flowers
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Thursday, April 9th, 2009
The Shavingbrush Tree in front of a flowering Jacaranda tree seen in Chapala, Mexico, 85H x 45W x 3D inches acrylics on canvas, wrapped sides painted, work in progress. Thumbnail, left: started March 31st
The last painting helped me more aware of how powerful contrasts of light and dark can be. Here, areas of primer will be purposely be left unpainted. I was going to just carefully avoid the white areas and paint around them, but during the second phase I dripped some of the masking fluid to block out a few details in the main flowers. Already it is a very different painting process-wise; right from the start it has felt like a complicated puzzle; that stage doesn’t usually appear until near finishing. The first stages of painting are usually the most liberating but since I never pencil in an outline before painting, I fought a lazy brain right from the start that did not want to map out the placement… which doesn’t make sense because I really really want to paint this one! These are not typically the colors I use either, so there are a few intimidating factors. I hope to maintain fresh, bright Easter colors — partly because this is when they bloom in Mexico. Painting is much like a runner hitting “the wall” but persevering and breaking through it…however in painting there are many walls to conquer.
Oxide Gallery
There are a few pieces hanging at Oxide Gallery, Denton, TX for the next three months: Rocky Mountain Vista, Zen Garden #6, and all four recent encaustic works.
End of Tulip Season
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Finished today: added some life to End of Tulip Season, 14H x 11W oil pastels on paper.
Images of progress
Except for the fact that paper has a limit to how much it can be reworked before it starts stretching, I could keep revising these drawings in the Paper Places series continually! Some of them are finished in a day, and truly finished. Some drawings seem OK when they are finished, but have areas that are not quite there yet, so they are left for a month or a year or two then taken out and reworked. It’s great exercise playing with color and composition. Some are taken too far, but with regard to learning, effort is never wasted. Change characterizes this series too; change of place, change of time, change of styles, changing what’s already been changed.
Encaustic – painting with beeswax
Friday, January 16th, 2009
Windy Maple Leaves, 8H x 10W x 2D inches encaustics
1) design inspired by Flamboyant Tree Seed Pods, white beeswax inlay on black, and 2) using a print of an old painting Dahlias as a base, techniques were more spontaneous, each 10H x 8W x 2D inches encaustics
Encaustic Artist Deanna Wood offers her studio space and supplies to her students on days when she’ll be there working. It’s a bargain for $30 per day so I went yesterday and finished the two pieces above. Painting with wax is a messy process, and Deanna’s studio is all set up for it, so it’s a perfect arrangement for artists who work primarily in other mediums, who don’t yet have their own supplies and wish to continue exploring encaustics. BYOS – Bring your own surface!
With a FAQ page on her website, Deanna outlines a brief history about encaustics and herself. Her most recent solo exhibition displays a portion of the extensive amount of encaustic works created around the theme of tornadoes. Including a few multi-media pieces as well, the show runs January 10th – February 29th, 2009 at the Leslie Powell Foundation and Gallery in Lawton, Oklahoma.
The Fourth Of July – moving on
Saturday, October 18th, 2008
The Fourth of July, 36H x 48W x 2D inches, acrylics on canvas, wrapped sides painted. Sold.
The Oxide Gallery in Denton had an open call today for Artists to bring in three paintings that best represented current work, to be judged for upcoming space openings. Even though I didn’t think The Fourth of July was finished, I brought it in because it has the cheerful colors and bold marks that I’d like to inject more into future work. Usually there are lots of colors used, but they get layered over each other on the canvas and can become muted. The gallery owners informed me that it is finished! OK, great, I’ll take their advice. I’m quite happy to move on to another painting.
Especially toward the final stages when so much time and study has been invested, we can be so involved in the work we don’t see it with a fresh perspective the way others do. Other people’s eyes and opinions are so valuable.
Details
Monday, September 29th, 2008
The Fourth of July, past the point of no return. Making one small change affects the whole piece. Rather than post another image of the painting as a whole, because there are already enough pictures of it, here are some details of changes made in the past few days from the lower central portion of the painting. To be continued…
The Fourth of July work in progress
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
The Fourth of July work in progress, 36H x 48W x 2D inches acrylics on canvas, custom built stretcher frame, wrapped sides painted.
June 22, 23, Sept 23, 24: Adding mid-tones. The addition of a blue-white haze gel wash lightens areas that need to be rebuilt with brighter colors; in attempts to create contrasts, many areas have become too dark. Paintings always swing back and forth from too light to too dark or too defined to not defined enough, and just like a pendulum eventually come to rest between the two. I hope to bring the painting back toward the energy and explosive colors that it had after only one hour of work. Only the foreground flowers will have some detail; the rest will remain impressionistic in style.
New heart-shape
Monday, July 28th, 2008
A new heart shape in nature to add to the series today.
Special effects
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
The whorl pattern of Sunflower seeds on this large seed-head has a hypnotic effect. (You neeeeed to purchase my Artwork!)
Two more interesting garden pics: tendrils of a cucumber vine reaching out like hands, grasping dead sunflower leaves…and the outer petals of a sunflower bud.
Pumpkin leaves and blossom
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
The first of the pumpkin blossoms are opening; they open early in the morning and close fairly quickly. This morning a bee was struggling inside a flower that had collapsed before it finished gathering pollen. When the flower wilts, the sticky soft petals bond together, and the bee would never have escaped had I not investigated where the frantic-sounding buzzing was coming from. I didn’t think a tender flower could be so strong!
The 4th of July on the 22nd of June
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
Added darkest values, mapping out the composition more clearly, now will define a few blossoms in the foreground by washing off dark areas and paint with pure colors from the tube and bring back to the cheery lights and brights that were present at the start.
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