It seems that there will just be times when life gets in the way of creativity. 🙁
My past two months have been full of all kinds of activity — too little of which has been painting, but I finally cleared out my schedule and the studio enough on Sunday to get back in there and paint, and man, does it feel good.
The painting I spent the most time working on Sunday afternoon is still a mess. I think perhaps some canvases are just cursed, as that one has been ~20 different paintings over the past few months, and I’ve not been happy with any of them!
This one, on the other hand, came together fairly quickly and directly. I may do a tad more to it; haven’t decided yet, but I can say I’m fairly happy with most parts of it, and with the whole. Yay!
I’m finally posting this small one in my latest series. I’ve thought it was done several times before, and then decided to change something else. I’m posting it here now as possibly done, though I may still decide to change something else.
Well, it is essentially the same as when I first painted it, maybe a month ago, but I repainted the whole thing on Sunday and made a few changes.
The colors on my monitor are not exact: the dark blues are purpler in person, and the fuchsias are redder and brighter, the cyans are maybe a tad greener or yellower, but even using selective color sliders on every color in PhotoShop, I can’t seem to capture all the colors correctly at the same time. 🙁
OTOH, you may see this completely differently than I do, depending on your monitor. And there’s nothing I can do about that. Still planning to buy calibration software the next time I have any money.
At any rate, this whole color thing is terribly frustrating, as for me, the colors are the thing (or at least one of the 3 or 4 most important things in this body of work), and I wish you could see the relationships as they truly exist. Maybe someday I’ll figure it out, or maybe you’ll come to my studio. 😉
Too much left brain lately, and I think I’ve done my last new website project for anyone else (pretty please, let it be so!).
My neighborhood website project is mostly done (well, are they ever really done?), so finally I can get back in the studio, finish #’s 1, 4, 6 & 8 and start some new ones.
This one is from about 3-4 weeks ago…whenever that was that I was more of a full-time painter. It seems so long ago now. I still have much to learn about using acrylics. I’ll probably end up back in oils, but this is opening up some new possibilities, too, and it’s kind of fun, actually. 🙂
But I do really like this one quite a bit. It started out horizontal with lots of red and blue and purple, but then I kept painting out what I’d painted in.
Learning to work with acrylic — what a medium! I used up a tube of white in a week on 8 small paintings (this being the whitest). That stuff doesn’t go far.
Yikes! The intense focus on building a website for the neighborhood these past 3 weeks has totally interrupted my painting process, and even my posting process! I can’t seem to work in both sides of my brain too much on the same day. So web work negates painting. Must stop doing web work. 😀
This was the 3rd painting from my recent series; I showed you the 2nd one last week (at least, I think it was last week), and the first one is being painted over for the 20th time or so. I have several more done, which I’ll be sharing with you all soon.
Honestly, I’m not sure I’m done messing with this one. I intended to try to do each one in just one work session, but sometimes you later see parts that bother you and must be changed. I’ve worked on this one at least twice; more may be necessary for me to feel it’s what it wants to be (and that I approve), but I need to get back into my painting brain to be sure.
Some of you may remember that about a month ago, I mentioned I was starting a new series that represents a slight (or maybe not so slight) change in direction.
I had found with the work I was trying to do that I was attempting to make new strides in several directions at once, and it turned out they weren’t necessarily compatible directions!
For one, I wanted to emphasize the brushwork more and find a way to make the brushstroke form the shape — that they would become one, like the blood and bones of Chinese calligraphic strokes.
I also wanted to stretch my color decision-making process, in part by reducing the number of tubes of color I was using to perhaps between 6 tubes to no more than 8 or 10 (or 12) tubes. Well, you get the idea. This was partly a result of my color studies last month.
And the third major thing I wanted to do was to really push my own understanding of and conception of what makes a good and interesting non-objective composition.
I figured it would be easiest to work out all these ideas by painting in acrylic – a medium with which I have very little experience, but am learning to like for this purpose, at least.
So, for today’s #firstfridayartwalk on GooglePlus, I decided to go ahead and share with you the first successful acrylic painting sketch in this new direction, from those several weeks ago. It is sketchy and a bit thin on the paint, as I got where I was going in this painting with almost no struggle or rework at all! Amazingly enough. But I’m letting it stand as a record of my 1st successful attempt, plus, I fear if I try to “improve” it at all, I’ll really just end up with something completely different. So it remains, as of this writing. 🙂
Anyway, I am loving this new exploration (dare I use that word?), and I love this painting! I don’t have any clever titles for this series yet, so for now, the working title is “Composition #2, 2013”:
I thought I’d try out the Sennelier watercolor block I discovered the other day buried in my studio. Watercolor is a medium I’m not terribly familiar with. I did maybe 10-12 large watercolor still lifes back in the late ’80s, but otherwise, I have mostly avoided it — except for small watercolor pencil drawings (paintings?) over the last few years — until just a few weeks ago.
This time, I soaked the paper pretty thoroughly, taped it down, and started to paint. Hours later, the paper was still mostly wet, and the colors were still bleeding. So, this is messier than I’m completely comfortable with, but there it is, FWIW.
Happy Thanksgiving! I wish all my friends a wonderful day with loved ones and good food. I give thanks today for my smart, talented, appreciative, and considerate husband, for my dear friends and loved ones all over the world, for the joy of living in the lovely city of Austin, for my wonderful neighbors, for the delight I experience daily living in our cheery little house, and for the great gift of time and energy to create art and a lovely space in which to work.
Here’s a very cheerful piece from my series of small painting-sketches — the Not-So-Daily Paintings/Drawings.
As always, available for sale in my shop — on the Works on Paper page.
