Jean Burman

“Blogging On”

pen and watercolour illustration 9″ x 12″

Jean Burman Copyright 2008

It’s been one year today since I wrote my very first article for this BLOG! Back then I didn’t have a clue what I was doing! And 52 weeks… 66 articles and 40 cartoon/ illustrations later… I still don’t! ~grin~ But one thing I do know… it’s been massive fun!

I have learned a couple of things though.

I’ve decided there is a very good reason why the word blog also rhymes with the word slog… not to mention the words plod, flog, job and sob. And they say there are no coincidences! ~grin~

Blogging is not for the faint hearted. Topics don’t just fall from the sky on the day you would like them to… but having said that… I’ve been very surprised how often they turn up at the eleventh hour and pretty much write themselves! Like all creative “process”… it can’t be hurried. I firmly believe there is a time and a place for every story… and every picture ever made or written. Having faith and trusting in the “process” really helps!

Blogging is hard work. Especially when you need artwork to go with stories at least once a week! The cartoons and illustrations have really helped here… as once the idea has been “conceived” the work materialises onto the page fairly quickly. The cartoons are pure joy… I love to do them! They generally take around 3 hours to complete… sketching out… inking in… then applying the watercolour washes… (allowing for drying times in between). By the time I’m done I’ve become firm friends with many of the characters who turn up on the page. And they all pretty much remind me of “someone somewhere” in the real world!

Blogging is a solitary pursuit… (but way less lonely than the pursuit of the practising studio artist). It does however require that a certain amount of solitary time be set aside “just to think”. Ideas percolate continually… and I’ve learned the hard way how imperative it is to write them down as soon as they surface… even if it means getting out of the shower with your hair still in a lather… or screeching to a halt in the express lane on the Motorway… or crawling around on the floor in the dead of night looking for your glasses! This past year I have written and sketched on pretty much whatever I had to hand when the idea struck… from paper napkins to toilet paper… but even then… the best ideas slipped by in the middle of the night when I was too tired to get out of bed… and too sure they would still be there in the morning! They weren’t……. alas! *sigh*

Blogging is a great way to find out who your friends are (okay just kidding)… but this place would be way less fun without the loyal support of the many friends (who visit here from the four far-flung corners of the earth)… and who choose to step up to the plate to comment on what’s been said… or what’s been painted… or just to say “g’day how are ya’ mate!” I love you all!

Blogging is a mystery to most people in the real world. Sad but true. I can’t tell you how many times friends in the real world have enthusiastically told me “Oooo… I love your BLO(B)… I read it back in September… anything new since then?” Sheesh… I can’t even remember September… a year’s a long time in the blogger’s world! LOL

Some interesting stats…

In excess of 17,000 people from a total of 25 countries have visited this website over the past 12 months. Kinda scarey eh? (but in a good way!)

There have been 1,085 comments made over that time… (probably at least half of them mine! ~chuckles~) as friends and visitors participate in the many and varied conversations that go on “behind the topics” on any given day. For those not in the know… it’s a whole ‘nother world back there and a great place to be! Conversations sometimes ramble on for a week or more and have reached the over 40 mark on several occasions as we banter back and forth on relatively tame topics ranging from politics to sex to religion (!) So next time you visit… don’t forget to check the COMMENTS… and jump right in if you want to!

I’ve discovered that Blogging is a lot like life really. Unpredictable, unreliable, unrelenting, and consistent only in it’s inconsistency… but thoroughly absorbing and fascinating too! The pays nothing to write home about… but then that’s not the reason we do it. So why do we do it? (As a working artist, writer, wife and mother, with my work cut out for me already… I really can’t say! *wink*) No-one really knows. We just do it because we can’t not… and it IS a heck of a lot of fun!

Next up in the Coral Seas series…

Shoal Water

oil on 6″ x 6″ gallery wrapped canvas

Artwork

Copyright Jean Burman 2008

sideview

Not much I guess. Unless it’s yours! And I remember well… the day I stumbled upon the existence of a man who once, long ago shared my name… (as well as my love for the watercolour medium!)

