Abstract Paintings and Musings on Art
Here’s another new painting that started out quite differently than it ended up. This one took about a week to resolve; and I was working on it during the time Hurricane Isaac was building in the Gulf Coast, so I guess you could say that became an influence. 😉
Even though I scraped lots of paint off of this several times while in the process of creation, it still has lots of wonderfully gooey paint on it (dry to the touch now, of course).
It may be hard to believe, but this little painting took about a week. It started out vertical, with less stuff, but even goofier than this, and it just took that long to resolve the composition to my liking.
Once I got it to this point, I was thrilled, and thought, “Oh, this is it! This will be my new signature style!”
Tune in tomorrow to see whether I was right or not. 😉
I haven’t posted in a while, but I have been painting. I have about 12 new paintings to share; here is the first of my new series of abstracts that I have been working on since July.
I began this one inspired by passion flowers (we have a huge vine of small passion flowers in our yard). I started this in acrylic, as my previous painting, “Food Forest,” was done in acrylic and I was so happy (eventually) with both the process and the end result.
With this one, however, I found working in acrylic as frustrating as is usually the case for me. So I repainted the whole thing in oil and then ended up painting out much of what had been part of the original composition. I finally abandoned the idea of a passionflower, and let the painting tell me what it wanted to be. And this is the result.
Kind of goofy, kind of beautiful, and I find myself loving the parts but wondering about the whole. This painting got juicier and juicier as I simplified, simplified, simplified.
This painting is available in my shop now: http://marilynfenn.com/shop/the-cosmos-made-conscious/
I didn’t paint this to be about fracking, but I had just read an article about it, and the title seemed to fit this piece. I try to keep politics out of my paintings, but they seem to creep into my titles.
Or I could have called it something about “pressure.” Whatever.
This is, for all practical purposes, my first red painting (I have one other in progress, and I did two small ones in acrylic on paper — just sketches — over the years, but those hardly seem to count). When I take a look at most of the art I have done, a few have red in them, but most do not.
On Friday, I started out with images from Hundertwasser in my head, an idea about concentric circles, and a desire to paint a primarily red painting. This one was really quite a struggle! I scraped and wiped it down entirely twice; two whole days of work obliterated and scraped and wiped down 3/4 of the painting one final time before it started to come together.
And now I love it and am thinking of extending it into a four-panel piece (in a square).
A delightful Valentine’s dinner conversation with my sweetie produced the title: “Flamingo Mallets.” 😀 I’ve always loved Lewis Carroll! (I used to copy Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations in pen and ink as a teenager).
So, Happy Valentine’s Day — without further ado, here is my first red painting.
I wanted to do one more new painting before hanging the show at Austin Art Space. I started this one with the intention of creating a 4th more geometric style work like the ones that started me off on my latest series of abstracts: “It’s Awash,” “Paradigms Lost,” and “High-Risk Pool.” A few rectangles into the painting and I couldn’t restrain myself any longer…I had to make this one more fluid and free. Then, my husband brought home 4 brownies for me from a meeting with our neighborhood organic gardeners, no less. I ate them all over the course of the evening/night, and stayed up into the wee hours to finish this piece! Wheeee!
P.S. I will take a better picture of this soon. Until March 3, the painting is hanging at Austin Art Space on my wall for the “For Love of Art” show.
And now for something completely different…
I haven’t lost my mind, really. But, this is not quite like anything I’ve done before, except for maybe one or two very old crazy abstract works…but not really even like those.
I finished this last week. This was one of the first few paintings that I did in the process of heading towards my new direction last fall, but I never really felt it worked all that well. I just kept working on it and working on it, painting out what I didn’t like, until I got to here. After so many working sessions, it now has a lot of surface history, and I finally like it a lot. I hope to do more work along these lines.
It’s kind of amazing to me what can happen in the studio of an abstract painter. If you let the painting talk to you, you can discover what it wants to be.
I started working on this canvas last fall. Then, I was just doodling around on it, trying out different brushstrokes and experimenting with techniques. I achieved some very cool results, but not what I would call a painting, as all the little parts didn’t hang together.
I started working on it again the other night. I kept trying to add loops in the big space; I painted them in and then out again at least half a dozen times. I was planning to repaint the entire surface, even though there were bits from the previous work on it that I hated to lose. I painted over most of those bits more than once and then wiped it out again.
I wasn’t planning for the palette to come out like this, either. But painting this way is one stroke and then the next, and then a response to that and then another, until you end up with something that does hang together.
This is yet another work that is a bit different for me, both in composition and color palette…and I must say, I really, really like it!
I haven’t posted much new work so far this year (!), but here are seven of my most recent paintings on canvas (on 1.5″ gallery-wrap canvas, with painted edges, to be exact).
The first one, “Be Bop a Re Bop,” was probably done in April. I painted out everything that didn’t belong.
The second painting shown here was even more of an exploration of painting materials and techniques, and the painting came before the title (which is almost always the way I work). The title for it, “Running Pops,” was inspired by a wild type of passion flower that volunteered in our backyard this summer; a flower that grew like crazy over other plants. Hanging from the vines were dozens of wonderful little round buds that eventually became either flowers or red fruit, and they look a lot like these shapes.
This painting is still in progress, though it is unlikely to change dramatically.
This painting is also still in progress; it now has a new title.
Now with a new title, I love what’s happening in this space.
😀
I still have a few more in progress. If I finish them in time, I’ll have them with me at EAST over the next 2 weekends, as well as nearly 40-50 small paintings and works on paper. Join me and nine other Cherrywood artists at the Vortex, 2307 Manor Rd. Sat & Sun, 11am – 6pm. The Vortex is also planning lots of fun events for children and adults. Check out the schedule, map, etc. on the Vortex website.
