DweezelJazz Art Blog » Geneva

The Next Set of Watercolor Paintings for the Gex Book

DweezelJazz — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:15:31 +0000

Last week I did six more watercolors for the Gex book, completing the paintings for two more pages and starting a couple more pages.

There are many walking paths in the mountains and foothills just behind Gex and every once in a while there are signposts showing directions and, sometimes, distances or walking times. Here’s one such sign (click on photos to see larger image):

Gex Country Walkway Signpost

A river runs through the lowest part of the town (as rivers often do) and right next to the river there’s a fountain. This is sometimes used by a nearby car repair shop to check where the holes are in punctured tires. The river runs just below, to the right of the railing; the house on the right is on the other side of the bank.

Fountain Near River In Gex

Close to the fountain on the other side of the river, and on slightly higher ground, there are very old parts of the town that lead upwards behind the old town wall. The next painting shows the view looking up one of the narrow staircases from the street.

Narrow staircase leading up to house in Gex

These last two paintings make up a page in the book. The page is shown below; it’s a rough draft of the image layout just to give an idea of what it’ll look like.

Rough Image Layout Draft of Page in Gex Book

I’m painting whatever scene appeals to me at the time of choosing, so the pages aren’t being completed in book page order. Higher up the town the streets are steep, and some are fairly narrow and are pedestrian walkways only.

View from Gex in direction of Le Saleve

Looking over the wall of one such walkway the view is expansive, looking out towards Le Saleve, which is also in France, but is on the other side of Geneva, Switzerland. If you’d like to see more about Le Saleve you can see previous posts: A Car Trip Up Le Saleve, Part I and Part II.

This painting fits on the page of the Gex book shown below. This week I’ll paint the other scene that you can see as a sketch on the right hand side of the page, showing a view from the town looking south down the valley towards Bellegarde.

Draft Image Layout for a page in the Gex book

I chose a couple of bright, colorful little paintings for the sheer fun of it. There’s a very nice cafe on the main street in Gex. Every weekend there’s a market on this street, so this cafe is very popular with the market stall keepers and customers alike. There will be a couple of paintings, for the book, of both the inside and outside of this cafe coming up in the future. Their cups and saucers have always been a great source of fun.

Gex PMU cafe coffee cup

And there are often very interesting sugar cubes, bright and cheerful.

Sugar cube bowl at the Gex PMU cafe

These two paintings are arranged on a page to the left of the page that will show the inside of the cafe.

Draft Layout of Images on a page in Gex book

Stay tuned to DweezelJazz Art blog to see the painting of the inside of the cafe, and others, as the Gex book is being completed!

Fancy Napkins

DweezelJazz — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:30:52 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we were in town and we went to the Place du Bourg de Four (in Geneva, Switzerland) for a coffee.

Place du Bourg de Four in the Old Town Geneva, Switzerland

As we were leaving we noticed an ice cream bar and decided, on the spur of the moment, to get one.

Place du Bourg de Four. The ice cream bar is on the left in a row of cafes and shops.

They had these very cute napkins:

I brought a few different designs home for fun; it turns out there are a total of eight different designs in this series.

On the back of the napkins is a link for the design company Camal.

This week I’m back to painting in watercolor – the next batch of drawings are ready. You can see the last set of paintings for the Gex book in the post, “Watercolor Paintings of Scenes in the Pays de Gex, France“.

Drawings for book about Pays de Gex, France, ready for painting in watercolor

Egg Tempera Painting of “Rocky Shores of Lac Leman”

DweezelJazz — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:10:18 +0000

There are many many views from the shores of Lac Leman. Town views, beach views, home-front views, country views… There’s no end to the variety of scenes that can be found along the lake. It’s approximately 73 km (45 miles) long and 14 km (8 miles) wide. It is the largest body of freshwater in continental Europe, and 60% of it belongs to Switzerland, with the rest belonging to France.

