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No.44. in my series of short stories.
For several years in the early days of my art I did lots of the Pointillism style of drawing and I happened to find some photos of several of them.
These pictures as you can see are pretty shitty, but they are around 50years old and have been hanging around in cupboards and drawers and dragged with me in my transient life.
They are both done with pointillism though the black one is a little hard to view the dots due to the photography.
Both the pictures were done with a dip pen, a dip pen had a nib and a wooden handle of which there was a slot at one end that the nib fitted into, when the nib was empty of ink you re-dipped it. At primary school we were taught to use a dip pen and each students school desk had an ink well set in to it and ink was put in it each day for our use. Ball point pens hadn't quite started around that time.
You needed pretty good control of the dip pen or it would drop too much ink at one time and make blobs which you then had to use blotting paper to suck it up.
WHY DRAW PLANTS? I was and am still an avid gardener, when I was a teenager my sister and I did most weekends propagating plants in our back yards, getting the plants on their way to maturity and selling them at the Sunday markets, anything to make a quid. I have always thoroughly enjoyed gardening and always had a large shade house, my first one my father built for me when I was around 15 years old, I worked for hours in that shade house and therefore drawing plants was always something I was interested in.
When I arrived in Karratha, Western Australia I was 29 I met a lovely lady who was an artist she was quite a lot older than me and we often went out and about drawing "en plain air" and she coaxed me into going to TAFE to do an art course. Me and school were never very compatible, finally my friend talked me into going, so I signed up for a 5 year art degree with around 8 other students, after 3 months the teacher advised me that I probably wouldn't do much good and I was wasting hers and my time so as usual I got pretty pissed off and left. A few days later I still wasn't very happy about what had happened, so I asked my husband to light a fire on the dirt driveway and I threw all of the art that I had done at TAFE onto that fire. Sitting back on our deck chairs with a few beers and a few more in the esky we watched them burn, vowing that I was going to move on and not be defeated by anyone.
So here I am around 45 odd years later having made a good living out of my art for around 25years. I would have loved that teacher to see how far I have come.
Maybe she has been watching me evolve.