Month: March 2016

march 29, 2016

03-29-16 "canyonlands"
03-29-16 “canyonlands”

8×12.25″ acrylic, wool on matboard

This involves a few paint-scraping passes. Then I took some little tufts of wool yarn, leftover from my hand-knotting weaving, and adhered them to the piece. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

march 28, 2016

03-28-16 "piano player"
03-28-16 “piano player”

4×4″ acrylic, marker on paper

I know. This is completely ridiculous. When I scraped this, I saw a figure playing the piano, sliding downhill. But I decided to make it going uphill (or sliding backward downhill, perhaps)…just because. It reminds me that my piano is lonely these days, and that I need and want to sit down and play a little. Maybe this week….

march 17, 2016

03-17-16 "felted"
03-17-16 “felted”
03-17-16 "soumak"
03-17-16 “soumak”

I realize that I should be posting the green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, but I have nothing useful in green right now. And I am prone to breaking the rules, anyway.

I have knitted and otherwise used up a bunch of the “solar downpour” yarn from my friend at Blue Gate Farm (via a gift from my cousin Melissa) making various sizes and types of yarn “circles” for a future art project. Now I’m about ready to start the painting one of these will accompany. The problem? I can’t decide whether I prefer the felted version (above on the left) or the soumak version (lower on the right). Tell me which one YOU like, and why? 🙂

march 11, 2016

03-11-16 "snake oil"
03-11-16 “snake oil” —SOLD—

6×6″ acrylic on paper

Instead of rolling acrylic paint onto this print block, I scraped it on to make the imprints. These are three side-by-side images from the same block. I then scraped some transparent raw sienna directly onto the paper after the prints were dry.

Initially I was thinking of this more as a bundling of grasses, but I started thinking of the sienna as oil in the grasses, and then thought of the shapes as snake-like, and then thought of the term “snake oil,” and that relates to what the oil companies are trying to sell the Iowa public regarding the “benefits” of the diagonal pipeline through Iowa. With the Utilities Board decision from yesterday fresh in my mind…that’s how I arrived at the title.