Art on holidays

I am basking in the beautiful sun in Cancun. While it’s 6C at home, and pouring rain, the Mexicans here are complaining because it’s only 15C in the morning!!!! Hahaha. I hear it’s below 0F in Chicago. Yikes.
I’ve been painting alebrijes, after Teri mentioned them. What a gorgeous and colorful design those animals have. Here is my inspiration card for the exchange on Sketchbook Yahoo group. It’s going to Australia….

I’ve also been painting shells to go in my “Oyster” book, which I’m making in the style inspired by Gina Armfield, in her online class called "Song of the Sea". You pick a theme, then paint in a large accounting book, decorate it with poems, paintings, line drawings, anything related, and lots of pages tipped in with that marvelous washi tape. I just got a large shipment from Happy Tape, waiting for me at home when I get back. I use my acrylic paints as watercolors.
I also painted a small abstract picture. I just understood something that Robert Ryman was explaining: using white paint to make the other colors pop. It’s probably obvious, but since I’m completely self taught, I had not thought of that. I did the painting from an exercise I did in Steve Aimone workshop, abstracting from the environment. Unfortunately, I ran out of white paint half way through. So I’ll call this painting Work In Progress…


Next are pictures of Cancun where I”m staying, so for everyone freezing under tons of snow in North America, you may leave the blog at this stage, I’ll understand. ;-))

Post Aimone Workshop

Here are some abstract paintings I have been working on since I completed the recent Steve Aimone workshop on Vancouver Island.

Abstract expressionism is not a description of my paintings, which is what the workshop was about. Having a lot of fun painting them does apply though.

 

  

The next two are older canvases that I didn’t like. Before cutting them up to use them in one of my books, I gave them (and myself) a last chance. I really had nothing to lose.

Comments from the Steve Aimone workshop on Vancouver Island, October 2010

 

These two I had painted before the start of the abstract workshop, as a way to get into painting again. Little did I know….

 

This next one happened early on in the workshop. It was an automatic drawing. Mine are usually round and closed loops, so I thought I’d try something else. Hummm, as we say, it’s a good underpainting! We then did an exercise where we painted our workshop environment, under Steve’s directions: paint the floor in front of you; 30seconds later: paint what’s above your head; 30 seconds later: paint what’s to your right, change paint color, etc you get the idea.

So my next one was particularly ugly and disjointed, and I covered it with ‘pretty’ colors. Well, that made for another nice underpainting!!!! I was getting pretty desperate, so I took a drastic step. 

 

Here’s what resulted:

Thankfully, the others will not see the light of day, they’ve been exposed enough on my easel for a week. Some have found a new life as pages for my altered books. Yeah!

This one is 48x48, and is a colored representation of a dancing model. Nice starting point for something else.

 

The biggest learning for me is that a painting doesn’t stop at the first step, when it starts coming together and looks pretty. That’s just a better underpainting. The real work starts when the white paint or the black paint start obliterating the ‘underpainting’ to start another painting, but that still retains the spirit of the first layer. For some of the workshop participants, a final painting will have 10 or 15 layers. My easel partner, the lady with whom I shared the table where we lay all our paints out, would do as many as 25 layers. There were some truly gorgeous paintings, and up she would cover them with a thick layer of pale brown. I took it upon myself to interrupt her concentration and acknowledge the beauty of the layers I loved, otherwise, these layers would never have been acknowledge.

I do admit that her final paintings were stunning, some very disturbing, but it was an incredible work and I have been humbled to watch her process and learn so much: not stop at the first satisfactory step, but let the process unfold, and dig deeper and deeper.

After all, the workshop was called: The Spiritual Language of Art. One really had to dig deep to uncover the gem. Fortunately, we had wonderful organizers, thank you Mary Stewart, and beautiful friend, Donna B,, Jill, Eve, Susan, Jean, you know who you are.

This last one happened on the last day, that was my representation of a beautiful oyster shell we were given. Abstracted, definitely.

Steve Aimone workshop on Vancouver Island

I’m only going to post some photos without too much explanations, my brain is not quite functioning yet, after 5 intense days of abstract painting with amazing artist Steve Aimone.

It was pretty intense, and when a workshop is called “The Spiritual Language of Art” one have to expect that stuff comes up, yours or someone else’s. What a week that was!

Here’s a sample.  There are mostly 48x48 (inches) except for the first one, which is 22x30. That one was done under ‘directions’: put an orange triangle in the right corner, but a black bar going through it, put 3 loops on the right end sige, etc. Then we had an hour to finish it.

  

All very different, depending on the nature of the exercises. The last one is based on abstracting from an oyster shell.

Now I go rest so I can write more fully later.

And a special thanks to my ‘froup’ for seeing me through the hurdles. You know who you are and I love you all. You make my heart sing.

I got rhythm

Well, actually, I'm not sure I do. One of the exercises in the Steve Aimone workshop was to paint rhythm. I had a terrible time with that exercise.

So I keep trying it. I can recognize rhythm in another's painting, but short of copying it, I just can't seem to come up with my own interpretation.

I think this one has more to do with a grid, and balance, than with rhythm.