I'm a Sap 4 Art

The past few days I've been working out my color experiments on an unusual surface...a sap bucket. My town library has asked local artists to be creative with galvanized sap buckets as a fund raiser. Here's mine so far. I'm tempted to add some gold "stars" to the sky with permanent paint pen, but not sure. What do you think?

Mentors

Last night I divorced myself from work and spent hours drifting through art books: Wolf Kahn's America and Wolf Kahn's Pastels, as well as Painting Maine, Borrowed Views of Connie Hayes. The common denominator is color and shape. Hayes paints interiors and the rocky villages of ME, while Kahn loves the woods and fields of VT (with some staunch barns for company). Both push their color palettes towards bold so one gets to see: turquoise barns in ochre fields (Kahn); sun filled living rooms with bulky furniture shapes so full of light the whole painting seems yellow (Hayes); hot pink and orange trees in a purple field (Kahn). I realize color jumps off the canvas to me and pulls me right in. Looking at Kahn's purple skies and violet grass make me feel like I'm indulging in the most exotic three layer mousse chocolate dessert extravaganza. It fills me right up with pleasure and satiates me with joy.

With all that abundance of color in my head I began by laying down red/orange grass, purple mountains - orange rimmed - and periwinkle sky. The green crept into the sky when I added yellow to the periwinkle to make it glow. Although I was looking for a kind of acid green, the kind of light that tiptoes in before a storm, I ended up with a more mature grass green, that of dark roiling summer storms; or the stuff found stuck to the lawn mower blade housing after a day battling the abundance of lawn growth during a New England spring.

OIl pastel on paper, 6x8".

Still in Progress

I got to thinking about this piece after perusing Ken Leslie's Oil Pastel book. He uses a lot of curved horizons in his work and wacky perspective and I thought about that "global warming" piece I'd been playing with. I'm struggling with this long, albeit mild, NEngland winter and thinking fondly of my partner who is enjoying the warm breezes and tropical sun. Here I'm depicting my southern and northern homes and for me the conflict of not being with him under palm trees.

Framing

Here are 3 of my blog paintings framed for a show (and one previous work from the fall). I'm pretty pleased by how they look and just thought I'd share.

Finally, I'm back!

This has been a hellish week. I didn't produce art although I did a lot of art related stuff. I took four of my art blog works to the framer to get framed for a local show and got another big piece of heavy paper taped to the board and so I'm ready to go. Tuesday and Weds. I read some of Ken Leslie's Oil Pastel book and was just blown away by all the techniques and materials he talks about. I need to read more. Every night this week I've been working on online classes until 7pm so that leaves little evening time for anything, let alone art. Thurs. evening was a blob out and I think I watched a movie called Let's dance about ballroom dancing. Also perused the Oil Pastel book some more. Friday I had an appt I couldn't get out of and got home late, but while out bought two more books by the artist Wolf Kahn. His color work is so amazing. I am really inspired by him and was drooling over these books at my local museum, bought some postcards of his work a few weeks ago, and now own the books, yipee.

I'm back working some more on my courses today, picked up the framed work which looks great, and hopefully will break out the colors tonight and begin a new work.