Sculpture

So I've been busy busy here in Aix-en-Provence. Hence the lack of posts recently. The last two weeks have consisted of a combination of a sculpture workshop in the morning (led by Greg Wyatt) and landscape painting in the afternoons, and of course a bit of travel and going out on the weekends and nights thrown in there as well. Greg Wyatt is an accomplished sculptor who lives and works in NYC and we are very lucky to have had him come give us a workshop. As we were working I fell in love with sculpting with wax and hope to continue working with the medium if I can when I get home. The only problem is that since wax melts, it is a semi-permanent method, so Greg somehow found the funding to have one of our small sculptures sent to the Coubertin Foundry where Rodin had his works bronzed. So they will be sending one of my sculptures to me cast in bronze and I will receive it in a few months. Unfortunately, I made about 4 wax sculptures, so I am going to try to see if I can transport them home and eventually get them bronzed as well, but seeing as it is an expensive process we'll see.

Here a few of the sculptures I created, more paintings to come.

Plein Air

Today my class went out and did our first plein air oil paintings. I really don't have much experience with this type of painting (I really don't even like landscape painting much), and painting exposed to the elements, sun, wind, and such, while sounding wonderful in theory, has not been enjoyable for me in the past. Today however, was extremely relaxing. I found a shady spot that looked out onto this beautiful wheat feel full of sunlight and beautiful shadows. I won't say that I've quite mastered the technique yet, but I had a great time and I'm fairly satisfied with the outcome.

So here it is:

Peindre au Parc

So I am living in a little apartment with an older French woman in Aix-en-Provence. Her name is Madame LeRouge, like you could get anymore French. Madame is very nice, and it is absolutely beautiful here. So far I've been here 9 days and I've discovered my favorite thing to do. There is a park right next to my apartment that has a little stream, lots of trees, and lots of children. It is the perfect place to go for a walk, just hang out, or in my case, to paint. I've gone a couple of times and just painted in the shade. Today I took my watercolors down to the park, found a nice spot (which ended up being inhabited by a large group of children from a nearby school). Normally so many children would annoy me, but for some reason today I didn't mind. While I was painting a couple of the kids came up to watch me paint and there was one boy in particular who complimented my work. He was very cute, and as his chaperone said, "très curieux".

Here is the piece that I did today.