Category: art

10″x10″ acrylic on paper

This is another re-purposed old poem-painting. It’s nice to be able to riff on a piece I’d given up on years ago but kept around in my studio. This improvisation doesn’t always work, but I am interested in the process of finding out if it will—as long as I don’t attach too much to the original piece or to the new product.

Sometimes I can’t leave well enough alone and I want to add just one more color or one more shape, and I go a step too far. I wish I could say I’ve learned my lesson, but more likely I’ll continue to follow my intuition and trust (hope?) that more and more as time goes on the outcome will be pleasant!

Acrylic on silk, approx. 10″x10″

Today I tried to rehabilitate the wayward painting of yesterday. I was relatively satisfied with today’s work (top photo). But as I was removing the piece of silk from the paper block onto which I had taped it, I noticed the image on the BACK of the fabric was also interesting to me. It hints at the look of the original paint scrape (much more than the front does, in any case).

So, I present two works today, front and back. Two sides of a coin. Flip it to see which one appeals to you.

I first played with fitting some pieces of old painting together for a collage as I’ve done before, but I just wasn’t feeling it today. So, I picked up this narrow piece of Yupo paper that a friend gave me some time ago. I haven’t really liked how acrylic paint scrapes and sits on this paper when using it in the past. But I picked out three transparent colors and came up with this (after discarding the first attempt with other colors)—and liked it well enough that I’m now going outside for a windy walk in the sun instead of continuing with inside work. I’ll be out gathering new images—collecting inspiration…yeah, that’s it.

The sun was streaming in so bright and lovely in the back porch this noon that I decided to try to create some interesting shadows and take some photos. Here is the one that won.

I collaged some trimmed pieces of photographs (and one piece of painted paper) onto a scraped acrylic painting on matboard (10″x8″). Sometimes I prefer the digital images over the actual piece. This one I like better in person. So, you’ll have to wait for the “daily janes” exhibit for my view. (Is the daily janes exhibit really a thing? Well, not yet. But I’m thinking about the idea.)

The “paper” this time is a piece of APT yellow silk or silk-wannabe (10″x10″). The first pass of acrylic paint I liked, but it wasn’t quite enough. The second pass, adding the magenta, was a disaster and I thought I had “ruined” it. So I quickly did a third pass adding more cerulean blue and Indian yellow. Amazingly enough that seemed to redeem it for me.

The little blob in the lower right happened on the first pass. I had put a piece of matboard underneath the material to catch the ghost images again. My scraper slipped right off the edge of the smaller matboard and created the lovely little blob. I considered cropping it out of the photo—and I have that version as well. But the little blob is growing on me, too.

This is sometimes how it goes in the studio. Did I settle? I hope not, but I’m not really sure. I am moving on. And sometimes that’s just what I need to do.