Strata Series

Just before I turned forty, I went to Denver, Colorado for an art educators’ national convention. On one of the days there, I went on a city tour in the morning and then a mountain tour in the evening. It was on the mountain tour I had a chance to see where giant red rocks pushed through the ground. I also saw petrified dinosaur bones embedded in another area. Also, there was an area that used to be the sea floor - including fossils of sea creatures. When I came back from the trip, I became interested in a strata motif.


watercolor on paper, 8 pieces, 7 1/2" x 11"

Here I was turning forty. It seemed like a good symbolic way of representing the milestone. Anyway I did strata painting for our Contemporary Art Center. It was having a fundraiser in which each artist was given a postcard size piece of paper and asked to make it into an art postcard. I wish I had taken a picture of it. Anyway, that was the first one I made.

I did these larger strata paintings after that and got stuck. One of my students said they looked like wallpaper. That’s what put me into a rut. How do I get them away from them just being a dull repeating pattern. Anyway it’s been a good three years since I began these. I just have to finish them. Then the nest trick will be framing them.

Super Flat Stool

After reading The Inevitable Japanese Experience and Super Flat, I painted a stool based on characteristics from animé and manga.





acrylic on wood

Three New Paintings

Well I finished these three paintings this afternoon. I took forever to decide on what I wanted to do in the very beginning. Then it took forever for me to work through them. Originally they were going to be like some Japanese paintings I have seen, but they just were not working out. Midstream I had to do something else. Maybe these will lead to some other paintings. I just know I had to do something other than dots.

Fountain

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Patio

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Wall

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Dots, Grids and Expressive Lines

This piece brought together three types of imagery found in my artwork. Below are two sketches as well as the final piece.


colored pencil on paper, 5.5" x 8.5"


colored pencil on paper, 5.5" x 8.5"

At The Decordova Museum outside of Boston, I saw a kitsch show back in 2005. There were lots of sentimental objects and garish pieces. When I got back to Metairie, I started working on this piece. In each square of the grid, I picked six colors blindly. I then chose which ones to make the background in a square and which others to color the dots. Then I'd pick six more again and again until I had used all the colors in the set.

Normally instructor artists will tell you to use a limited palette. I was determined to use every color in the box of 120 colored pencils. I kept pulling six colors until I went through the whole box then started over picking six colors at a time.


colored pencil on paper, 21" x 26.5"

Artwork in Circulation

In March '06 many of the pieces on this blog were placed at the Friends of Rivertown Fine Art Gallery. In mid April '07 the gallery closed for good. Since then I have circulated the art to other venues around town. I've even entered some of the works in competition.

Although I have concentrated on the production of my dot artwork, I do plan to continue on this tangent I began in late '04 - that is keep what I do more random and continue to experiment. These works represent a different direction for me and I hope to continue it. Like most art I do, I just have to jump in and see what happens. Making art spontaneously is always more exciting. I don't who said it but it goes something like this: "If all you do is what you did, than all you'll get is what you got."

Agrow Sold

Today I sold this piece to a friend I knew from high school. She intends to hang it in her daughter’s bedroom. It was great to sell to someone I’ve known that long.


watercolor on canvas, 12" x 12"

Premonition Orange Sold

Today I sold this piece to another artist. It’s always more exciting to sell to someone who likes making art too.

We See

The West Bank Art Guiild meeting was tonight. Again we had an "artist of the month" competition. Below is the piece I entered. At the break all the artists voted. After the ballots were tabulated, my piece was announced as having won second place. What is rewarding is that my peers were the ones voting.

This is a piece I made from images and papers handed to me at a seminar in Boston last March. I was attending an art educator's convention. The first twenty-five people in the room received materials. We were instructed to take the bag of items and make a collage when we returned home.


collage, 17.5" x 24"

Premonition Orange

mixed media on paper, 17.5" x 24"

Premonition Green

mixed media on paper, 17.5" x 24"

Premonition Pink

mixed media on paper, 17.5" x 24"