An unusually restful day in Honduras

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Cannonball tree

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

This is what you see if you look up through the lower branches of one of the huge Couroupita guianensis lining the roads at the Lancetilla Botanical Garden.

I had big painting plans for my Road Scholar Inter-generational trip to Honduras with my grandson… but we were kept so busy swimming in rivers, pools and the Caribbean, snorkeling on the reef, whitewater rafting on the Rio Humuya, hiking in the rain forest, planting coffee bushes, and watching our grandkids play soccer with the local kids, I didn’t actually complete anything!  Well I did mail two postcards to other Postcard From My Walk participants, but I’m only now completing the rest of my (barely) started cards, such as Cannonball tree, or turning them into full-size paintings.

10 Painting things to take to Honduras

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Whitewater Rafting on the Urubamba, painted following a previous intergenerational expedition

Watercolour, crayon and ink
©2009 Charlene Brown

I'm setting out this evening with our 10-year-old grandson on a Road Scholar (used to be Elderhostel) intergenerational adventure, Exploring Honduras: Coral Reefs and Mayan Ruins. I've assembled what I hope will be the perfect array of art supplies for the trip. I’m hoping my grandson will paint too, and my list of things we’ll need is based on a couple of the blog posts I wrote two years ago when I took his older brother to Peru – 12 Painting things to take to Peru and 5 things I learned about painting in the Andes.

1. coil bound watercolour sketch book with map and archaeology notes about the Mayan civilization
2. watercolour postcards
3. pencils, sharpener, and eraser
4. crayons and Masquepen masking fluid to use as resists. The wax crayon resist stays in the picture, but I’ll take a piece of crepe to remove the Masqupen when the paintings are dry
5. Koi watercolor pocket field sketch box, with waterbrush
6. palette in a Ziploc bag – with a few favourites that are not included in Koi set – Perylene green, cobalt blue deep, Opera, metallic copper, and Quinacridone Gold.
7. flat and round paint brushes in plastic holder
8. glue stick .for collage
9. Ziploc bags for ephemera – extra stuff and things not immediately suitable for collage. (Plasticized ice cream bar wrappers, for example, have great designs, but can only be glued after scanning and printing on more suitable paper)
10. Camera with extra battery and charger. Apparently Honduras has the same wiring as North America, so this should be easier than previous battery charging efforts…
    
    

Mid-Year Review 2011

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Quebec City

       Watercolour and crayon

       ©2011 Charlene Brown

       Here are a couple of highlights concerning progress on The Plan for 2011:

        In the area of travel journaling, I’ve got a good start on a really big project I’ve been putting off since 2000  – an illustrated journal of our two-month Retirement Grand Tour of Europe on our way back to Canada from Dubai. I used several painted postcards I retrieved from people I’d sent them to at the time, and completed six new paintings for this journal, which was posted during the May-June period corresponding to the trip itself.

       I’ve participated in all six Virtual Paintouts so far this year (Boston, Romania, Cape Town, Japan, Côte d'Azur, and New Zealand, and am having a great time sending and receiving hand-painted postcards from round the world on A Postcard From My Walk.  I’m really pleased to be participating in the group blog – the quality and variety of the artwork is fascinating! Have a look…

       I completed a project about poster production, Making Art with Impact, involving a combination of computer collage and lettering. I’m planning to do more of this ‘poster art’ involving background paintings of Canadian landscapes and cityscapes. This painting of Quebec City will be part of this plan.

       I’d also like to mention something not even in The Plan, that I learned quite accidentally, about observation skills, seeing relationships and relative positions and all that… I wrote about this in Seeing what you’re looking at  Although I can’t say I’ll always see what I’m looking at from now on, this was a big step in the right direction.

Virtual Paintout in New Zealand

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North of Glenorchy, Otago

Watercolour, crayon and CP

©2011 Charlene Brown

I just about didn’t paint anything for the Virtual Paintout this month, because the images of New Zealand on Google Streetview, which must be used for the Virtual Paintout, all seemed kind of dull. Then yesterday, I took what I thought would be one last look at this blog, and found a beautiful painting by Nancie Johnson with the title, Glenorchy-Paradise Road...  Hope she doesn’t mind that I’ve also used this great stretch of road she found. Here’s a link to it. You need to pan left to get the whole panorama I've included in the painting. If you zoom out of Streetview (way out, until you’ve got the map of the west coat of the south island) you’ll see that this is the view from Paradise Road looking west toward the head of the iconic Milford Sound.

