Saturday, November 25, 2006

Nine Lives



Nine lives.........I sure hope this canvas doesn't have nine incarnations. So far this must be the fourth in the series. It started out as a large golden painting......then a large Brown/Black
...then morphed into something with a lot of turquoise and I was thinking of turning it into a painting titled Raku since it reminded me of a new little raku pot I bought at the Edom, TX art fair.


That's the problem with acrylic... if/when you work on it, you have to work all over it to keep the freshness of brush strokes and thought going. Working all over is another way to say....a new painting develops most of the time...and sometimes it's really a totally new painting.


I've got to be cautious here as now I'm seeing another title come to mind. I hate titling work but it's almost as bad to have a title too early on as it then it makes me think too much and it ruins the whole process......and caution is the worst of the whole deal. A painting should have courage and liveliness............well, except when it should be calm and serene. Decisive might be a better word...confident and decisive.


For this one, I can see some spottiness in the upper ground that need some glazing over to make it less so. The foreground is the place that will need the caution vs. courage to pull off. If I add too much, it will be ruined and hence another life will have to begin.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Four down and one to go



Four down and one to go.................


I've a family member in the hospital so I've been in and out of the house and the studio the past week..........not much time to really concentrate.


This is the fourth of the paintings I've been working on lately...........I still have the big 48 x 48" brown/black that is no longer brown/black to work on.


This painting has gone through several layers.......hum, already forgot the title to the original one but I was thinking of France and the trip there today so I'm titling it Plage as it reminds me of the shore/beach. It's 20 x 16" acrylic on canvas.

Tuesday, November 7, 2006

Still working on the small pieces....






I'm back to working on the pieces I had going a week or two ago. I just painted over one of them and now it's in it's third incarnation. I've painted over and then sanded and glazed with gloss medium and painted over again.

Who knows if it's finished for sure..but it might be.



I've been so used to working on larger pieces that I lose touch at times with when to stop on smaller ones. I'm more inclined to fiddle around with these smaller pieces that I'm up close to and get down from the wall and place on the painting table. The color is pretty intense.

The other one I've been working with is the other red one on the wall easel at the same time. It's beginning to look like Christmas already :>) with all the red and green in the studio. This one didn't need much else done to it except a little glazing after I let it just hang around for a time. I, also, think I'll let the other red one that looked like it had a tornado in it alone as well.



Both of these are 16 x 16's acrylic on gallery wrapped canvas. I'll be off to Dallas tomorrow unless something happens...........back in a few days.

Saturday, November 4, 2006

Continuing saga

So much for the "getting into the studio" yesterday afternoon. You know how it goes, clean things up, put up shipping stuff....... and then it's time to suddenly ship something out. At least that box was on the very top of the pile in the closet. So I spent time packing up work and taking it to FedEx for shipment that afternoon. Once I get out of the house, my time suddenly is just gone.

The company that does my reproduction giclees, American Artist Series, wanted some more work so I packed up a couple of collages (the ones from the last post) and three more of the Brown/Black series for him.

Nita Leland's demo for SWS will be next Wednesday at 7pm. It will be nice to see her again while she is in Dallas for a workshop.

I, also, upgraded to the new blogger beta........hope this one works better for images. Heck...I was going to test it out but have already cleared those problem images off my desktop and have no time to go looking for them in the trash bin.

I just now noticed that part of this blog got left off from loading yesterday....weird. So I went back to try to change it. I'll see what happens...so much for the updated Blogger so far.

Friday, November 3, 2006

Crossing off the list


Crossing off the list.......

Got all six pieces with strap hangers and wire finished up last night ......AND all ready for the varnishing this morning. Now all the work is varnished and waiting for it to level out on the surface before they can be put up to cure another day.

Then I can get back to the serious fun stuff...........those four paintings in process.........Oh,and one other I came across while moving stuff around. One of those that just never passed muster although I did make slides one day. It's history now as I just brushed on some cobalt blue and it will now be ready with the other four for magic to happen. SO, bring on the magic. Maybe I should call it "thinking or not thinking" according to the twice weekly letter from Robert Genn this morning. Or right vs. left brain thinking. Sometimes you need some of this mundane studio work to just relax the brain and have it "ready" for the magic of right brained thinking to come. While I'm doing things like this or mixing up a whole new palette of paints........or even cleaning up, heaven forbid, my brain rests and mulls over the things I've tried to make it "think" about and consider for the next work. Kinda like dreaming while awake.

Since I don't have another painting to put up right now........here's another of the collages I did in France in April. Blogger wants to turn it around as well but that will just have to be as I can't figure out why it does this to some images. So just pretend the taupe colored band is in the top. Analyzing this later, I figured those drips look a lot like the spacing of all the plane trees we saw up and down every road in the area.

Thursday, November 2, 2006

First things, first.......or finishing up what you've started!





Woo-woo..........got a dozen new 12 x 12" Ampersand panels from Jerry's yesterday. Asleep last night.... all night, I had ideas spinning around in my head about what to do with them. I know nothing is NEW in the world of art but I plan to put these panels together as a group of four and just have an inkling about how I want to do it. Maybe it will be a little different than the way others have presented theirs.

So I say,...... "hold on there, first things first".............gotta get the other pieces I'm working on finished before I get to work on something new. I can't have another half finished piece staring at me from the floors, walls, easel or shelf. I do like to work on several at a time but this has just gone too far.

My helper around here did assist in breaking down a lot of shipping boxes I had in the closet causing me no end of problems trying to find stuff when I went in to look for something.......and helped with putting them WAAAY up on the top deep shelving, too. I need a certain amount of space to feel like I'm not totally closed in when I'm working and I hope this does it. You can't work without supplies and you can't work when too many pile up around you..........so what's a person to do? Get a larger studio. I have an idea that however much room you have, sooner or later an artist will fill it up and be back at the same place all over again in a short time frame.

While cleaning up stuff in shelves and looking to see what frames I had available, I found these two collage pieces again .........I made them in France and found that lucky me, I have two square maple frames that will work for them..........but I have to have get around to looking for the Plexiglas first. Cat'Art 13 became the title to this one ...I'd also forgotten that I tried to load a couple of these in France and Blogger turns them around and I can't figure out how to get them turned right. It doesn't make any sense at all that the program would rotate an image around like this.......oh well....the bottom is showing on the right side in this view, so crook your head toward your left shoulder.

Hum, "what to do, what to do??" varnish work and put on hangers, frame and mat work, work on unfinished stuff, start playing with new supplies......decisions, decisions. Also, considering....does this collage need a little more surface quality???.........NO NO NO...I can't add another thing to my "to do" list today.