31 March 2010

Trying to find the groove

I just returned from a wonderful extended weekend trip and am trying to get back in the groove. I love to get away but sometimes feel a little disoriented on the return.

The quote below is some of the past homework from Reggie's class.

25 March 2010

Gilding on vellum

I can not believe how time flies. It has been over two weeks since the last post. March has been a most busy, productive and superb month. I love the spring!

This year I have the tremendous opportunity to participate in the year long Reggie Ezell class "Primitive to Modern". We had our second class of the year just this last weekend. Our goal was to work with and on vellum with different inks and also to learn to apply gilding. This is the first time for me to work with vellum and gold. We sanded our vellum to different degrees of doneness, we tested each area with sumi ink, gouache, and stick ink. My favorite on the vellum is the stick ink. Our homework from the previous class was to design and practice a small piece of text with a simple icon for gilding. After lots of practicing and testing on the vellum in class, we were ready to pen our quotes and apply the instacol for the gilding process. The process was enlightening and transforming.

I will refrain from getting too wordy now but will try to continue this topic in the future. Below is my piece from class.




09 March 2010

Still with the Small Canvases

Well, this is a continuation on a continuation. There were two earlier post showing the progression of a series of small canvases. One was a trio of sunflowers the other has turned into this square of nine canvases. The text, which is mostly washed away, is the personification of Wisdom as described in Proverbs. I love this text.

The things I like about this set is the colors and depth of color. The thing that I find is missing is a structural element. There is plenty of organic movement in each canvas and across the whole, but there is no linking structural element. What do you think?

the final series


closeup before the text was washed away


the nine before all the text has been washed away in places

02 March 2010

continuation of Series of Small Canvases



Well, I finished my trio of sunflower canvases that were in the earlier blog, A Series of Small Canvases. There are three paintings in the set. I liked it so much I put it on my etsy site. I also painted a set of three echinacea flowers, but I only liked one of them.

I am in the process of a series of nine small 5x5 canvases. The backgrounds are started and the colors are so pretty. Just not sure what the focal point will be; it's a process. Below is a photo of the progress.