Le tAbLe oRaNgE eT LeS OiSeAuX

Over the last  months of the cold season, I continued working on a canvas to which I had given the working title  >Café des Anges< , partly because of the blue 1930s fabric inspired squares that seemed to billow out from the backs of the chairs like the wings of angels. The friend who kindly gifted me the fabric had lost her mother in her early twenties and as I painted and thought about her  it seemed to become an ethereal table with chairs that hovered with the assistance of angelic fabric wings .
The stylised pineapple and sunflowers ground the whole work firmly back in reality . The butterfly and birds suggest flight between the worlds and also between TS Eliot's poetic time present and time past .
The cut sunflowers and fields of sunflowers running along the top of the canvas represent the sheer warmth and joy of the living world .

LeS ToUrNeSoLs eT LeS RoSeS ~ a work in progress

Yesterday whilst showing a student a well rehearsed drawing exercise using three pencils simultaneously , I decided to do the exercise myself on to a large canvas . I had already drawn out another idea on to this canvas so drew straight over it creating an interesting superposition .After adding some oil paint washes the three lines can only be seen in selective places.


work in progress



La cAfeTièRe bLoOmSbUrY

Working as usual from my cherished enamelware collection and delving deep in to the textiles produced by the Omega workshops in the 1920s with an irresistable nod to Dufy's amazing textile output thrown in , I embarked on a large oil painting that encapsulated all three .

 

>La Cafetière Bloomsbury< detail

>La Cafetière Bloomsbury< detail

 

My current working Enamelware Still Life

>La Cafetière Bloomsbury<  2013

nEw SpRiNg pAiNtInGs

>Paysage interieure/exterieure Charentaise< 2012/2013

 

Sketching last summer in the Charentaise landscape of fields of corn and sunflowers
rarely far from the river Charente and its tributaries , as well as sketching back in the studio, engendered a crossing of interior and exterior space that lent itself more towards an abstract expression that recently culminated in the above painting.


Jane Courquin < Le Potager du Chateau de  L'Abregement , Bioussac< 2012 oils, acrylics and gesso on board

The 2012 Abregement painting which now hangs on permanent exhibition in Chateau Lavaud , La Charente,  gave rise to further explorations into deconstruction of quotidian objects found around the house and my studios,

Sketching from my enamelware collection that had just burgeoned after a trip to a brocante on the Ile

de Ré provided the organic interplay of lines in to which I subsequently ran sparse washes .

 

.>Enamelware Deconstructed< watercolour and pencils on paper 2013

 

The circular le creuset frying pans and the round faces of the sunflowers that thrive in this

region of France become interchangeable forms on the painted surface of the canvas. If I push further forward with the idea the third canvas might contain the interplay of both.

 

 

>Les Tournesols < 2012/2013 oil on canvas

>Les Tournesols< detail