Painting on the Edge 2011

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Consolation Lake, Banff National Park

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

Painting on the Edge – for which I have never had a painting accepted – is a Vancouver-based competition, open to all living artists worldwide. This year, I had planned to email them a jpeg (Yes, they accept email entries!) of ‘Consolation Lake,’ but decided it was just another ‘pretty mountain scene’ and nowhere near adventurous enough to have any chance of being juried-in. At first I thought maybe I could improve it with some print collage, but then lost my nerve, thinking collage wouldn’t accomplish much besides reducing the prettiness. So, I saved myself the $20 entry fee, bypassed the middleman, and consigned it directly to my personal Salon des Refusés – a growing body of work consisting of all of my paintings rejected by Painting on the Edge. Last year, I did the same thing with my entry St John’s NL– although at that time, my reason for bypassing the middleman was that I missed the deadline for emailing it in.

Report from Normandy

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Mont St. Michel

Watercolour, crayon and CP

©2011 Charlene Brown

Our first stop in Normandy was Mont St. Michel.  It is virtually an island at high tide, and because of the great area of the very shallow bay over which the tide rises – the wave was described by Victor Hugo as ‘coming in with the speed of a galloping horse’ – I was a little surprised when we arrived at low tide and were allowed to park in the lower lot – we certainly couldn’t go in there when I was at Mont St. Michel in the fall of 1996. I mentioned this to the guard, and quickly gathered he was really sick of being asked about it. Then, at the base of the climb up to the village, we saw a sign explaining that the galloping horse thing only applies during the high spring and fall tides and as this was almost mid-summer, so such drama would be taking place.

such drama would be taking place.

At our next major stop in Normandy, Bayeux, they have something for everyone. I went to see the tapestry of the Battle of 1066, and my husband went to the 1944 Battle of Normandy Museum.

We finished off our ‘driving off into the sunset’ Grand Tour of Europe by ‘hitting the beach’… by which I mean touring the beaches -- and also the battlefields and Memorials -- relating to Canadian participation in World War II.

Eventually, we drove to Brussels to leave our car for shipment to Canada.  It was two months before we saw it again, but that’s another story…

 

Hand-painted postcards from round the World

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The first of the 2011 Alaska Cruise Ships

Watercolour postcard

©2011 Charlene Brown

This is the postcard I sent to Felicity Grace in Switzerland – my May contribution to A Postcard from my Walk. There’s a new post every couple of days on this blog, and the quality and variety of the artwork is fascinating! Have a look…

I am absolutely thrilled with the ‘original’ postcards I have received since the last time I wrote about the Postcard from my Walk blog – I talked about them here and here.

Report from the Périgord and the Loire Valley

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Chambord (with a bit of garden borrowed from Hautefort)

Watercolour, crayon and CP

©2011 Charlene Brown

On June 11, 2000 we were in the Périgord region of France, where we went on a tour of the Chateau Hautefort – probably should have stayed out in their wonderful garden, even though it was threatening rain most of the time we were there. The estate was a real treat – acres of Cedars of Lebanon and geometric and filigree-sculptured boxwood. The inside is mainly spiral staircases and furniture they don’t encourage you to sit on, but you do get a nice look at the geometry of the gardens from the tops of the turrets.

About 2 pm the sun came out, so naturally we headed for the caves!  Lascaux, with their 17,000 year-old cave paintings, discovered in 1940, but closed to the public since 1963, have been faithfully replicated and the result is wonderful to see – all those familiar bulls and horses almost close enough to touch.

We spent a day looking at Chateaux in the Loire Valley, and what a day that was! First, we went to Chambord, the largest of them, with what must be the world’s best arrangement of blue-slate-roofed turrets – and an equestrian show we arrived just in time to see. One of the high-lights was a lady in a blue velvet ball gown riding side saddle over a series of flaming barriers, and the horse, a white Arabian mare, pranced and flicked her two-metre tail in perfect time to the music (which was The British Grenadiers, for some reason). She could teach those Lipizzaners in Vienna a thing or two.  We pressed on to Chenonceau, the one that actually crosses the river (the Cher, which flows into the Loire at Tours) on six beautifully arched piers. As luck would have it, we arrived at the same time as a whole lot of teenagers on a school tour – infinitely more interested in each other than in any beautifully arched piers, lavender and rose gardens, Diana de Poitiers, Henry II, Mary Queen of Scots, or anything else about the place.