Mosaiculture and Magnets

This summer the Montreal botanical garden (Jardin Botanique) is the host for Mosaiculture International.
It’s a show of topiary follies. Painstakingly planted and clipped
sculptural works on a grand scale. I’m estimating some of the larger
ones being 30 feet across.

It’s certainly a spectacle, attracting big crowds. Get your tickets online to avoid a significant wait; but alas, no Access Montreal discount for the speedy service.

At
best the plantings can feel like forest spirits. A sculpture of organic
material – clay, dead wood, antler, moss, lichen, (on a steel armature)
combine with plant species selected for color and texture to create
figures of living foliage.

At worst, it’s high-kitsch. Enormous
blooming bumble bees knock over pots of cartoon flowers. Leafy lemurs,
flowery clown fish, and succulent gila-monsters amuse kids and oldsters
alike.

I’m not going to try and convince you it’s worth the steep
admission – it is after all just an extravagant walk in the park. But if
you’re looking for something to sketch (or photo) in Montreal right now
– it was many years in the making, and might not happen again soon.

I’ve
been talking a lot lately about painting on location, with the big
easel and the whole shebang. I thought this time I’d try out something
completely opposite. A real guerilla operation. This is a trick I saw at
some sketchcrawl – perhaps it was our workshop in Portland?

The idea is to use super strong magnets
to clip water bottles and palettes onto a drawing board. (One magnet
goes right in your bottle of water, the other goes underneath the board –
jumping from your fingers and clamping on).

It gives you some
freedom to walk around, wave the board in the air, and generally not
worry too much about holding stuff while you try and see through a crowd
of tourists. Certainly, if you’re walking all day, it’s nice not to
have to carry a tripod or easel.  I used it standing for short periods
of time, but more often it’s a kind of lap desk.

With
strong enough magnets it’s not a fragile setup. Things won’t fall off
on their own – but the magnets will slide if you push them – so could
end up nudging things off the edge. If that happens, the magnets will
snap together with wicked force. I got some nice pinches getting used to
that behavior.

I’ve seen a variation on this, a sketcher had a large panel of sheet magnet
(sold as something to make photographic fridge decorations) contact
cemented to their board. Making a kind of bulletin board for art
supplies. Her Altoid tin watercolor kit stuck on nicely.

This
trip I was experimenting with Line over Color – (reversing the normal
approach – loose, exploratory washes first, tightening with line after).
Something I’ve seen offered as a class at the USk symposium, but never
had the chance to do.

So,
there you go – something worth trying out. I think this magnetic setup
is best suited for clipping a bottle of india ink to your board and
doing big brush drawings in the field. It would probably be great at
life drawing. I’m going to try that next. Something a little more
streamlined than clipping on my full size folding palette. Perhaps just a
few bottles of pre-mixed watercolor. Should be interesting to play
with.