New paintings and regular art updates.
I turned my painting upside down because I’m struggling to reach the top with my aching and shaking arms. I’m working on the background. But it also helps me see shapes and tones and proportions. I need to decide if I want the background to be blurry? Perhaps I should change my brush size and try and blur the edges. I will turn it back in a while….
I am painting again. I’ve spent a few hours on this and it’s about a quarter done. I want to get it finished quickly because it needs taking in to the gallery, but I want to make sure it’s a good job. I’m layering u the flowers and I will be adding vegetation growing in front to give it more depth soon. I have to stand back from it to check how it fits together. But is it too busy?
Poppies and other flowers, I started painting this a few days ago and am trying to make progress. The flowers and tangle of vegetation is based on a photo I took at Trentham Gardens this summer. I hope it can be a meditative piece for a quiet room at the gallery which I have work in. I’m going to press on with this, it’s keeping my mind off things.
I’ve started working on a painting of flowers in a meadow. I am not including the sky, I just want to concentrate on the flowers. I’m afraid I don’t know the names of all of them. I want the image to look realistic and hopefully beautiful. It’s about two feet by one and a half. It will be acrylic on canvas.
I painted this a few years ago, it’s based on a poppy with a white centre. Most poppies have dark splodges in the centre. I think this looks more subtle. I’m toying with the idea of painting a mixture of both on a larger canvas? The background would be greens and straw coloured. Got to possibly block out or draw out their positions and then maybe add some forget-me-nots.
I feel guilty that I haven’t painted. I think I need to get my brushes out. Painting is my reason for being. It’s not negotiable, I have to paint, or at least draw. It will happen, I’m just not sure when. As the days get darker I always find it more difficult, especially painting under artificial light. By the way, I must have a hundred brushes around the house, I think they multiply when I’m not looking!
I was looking for an image to use for this post and found this. Where the light through prisms in the mobile in my window was casting rainbows on these brushes. I hope I don’t get artists block, sometimes I just can’t paint…
It’s blank, I have the canvas, I have the paints, I have an idea, but I don’t know where to start. I have to do a painting for someone, and I want to, but my mind is blank. Just like the canvas. I might have a fight with it later, spread some green and red paint on it. It’s just knowing how to start. I’ll have to do it, soon….
During lock down last year, members of the Orme Art Group collaborated in recreating this Cezanne still life. We took a square each and copied what we saw in whatever medium we liked. Some of the images were smaller or larger than others so when the picture was put together not everything lined up. Also the colours vary because each artist was working to their own image colour settings. I think the resulting collage is rather good. We did several separate challenges like this over covid.
Today at the Brampton open exhibition. I found my barn owl painting in a good position, not tucked away out of site. Earlier I’d been to Art and Minds in Middleport and was asked to paint an extra painting for a quiet area in the gallery. Both gave me a little bit of joy in a sad time. Perhaps I will start planning the painting tomorrow.
WordPress keeps telling me my phone is full. I know! I keep trying to delete photos but it’s almost impossible. There are thousands of them. There’s lots of other things, I am not sure of half of what’s on here….
So I think I will have to buy more memory. Its funny how real memories are subsumed into a digital memory. If you don’t have a photo of it, it didn’t happen? Case in point, the recent death and funeral of the Queen. People have always recorded their lives throughout the ages, for example look at cave paintings. Then art throughout the ages, paintings for people who could pay, or sketches by people who had the means or ability to draw or paint. Then deguerreotypes (not sure of the spelling) became popular, painted portraits turned into slow motion photos that took time to take and heads had to be clamped in place to get a clear image. Box brownies, single lens reflex, eventually digital cameras, then phones which took a few photos. Now, the mobile phone is a hand held computer… But it still gets full.
The human mind can hold more information, but it’s not stored in a logical order. Links from the past suddenly reach out and grab your attention. Clearing a human brain of memory is not a good thing, and unless it happens through illness, age or injury, causing degradation of the brain structure, it is to be hoped that people can build memories (good or bad?), not lose them.
Mallaband-Brown