Attitude

Quote for today: "The first thing I do in the morning is to make my bed and while I am making up my bed I am making up my mind as to what kind of a day I am going to have." Robert Frost

Today, I really have to choose my attitude. It's tax time and I am reminded that a right-brained artist needs MORE THAN a great deal of help to keep accurate records. Driving my sweet, left-brained husband crazy is not my intent, but it seems to be what I've done. I now have ANOTHER New Year's resolution: to keep more easily found records of my mileage, expenses, etc., for my art business. Every year, I think I'm doing this and every year . . . . Sigh.

The latest of my mini paintings, which I painted as a painting-a-day, has attitude! "Cactus Flower," (5x5 gallery wrapped oil) was underpainted first in brush, but then I thought better of it and used palette knife to restate the strokes. As is common, I loved the black gesso background, so I painted it with black mixed with red to temper it. The result is pretty fun and colorful. Any comments would be appreciated.

This would make a great piece of art for a bathroom or any other small space that needs brightening up! (PS--You can own this little gem for $100, plus shipping. Just let me know.)

Reworking a Rejected Painting

This horse is my latest monotype experiment, done on a rejected painting that I used as an abstract underpainting, after spraying with Kamar retouch varnish.

I began with a drawing on a piece of palette paper and painted with oil. After transferring the image, I then worked it with palette knife. I'm much happier with the horse than I was with the previous image, but the jelly fish (!!) made a great abstract underpainting, with the tentacles becoming the horse's mane.

More Monotype Experiments

I was short of extra working time yesterday, but wanted to play with an idea about using oil paint on a black gessoed board to create a monotype image. Realizing that I needed some sort of flexible application, I tried using palette knife on wax paper to apply the design, since I was using a rigid support for the final product. I also had been working with alkyd paint earlier, so that's what I used.

Since it's almost spring, I had in mind a dandelion as the subject. The outcome was pretty pleasing, even if it doesn't necessarily look like a dandelion! The main thing I learned is that I want to leave more "edges" around much of my subject to gain more black. This photo, taken with my cell phone at night, is a little less sharp than I'd like, but I wanted to share it, anyway.

I may try adding to the surface today, to see what can happen. At any rate, I'm having fun!

Monotype Fun

My friend and fellow artist Sue Parry recently attended an exhibit in San Antonio of enhanced oil monotypes by Marcia Gygli King, and we were INSPIRED!

Yesterday we decided to "play" around with monotypes. Using water-based monotype paint, we had enormous fun exploring the possibilities of printing on both white and black and adding to the resulting images, which we pulled by hand. Although I had done monotypes before, and even used them with my young students, I hadn't done any in quite a while.

We learned a great deal, by trial and error, and with a few gleaned instructions from Julia Ayres' valuable book Monotypes. Of course, we didn't want to let the lack of facts interfere with our time allotted for playing, so we didn't do much study. We just rocked along, making it up as we went. The creative juices really flowed!

As King works frequently on black canvas, we were led to try printing on black paper. In this case we only had Canson, so that's what we used. The results, as this one example shows, were pleasing, even though the paper tended to stretch and buckle as it dried. I believe we can flatten these out, using the method of lightly dampening the back of the paper again and weighting it down under a flat board (face down, to preserve the image).

After our session, I searched on Google and found some YouTube videos about monotypes which added to my body of knowledge. I DO have to resist going too far down THIS rabbit-trail!! One of my favorites was called "MonoMovie about Monotypes." Another showed a multiple-edition result from one drawing, using printing inks (click here). Altogether, a fascinating, multi-approach process which seems to allow almost any wet medium to be used on several different supports and with or without a press.

If you're feeling a bit bogged down and need some inspiration, maybe playing with monotypes is just what you need!

ACEOs for Fun and Training

I have been working on finishing and reworking several paintings recently, as well as preparing new grounds for future paintings, leaving little time to do "real" paintings. In order to stay creative and keep training, I find doing some of the ACEO minis does the trick. The top on is "car art" done while driving to El Paso recently. The horse is watercolor pencil with wc and gel pen added. They "read" bigger than they actually are.

I actually sold a couple of my iris ones recently--very pleasing to me and to the buyer!