Abstract Paintings and Musings on Art
Katrina, of course.
This was much more difficult than the tornado paintings, for some reason. Seems like it needs to be far bigger, also (it’s only 8″x10″ and will be mounted on a larger sheet of baltic birch plywood and framed, just like the tornado paintings).
But not bad for a start. I may work on it some more; I don’t know…
I actually started this one prior to the one in the previous post (below). This was the first of the tornado paintings painted into a rough and very absorbent watercolor paper mounted on Masonite.
This is also one of those paintings that was rockin’ in a way after my initial painting session, but one tiny area wasn’t quite right, and in changing that area, I ended up changing and repainting pretty much the entire painting several times before arriving at this. In the initial painting, the wax had soaked deeply into the watercolor paper in a fascinating, beautiful, and unexpected way, and so looked far more like a slightly shiny watercolor painting than like my other encaustics.
So I discovered yet another way to work with encaustics. I love it and hope to retain that sense of watercolor-y patchiness in a future painting (that effect did not quite survive the several re-paintings).
You can see I’ve gotten comfortable with the encaustic process again, as this little painting (which I love), has gotten more away from abstraction than the three previous ones (below).
This one was painted into rough watercolor paper mounted on masonite. This paper really soaks up a lot of the wax paint, so many more layers were required to achieve the effect I was looking for.
Here’s another — a really huge tornado. I love how the diagonal lines worked out in this piece. It is again, one of those paintings that’s truly paint first and an image second.
I imagine painting this again in oil, about four times as large, and really abstracting it away from the ‘image’ of a tornado — just abstract shapes of color and texture.
I hope you get a chance to see this painting up close and personal — it is full of beautiful little passages of paint. Come to my studio for the East Austin Studio Tour this coming November or call me to make arrangements to see this in person. Check my website for contact info: Contact Marilyn
I’m not sure where I found the image for this painting, and I really can’t imagine anyone being brave or crazy enough to stand under a tornado and take a photograph.
But it’s a fascinating image, and here’s my take on it. I love how this painting, like the one I did just before this, straddles that space between abstraction and representation.
It felt so good to see my little tornado paintings in the AVAA show, and I’ve always intended to keep painting them until…whenever. So, here’s my first tornado painting in a while; I had started it months ago, but it was too ‘happy,’ so today I took it in a dramatically different direction.
Unlike the abstract encaustic paintings, these semi-representational paintings really require a delicate balance. Because it had been a while since I painted like this in encaustic, my tendency was to let it achieve painting-hood as soon as possible, with as little reworking for the sake of ‘perfecting’ the image as possible. So, for me, the great joy in these first few paintings, when I’m a bit rusty and unsure of my process, is how they sort of straddle the line between abstraction and representation.
After all, they are paint first, and images of tornadoes second.
For a bit of background on the encaustic process, read this previous post on how to paint in encaustic.