Intrigued? Well… so was I!

When I was younger I used to daydream about my heritage…. and as a fourth generation Aussie descended (on my father’s side) from Scottish immigrants to this wide brown land… have even (okay maybe only once or twice *wink*) romanticised the notion that I may have been related… somewhere way back… to someone important! Okay… who hasn’t? (chuckles)

Back then I used to wonder about which branch of the family we might have been descended from.

My father was a silent man who never spoke of family… it was only recently we discovered the existence of not one but five great aunts (all of them… now long since gone and silent as the grave!) Okay - way off track now…

So was it Herman’s (Moby Dick) branch of the family… or was it the Lord with the ancestral seat near Edinburgh? Hahaha… truth is… probably neither! But surely we had to be related to someone!

And so it was into this mood of wishing to belong to “someone somewhere” that the unwitting Arthur Melville inadvertently stepped… poor man *wink* No-one could have been more surprised and delighted to learn… just a few years ago… about a man I’d never even heard of before… an artist no less… and not just any old artist… but one who had been one of the greatest and least known watermedia artists of his time!

Surely I could be related to him…oh please!? ~laughs~

Incidentally… Elinor shares his name too (that probably make us sisters)… hers being a middle name… and mine being my maiden surname!

Okay… here’s the skinny.

Arthur Melville lived at the turn of the 19th century (1855 - 1904) at the height of the Impressionist movement…

But he was not one of them!

He was labelled an Orientalist as many of the Impressionists of the day (who painted in the near and middle east) were…

but he wasn’t entirely one of them either!

Stephen Quiller in his 2004 article for The Artist’s Magazine described Melville as one of the greatest yet “least known” watermedia masters of all time”. His loose style could easily have been mistaken for Impressionism… but in truth Arthur Melville leaned more toward the Glasgow Boys (although he was never one of them) than either French or American Impressionism! No… it appears that Arthur Melville was a leader not a follower… and very different to them all.

Born in Scotland… during his early years he travelled to Paris where he was introduced to Impressionism.

TECHNIQUE: Around this time he developed what later became known as the “blotchesse” technique which entailed soaking his watercolour paper and then saturating it with Chinese White. The paper was then stretched and dried… giving a surface which could easily be scrubbed back and reworked back to the paper beneath. This process… innovative at the time… gave great atmosphere to his paintings. Quiller remarked “looking at Bravo Toro you can smell the dust and hear the crowd!”

He travelled extensively around the Middle East and the Mediterranean Sea… drawing inspiration there for now famous works which hang in galleries such as The Tate in London and the Victoria and Albert Museum in England… where Bravo Toro (watercolour 22 x 30) now hangs.

His watercolours were not small and intimate but rather bold and expressive and considered quite radical for the times.

Quiller points out how for this reason “Melville’s works were often “skyed” or placed out of eyeline at national exhibitions” (Some things never change! LOL)

He befriended John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler somewhere along the way and served together with Whistler on the hanging Committee of the Walker Art Gallery. In a letter to his beloved Beatrix (Chinkey)… Whistler remarked:

“I get on well with Melville… well indeed I could not have got on without him!”

And so it was that Arthur Melville was a man ahead of his time… but although he enjoyed moderate success during his lifetime… he was never fully appreciated… much less understood. Why does this not surprise me? (slap… ooo ouch… that hurt!)

And the reasons for his lack of acknowledgment were simple. He was at the heart of it a modest man… and nowhere near flamboyant enough in his persona to ensure his own immortality. He took no mistresses… he hadn’t escaped to the South Seas… and hadn’t gotten around to cutting off an ear by the time he died suddenly from typhoid… on the verge of his artistic prime!

Sadly… while his work embodied the spirit of the coming age… it “apparently” lacked the blatancy that would attract the criticism to support it. In short… critics of the day either missed the point… or couldn’t figure it out!