There are quite a number of beaches along Lac Leman. There are sandy ones,

A Beach on Lac Leman, France

…and then there are more pebbly beaches. You can see the Jet D’Eau in Geneva, in the distance:

Distant view of Jet D'Eau, Geneva, Switzerland

Many homes have gardens that end right at the waterfront.

Corsier, Lac Leman, Switzerland

Some of the homes are large and private, in beautiful spots.

Lac Leman, Switzerland

The towns along the lake often have many yachts and boats moored at the water’s edge.

Ouchy, Lac Leman, Switzerland

There are also many quiet coves with piers for docking the boats.

Cove at Bellerive, Lac Leman, Switzerland

It’s a great place to sit and watch the water. Last week I painted an egg tempera painting (10″ x 18 “) of one such tranquil scene, “Rocky Shores of Lac Leman”, where the water seemed to laze under the rays of the sun.

Egg Tempera Painting "Rocky Shores of Lac Leman"

Summertime Activities

DweezelJazz — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:43:20 +0000

Wheat almost ready to harvest

It has been a long time since the last post here on DweezelJazz Art blog. There have been a combination of things that made this so. What started it was that we lost our Internet connection for six weeks. Our Internet Service Provider, who will remain nameless here, upgraded their service, but unfortunately they lost our connection altogether and never found it again! So we switched providers. In France it takes a long time for a new provider to set up the line. But we’ve been back online for a few weeks now and everything is working very nicely.

Green Summer Countryside

We’ve had a very unusual summer here – it has rained so much that everything has stayed green and it looks like the high Alps in summertime. It’s absolutely beautiful. The air has been cleaned every few days by another downpour and lots of wind, but we’ve also had a lot of bright, shiny sunshine. It has been idyllic.

Corn Field

We’ve watched and heard the sparrows nesting in the eaves of our house. The swallows and house martins, also living around here, are cleaning up all of the mosquitoes in the area – we haven’t been bitten once at home! The swallows are fantastic to watch as they swoop gracefully back and forth, nearly colliding with the walls when they get close to the house. The roosters and chickens in the large open field next to us have been announcing themselves loudly and are a real joy to watch as they bound and run across the tall grass, always busy.

Jet D'Eau Geneva Switzerland

It has also been an eventful summer, as a result of something that happened way back in February. I went to the dentist to have a fixed orthodontic retainer glued back on. (Visits to the dentist have taken me frequently into Geneva and so I’ve witnessed summer in town too, as you can see in the photos.) This simple goal turned out to be far more involved than I at first thought. The dentist took one look at me, asked me all about any symptoms I experienced and then he announced that he thought he might be able to largely remove those symptoms: migraines, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, extreme fatigue, difficulty breathing, lung discomfort, neck and back muscle cramps, lack of sleep, and so on.

And, to my utmost amazement, in addition to the removal of these symptoms, I found that I no longer had reactions to being around perfumes, cleaning products and other toxic chemicals I have hitherto found increasingly difficult to endure. I didn’t rush out to put these things in my environment, but it was fabulous not to feel like someone had laid out kryptonite around me every time I went out somewhere.

Place du Bourg de Four, Old Town Geneva, Switzerland

I’ve lived with these difficulties all my life and had come to accept them as part of life, at least my life. So it has been with amazement that I’ve discovered that these myriad symptoms are indeed entirely due to jaw misalignment. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about this in the last months; it hasn’t been easy and has taken a huge amount of thinking and observing on my part, all the while trying to learn fast enough so as not to fall back into the abyss of pain-ridden exhaustion. Life rarely offers a magic bullet. My situation isn’t totally resolved and I’m still trying to find out if there’s a long-term solution to correct the jaw alignment.

Parc des Bastions, Geneva, Switzerland

The great thing is that along the way, there have been times during the last months that I’ve been the most pain-free I’ve ever been – in fact, I didn’t know what it was like to be that pain-free – didn’t know what it was like to have energy, and long, deep nights of sleep. Fantastic! So I took advantage of it!

