"Exist"

SOLD



"There can be no blue without yellow and without orange." --Vincent Van Gogh

"Presage"

SOLD



It only took me all day to figure this out. The colors in the shadow painting's photo are off, in person the paintings are exactly the same, but just getting the pictures to line up properly was enough for me to handle today. Whew! This blog world has taught me a lot more about computers than I ever thought I wanted to know!


Thanks to Carol Marine for helping me figure this out!

"Presage"

I must be taking my vitamins, because this painting just painted itself. This painting is a diptych, with one of the canvases containing this present, and its companion canvas containing the present's shadow. The above post shows the two together, but the zoom capability is not very clear and I wanted you to be able to see the thick brushwork in the velvet ribbon. (which you can do by clicking on this picture for a close up view)

So what's in a present?

These paintings of presents represent for me the unseen, more specifically the soul. If the eye is the window to the soul, is it a two way street? By that I mean, if someone looks into our eyes they can see into our soul, right? So can our souls also be revealed, and maybe just to ourselves, by what we take in through our eyes? Do we let our exterior world affect our interior world?

Crush

SOLD

Well I am happy I gave this little present another try. I knew there must be some reason I left it wrapped up sitting on my shelf for a year! Hope you love it too!

"Crush" in progress

This is the second time I've painted this little present. My first attempt, about a year ago, just did not capture the feeling I was after, so here I am trying again. I still have the left side of the bow to finish, but since I have not posted in so long I decided to let everyone see what I've been up to. My painting process is a strange one, and until I discovered Alex Kanevsky's website I thought I might be the only painter that goes about destroying the previous days work with no hesitation. What I mean by that is; I begin a painting then the next day when I return to it I might totally change colors, light, mood, everything. I always paint my "Presents" from life, and I think this daily change has to do with the change of light in my studio, my mood and my music which are apt to change every day as well. This particular painting has changed tremendously. One day there will be lots of purples in the shadows, the next day these shadows will be ochre. I always have a 'feel' I'm after in my painting, and keeping this in mind has helped me get back on track.

I have been painting, but ...... thought I would pass along a great link I found on Silvina Day's blog. http://jacksonpollock.org/ Try it out!! I had so much fun I could not contain myself, had to share! Hope you enjoy. Silvina, hope you don't mind???

Lake Shore, Wilson Avenue

SOLD

This little series is finally finished. I started my blog with the blue present and basically painted in reverse. I wanted to show all four paintings together and I am thrilled they are staying together as a group. A collector here in Chicago purchased them but they are travelling soon to his new bed and breakfast in New Orleans. Next for me ..... you guessed it, more presents. I am going to take Debbie Miller's advice and do several smaller sized presents for an up-coming "Open Studio" I hope to be participating in next month.

Oh shucks, I thought all four were going to be lined up horizontally!! Oh well, hopefully you can visualize what it should look. If anyone out there knows how I can arrange this so all four are together please let me know.

Flight of the Bumble Bee

Well I'm all done! Yeah! I started this blog for experimenting and doing this demo certainly has been a new experience for me. I so appreciate every one's comments and encouragement which made this demo super fun for me. I set about this painting with a couple of objectives in mind. One was to challenge the 'norm' of thin background. My background here, (or dandy lion field) is very thick and broken, the sheer fabric is painted thin and with less brushwork except in the lace and black dots which are very thick. The challenge being making the thin come forward and the thicker recede. To add to this challenge, the color I wanted to pull forward was black against the light warm background. Yikes! During this process I had to ask myself, why do we have to create this receding background??? The more I paint, the more I seem to find a desire to incorporate an abstract influence into my paintings or at least in my thought processes. Why can't the 'background' be just as important as the 'subject matter'? In abstract painting every part of the canvas is 'active' (if that is the right choice of words). I know we need restful spots on the canvas, that everything can't be equally important, but with representational art can our objects be so recognizable that our eyes are naturally drawn there and other areas of the painting be more than just background? Anybody??? Am I crazy today or what?