and inks. Nothing loose. No approaching it. And no way back once begun.

A decision made, to use the green pencil, the red ink, to go over a black line, cannot be undone. The mark is on the paper. Accept what is unfolding.

In this world, of the tea ceremony, the moment of connection, soothing satiety, the pouring of life, there is no room for hesitancy.
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And there I was, after a busy weekend, cooking our Thanksgiving feast on Saturday, cleaning  and shopping yesterday, telling myself, today is my day to relax. Which lasted all of 10 minutes before I was occupied with the Tea Ceremony sketch, and which took me through the afternoon with email breaks and uplifting videos at YouTube.

Lovely day, all in all.

                                 

India Ink Sketch - Tea Ceremony

A sketch, in ink - I know, seriously, I'm too lazy to use pencil first. She's not 'pretty' but older I'd say. Once I colour and do whatever she won't look like this so I thought I'd share an early moment.

I didn't finish the patterns of her kimono on all the fabric. The rising from the earth, the rockface I mentioned in my last post, that sense of the Canadian Shield, the Precambrian rock, this is what I wanted to convey. Leaving some of the fabric without pattern seemed to emphasize this quality in the overall shape of the composition. I mean, along with the grace and delicacy of an important spiritual and social ritual - the tea ceremony.

                                 

Angelman, the flowering tree

'Angelman,' as I call him, is based on an india ink sketch that has been brought to the state you see him through Photoshop Elements.

When I drew him from wherever he came, I mused on 'flowering trees,' extensive roots, connectedness, capillaries of culture, warmth, protection, strength, wisdom, bold love, how hands, our hands, are wands in the world. His hands are his wings. His wings are the sweep of the rooted world and sky. He is gold, like the sun.

I think of William Blake, and visionary art, of mysticism.

My preference is the image that is composed of the India ink drawing finished digitally. I copied his image into a new layer and added filters, coloration, clonings, dimming it from 100% opacity until he spread a translucent web of capillaries and rock colours over my computer screen. Perhaps he is like the gold embedded in the earth. Or a rising sun.

This week I received difficult news, 3 places I submitted work to some months ago said no, my contract where I'm working will end in a week, and my taxes were reassessed with the result that I owe. Sigh. Oh, and my daughter is waffling over whether to spend Saturday here when I cook my family a Thanksgiving dinner.

Today I worked 8½ hours without a lunch break. The world is a glorious place, though sometimes it presents rockfaces to us, and we must climb them.

Original image. 11"x8", coloured India inks on paper.