Looking up at back of Old Town Geneva from opposite the Parc des Bastions

In June I finished the Total Training Online Course on Adobe Dreamweaver, and within a couple of weeks I designed a completely new look for DweezelJazz Art site, with new galleries and descriptive content for the paintings.

Then I worked on a number of drawings for paintings in egg tempera, inked them…

Inked drawings ready to glue onto the tempered glass.

and then glued them onto tempered glass.

Drawings ready to be underpainted, and then prepped for painting with egg tempera.

As I was doing this, and also preparing some drawings for painting in watercolor, Tony came up with a brilliant idea: what about creating a book of paintings? Well, I have wanted to do something of that kind for a long time, dreaming about it. I decided to bite the bullet. I chose the subject, in fact, if I survive the first book, I plan to do a series of them: each book dedicated to a town and area in the Pays de Gex, France / Geneva, Switzerland area.

I started with a plan to fill a 60-page book, large format. So I created a storyboard for the entire book, including image sizes and placement.

Storyboard for the first book.

Then I started drawing and drawing and drawing.

A drawing for the book.

I’m including scenes in towns and in the countryside around them, so that the book will give the feel of the place as a whole.

This is what I call a "cow bus".

Quite often at the beginning of summer, you can see tractors hauling a trailer full of cows out to the fields, and again in fall taking them back to the warmth of the barns. It almost seems like the cows are being transported to school or something, so I call it a ‘cow bus’.

I’ve completed 64 drawings and have 18 left to do. Then, all I have to do is paint them! I’ll paint them probably using a combination of ink and watercolor. And of course add text to accompany the paintings.

Sunflower

So, if you’ve managed to read this entire post and have reached this far: thank you! Thank you for reading this blog, and if you’ve been a reader for some time, thank you for continuing to read DweezelJazz Art blog. I don’t post as often as I used to because I’ve had to prioritize the precious commodity of time, but I do plan to continue posting and have some photos of pretty places and countryside ready for future posts. I’m very happy if you find it interesting and fun. Life is full of beautiful things, to cherish and enjoy, and I try to share a little of that here.

This sunflower, for example, just wouldn’t pose correctly for the photo – I reckon it was a bit drunk out there in the fresh air – couldn’t focus on having it’s photo taken! But it is beautiful, nonetheless.

Restaurant Warmth

DweezelJazz — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:00:00 +0000

Occasionally we stop at a restaurant, called the Piatto d’Oro, in Geneva, Switzerland that’s very close to the airport. It has a large outdoor terrace which is nice in summer – although you can almost touch the planes as they go overhead to land.I love warm bright restaurant and cafe scenes; I’m thinking to paint this one day since it’s so heart-warming.We went some time ago and it was too cold to sit on the terrace. The inside is very nicely decorated. Here’s a photo showing a small part of it that I think is really neat.Next door to the restaurant is a house with a pretty garden full of flowers. Along the curb where cars park for the restaurant were these.

The Charm of Wisteria

DweezelJazz — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:00:00 +0000

Wisteria seems to grow well in the Geneva area and surrounds. It adorns many homes, providing color, beauty and shade.Wisteria in the Parc des Bastions in Geneva, Switzerland, makes this wall even more interesting.The way the vines spread out enhances the flowing shape and accessibility of the flowers.The purple flowers hang like bunches of sparkling grapes.In Annecy, France, there is a magnificent white wisteria vine on one of the buildings along the canal.Looking at it from the other side you can see that it has grown up three balcony levels.It’s massive with flowers covering the wall almost entirely.It gives the same fairy-like quality that Art Nouveau can give. I love the way the reflections of the water from the canal play with the white flowers.The trunk almost gives the impression of having a living being hidden within it, perhaps a fairy that emerges when we’re not looking. Whatever, it certainly has character and seems to speak of something old.The vines knot together, making it appear to be one whole trunk.Looking up through the blossoms gives the ultimate view of its delicate finery.