New small works

I've been moving into a new house this past month and have only stolen a few moments to paint. Here are some pieces I've recently finished.

The top one, "Carthage," was begun a long time ago when I was painting with coffee. I was never that satisfied with it, so I set it aside and recently added the white areas and the small red square. It's framed with leftover strips of black cherry, something I plan to do with a lot of the small pieces.

The second one down is "Reflecting Pool." This one has been through many stages, but finally I'm pretty happy with it. It is a little more vibrant than the colors here suggest.

Finally, "Ascend" is another piece that was begun a long time ago and sort of stagnated as a fairly boring composition until I added the connecting arc and it all kind of activated. The first and last pieces were completed for exhibit in Tim's "Little Big Show" along with 3 others. "Reflecting Pool" is a stand-alone, a color and layering experiment for some of the larger pieces I'm working on.

taking advice and other stuff

with these 19x24 paper pieces i was following some advice from lightgeist. first, kellie's advice from way back when to try doing stuff with no source material and travis' advice when he talked about making paintings that were an identifiable color. here i have green red and purple. next i might do a suggestion of molly's to do a tree house...which i was thinking about back in the day but couldn't make it work. also i was doing new stuff here...using aluminum foil and QR codes. in each QR code there is a few sentences of description of other rooms. so these are about spaces in spaces inside spaces etc. if you have a smart phone you can interact with the paintings, scanning the qr code to get the descriptions. i know these paintings basically suck but i was trying a bunch of new stuff. they really are just studies for later, bigger things. so any feedback is much appreciatd so i can improve the new stuff...especially anything about color...i really wanna get better with the color. also...are the QR codes dumb? thanks!


green room: acrylic, oil, aluminum foil, ink jet print outs

red room: acrylic, aluminum foil, vinyl, tape, ink jet print outs
purple room: acrylic, oil, ink jet print outs


##some of the QR codes say things like:
"I had never seen that door before. How had I missed it? I grew up in that house."

"Deep in the forest there was a florescent pink wall and a purple couch along side it. We sat down and had a drink. "

"We carried the couch into the cave and set the television up. It was damp and dark but we were ok. "

new figures

these are two new watercolors ,
i put birds in their shirts
im now full speed ahead on the book im doing with that writer
after these and getting the first check i can devote more time to it
not feeling like im losing money if im not painting for the gallery
which is something i battle with considering
experimental or outside projects
wierd
these photos are not the best, alot of subtlety is lost
i like these backgrounds. im considering some other forms of abstraction into these large passages
lovin it

oil portrait

Here's the finished piece. I took this crappy first photo in class with my iPhone, so I'll take a better shot and replace it. I'm happy with it overall, but there are a couple of drawing issues that bother me and other minor things I'd like to fix up. I'd be worried to do anything else without reference, though, so it'll probably stay just like this. I learned a lot with this piece, so I'm looking forward to doing another. I've never painted something so small and complex as this face, but there's something fun about painting tiny details.

pro artist hrs

Found this blog entry and thought i'd share it. A professional artist says she spends as much
time in the studio as she did when she was working a 9-5 job. Pretty interesting:

http://joannemattera.blogspot.com/2009/04/marketing-mondays-how-is-your-pie.html

the winding stair

don't think it's done quite yet. that pink has changed a bunch of different colors.
2'x4' acrylic, oil, ink, tape and sequins on canvas over panel.

also here is a link to a better picture of the fountain post below. i think i'm not
gonna add the trees because i like having part of it open. i dunno...