New paintings and regular art updates.
Painting from a few years ago. I sometimes come up with ideas I like, but I don’t keep doing the same things over and over again. I’m not sure if I could keep repeating an image with just little changes. Once you start doing that you might as well be creating Christmas or birthday cards.
I like being experimental. I might not always get it right but if I continue I learn with each effort. This acrylic on canvas is quite surreal, but why not?
Without flicking paint! Each dot so far and each smudge is from a brush touching the canvas. It’s a bit over exposed. It’s acrylic on a small 7×7 inch canvas. I might paint a tardis on it if it works. There are hundreds of dots and I’m really struggling to find a brush with a decent point. More to do!
I enjoyed painting this a few years ago, I used a phone app to change the texture of a photo then worked off that. This is acrylic on canvas. I keep meaning to do a few more pictures like this. It’s just deciding what images to work from. I’ve hit a bit of a block recently so I’m hoping if I do something like this it might encourage me to do more.
This was what I tried to finish painting today. I wanted to paint a cloudy sky and over painted patches with a sponge to give the clouds a fluffy feel . I even tried to paint some Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds above the mountains. They look like rolling waves on the sea. It’s a tiny portion of the painting and probably not that apparent.
Anyway, acrylic on canvas. (cheap canvas, you can really see the warp and weft.)
I’m painting a green woman and I’ve been trying to sort out how to differentiate the foreground figure from the background trees. I’ve accentuated the stripes on the bark and made them more black and white than in reality. Since the figure is abstracted in a different way I think it’s starting to work.
Imagined view, I think I need to have a look at some real clouds. I’m not sure if I’m going to call this finished. Acrylic on canvas. I just wanted to paint something calm and peaceful so I created this sketch view X
I’m sad to say that I didn’t get my painting of Molly Leigh the Burslem witch into the three counties open exhibition this year. (Staffordshire, Cheshire and Shropshire).
I know they had over 200 entries and it depends who is selecting the works of art. I also know that the exhibition has to be cohesive and not too eclectic. So will I enter again? Yes, but I will probably choose to do something less specific. But I’m glad I painted this.
The reason why? I painted something similar to this as a mural in the Leopard Hotel in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, several years ago. The building burned down a couple of years ago and I wanted to try and recreate the memory of it. The painting means a lot more to me than getting it in this competition. X
I had just gone through an artists block. Sometimes I can’t paint, I come to a standstill. I don’t think what I was painting was that good, but I’m sure I felt better being able to pick up a paintbrush.
Since then my painting work has been up and down. I don’t always feel up to painting, and various stuff makes it more difficult. Painting isn’t just a physical ability, it’s a mental one as well. Both of those things are affecting me. Life sometimes gets in the way of intention. But I don’t give up. I will probably carry on somehow till the day I die. Art is my imperative in life.
My painting of a green woman is coming on. I did some more today. I’m adding more metallic colours, to bring out the sheen on the leaves. Also I want to improve the background of the image. Hopefully it will feel more coherent when it is finished. Acrylic on canvas.
I added shading to a rose painting I started a couple of weeks ago to give it more depth. It is one of those blush roses, with pink and red on the edges of the petals and some yellow further down. Roses are beautiful flowers, but the simplest of them, like wild roses, Rosa rugosa, are better for insects to pollenate and collect nectar. That is because the petals are open and the central part of the flower is easily accessible.
Unfortunately a lot of flowers are now being bred to have twice the petals (doubles). They look beautiful and interesting, but they make it hard to pollenate by insects like bees and they are frequently infertile so they don’t produce viable seeds.
Look for bee friendly plants if you are looking for flowers for your garden.
Mallaband-Brown