The thought occurs to me… that perhaps this may have been different had he the chance to live a little longer!

Sadly for me… I will never get to meet him. And the truth is… I more than likely share no blood connection to this man who shared my name once long ago.

But it was fun getting to know him… and making the discovery that we have at least two things in common… a love of the watercolour medium… and a healthy disrespect for the conventional way!

That’s more than good enough for me… *wink*

The short and the long of it is… we don’t always get what we want… but we do seem to get what we need!

artwork & content Copyright Jean Burman 2008
cartoon - pen & watercolour 9″ x 12″

This thought (and the resultant irreverent cartoon) occurred to me out of the blue on my evening walk late yesterday as I “fell in” along the path behind a couple of women whose differences struck me as being uncharacteristically comical!

Please don’t get me wrong… I am not meaning to be unkind! But following along behind the pair at a cracking pace… it struck me that these two women… (one top heavy and the other one… well… you know… kinda the other way round… ~grin~) were more than probably chasing the same impossible ideal! The insolent thought flashed through my mind… ‘now if only it were possible for them to swap upper torsos…’ but mercifully the thought flashed out again before my subconscious reproof could find it’s voice… (and I’m eternally grateful for that ~grin~)

But it just didn’t seem fair! And it didn’t seem right either that in all probability… it wouldn’t have mattered how much exercise the two were to do… the outcome would more than likely still be the same. The facts are… we are each of us stamped with the maker’s mark and try as we might… we simply can’t change the way we’re made!

We had passed the 2.5 kilometre mark… (me bringing up the rear with not an icecube’s hope in hell of passing them) by the time I decided… ever the artist and interested people watcher… that it was way more interesting [anyway] to be back here listening out of earshot… to the lovely lilt of muffled conversation and watching from my unusual vantage point ~grin~ the animated gestures of these two good friends.

I had decided by now that they were in fact good friends… the easy flow of barely audible conversation bubbled over between them in such a joyful and infectious way!

By the 3 kilometre mark we had really hit our stride… and it was right about then that I had the epiphany. This walk had nothing whatsoever to do with the mere shape of a body… or the physical differences between the two… (or even getting fit for that matter).

But it had everything to do with what most of us have in some measure (and hopefully don’t take too much for granted)… the camaraderie of friendship and time spent talking and laughing together… and the sense of “belonging” that having good friends brings.

These two were champions at it! And that’s got to be better than being “a perfect 6″ any old day of the week don’t you think?

“Castaway”

oil 6″ x 6″ on gallery wrapped canvas

 Copyright Jean Burman 2008

3/4 view

Copyright Jean Burman 2008 

Here is the next one in the Coral Sea series. Still fun… but I can feel a cartoon coming on!

“Life in the Fast Lane”

oil painting 6″ x 6″ on free-standing gallery wrapped canvas

artwork & content Copyright Jean Burman 2008

This little painting was inspired by the notion of how fast life passes… regardless of which lane we might find ourselves in! Here we are… already… 12 days into the brand New Year… and I have been having a lot of fun with the Genesis heat set oils as you can see!

The thing that astounds me the most with this paint is the sense of comparative freedom and ease you have… by comparison to the watercolour medium I mean! I almost have to pinch myself (and can’t believe I am actually saying this, as anyone who knows me at all, knows how much I love the unique challenges and magic of watercolours!)

But… despite myself… I am becoming almost seduced by the delicious leisurely pace of this new-to-me oil painting medium. I still have lots to learn (as you oil painters out there can -and no doubt will- attest to! ~grin~) but I feel confident that it’s going to be a cruisey laid-back and rather enjoyable learning curve. What a nice change this will be from the frenetic fanaticism that almost always accompanies the never ending quest for the large, perfectly executed and flawless watercolour wash!

Oh… I’m so looking forward to it!

Copyright Jean Burman 2008 3/4 view