Whte Abstract

This is the same painting as August 23 and September 23! After living with it for a week, I decided to revise it yet again. This time I put white gesso over most of it, using a scrap of foam core for a spreader . . . sort of like icing a cake but messier and not nearly as sweet. I added some things, took away some things, threw some paint and generally made a mess and had fun. As always, critiques welcomed.

Birches

I started this pastel yesterday, too, and I'm really excited about it. It has an energy that I like. This needs more work yet than the low country painting, but I'm going to try my best to maintain the energy.

Low Country

I did this pastel yesterday from a photo I took in South Carolina. The marshes of the low country are beautiful with different colors practically every time I see them. I'm probably going to do a bit of this and that before I call it done, but it's close

New Work on Old Work

Today I worked on two paintings from my mixed media workshop in August (see the entry for August 23). If you go back and look, you can see what I did with the blue, gold and white painting. It really needed some darker values and to have some more solid places. The second one here, which I'm calling The Strip for now, was so bad that I only posted a teeny section of it in August. After I cut that section off, I had an almost square, very busy painting left. I covered large sections with black, letting the original mess show through where you see the color. Then I adjusted and added a bit, mostly the touches of blue.
I don't know if either is finished; who can know, when they're so abstact. Click on larger versions for the brighter colors and send me any critiques you feel like.
By the way, both of these paintings are the same height, I just can't get them to look that way here. 14" high

Catching Up

My goodness but it's been a long time since I posted. Not that I haven't been painting. I guess Life has just gotten in the way. I worked on this start from my mixed media workshop and I like it better, probably because it now has all three primary colors.

I also revisited the photo of the pastel, "Cheryl's Lake" that I posted on July 22. I did two more versions, one with acrylic paints and the other collaged with colored tissue paper. Neither is a masterpiece, but its a good exercise, I think, and makes me realize that the pastel is pretty dull looking. I'll work on that one the next time I put away the paints and get out the pastels. Here are the other 2. As usual, these will look brighter if you click on them for the larger versions.

Finally, I did these two which are called "Dreams" and "Dog Dreams." They were done as the result of a challenge to a small group I'm in. The challenge was to pick 2 colors which are complements to each other (opposite sides of the color wheel), add an earth tone, and paint anything using only those three colors. The colors I picked are a coral and peacock blue for the complements, and a gold for the earth tone. The image slowly formed in my head but it wasn't until I had it, as well as I could, on paper and looked at it for a while that I knew how to do it better. The first one has acrylic mat medium blotched on the paper before any paint . . . which didn't cover the medium. For the second, I used gesso for the texture. That takes watercolor, although differently from plain paper. I also planned the values better with a pencil value sketch.