Poppy heaven

'Tis the season for the humble poppy, and so I've made these quick pastel paintings for the pleasure of working with those gorgeous carmines and vermilions.

I used industrial sand paper, which I found in A2 format at our local Jem og Fix. It was a bright hazard-warning yellow that I wasn't particularly fond of. I tend to avoid the color yellow when I paint, so this enabled me to incorporate something I've always been wary of into my color scheme.

For reference, I used the flowers in our own garden. The photo of the scene below, of a field with the grass mown to one side to form a path, was taken on a trip to the north of Fyn (Funnen) over the Ascension Day weekend.  These are small paintings, about the size of postcards.

Over the Alps

I spent my birthday in Pompeii, visiting the ruins there and making the short drive to nearby Herculaneum. The day before, we were in Pæstum to visit the old Greek temple complex before taking the winding Amalfi coastal road and turning east over the mountains back to Pompeii.


But the story of those trips will have to come another time. Here instead are some photos I took, using my phone camera, during the flight back from Naples to Frankfurt the following day.

It wasn't the first time I had flown over the Alps, but previously they had been shrouded in clouds, or it had been after dark, or I hadn't gotten a window seat. My first view of the Alps, however, was in 2009, on a clear day with the sun shining with much greater intensity than it is in these photos. It struck the peaks and turned them into a pure glimmering white. I had never seen such beauty in my life. Alas, my camera was nestled in my check-in bag. But life gives you a do-over, so now I have these images as well.

The fair-haired boy

The project of making small pastel studies of people’s faces continues. The latest are these three, of the same subject, who I will call DB, short for Danish boy. My references were old photographs, blurry, the face literally thumbnail-sized, taken when he was three and a half years old (right), about five (above) and about 10. I wanted to capture the essence of his features at those different moments in the narrative of his life.  

For the first two drawings, I used my trusty Jaxell soft pastels (the square ones in the 72-color set), which I often employ for sketching or practice, and used rough paper (karduspapir) from Stelling. For the third (the boy at age 10), I thought something more permanent would be in order, namely Rembrandt soft pastels on brown pastel paper. 

All three were drawn freehand, which gave me a solid feeling of achievement.

I love the sun-drenched look of the last picture, the light falling on the boy’s bare shoulders, the cast shadows with a bit of red in them. The lopsided smile. 💕- Bing