Snow snow painting and snow

It has been snowing most of the month of January with 7 school snow days. Shoveling out to the studio when we can get my son to do it. Hopefully today I can get  out there.

Snow outside the studio

I am working on an even NEWER series of paintings. Using the previously posted paintings as bases, I am working from a sketch and responding to the canvas as it develops. I clearly need a palette to develop, but right now I am working with the composition.

base painting for siena series

I am happy with the above base as a start. As I continue, here is where I have left off:

step two on siena base

Again, the colors need to shift, but I am trying to constantly simplify. I think I may even just take a piece of this painting and redo it as a new painting. Crop it to simplify the composition even more. This canvas is 36″ x 48″ as are all of my canvases I am discussing. It has been weeks since I worked on this so I am chomping at the bit to get back to it. I’ll post more as it develops.

Yes another canvas!

Well here’s a far cry from the landscape beginning. This is just a base painting:

Yikes, where did all that come from? It was an explosion of painting, perhaps years of pent up desire to put stuff down, no matter what. But don’t worry it was always just to be a base, so here’s where it goes:

to this:

I feel closer to where I want to be, but still not quite there yet. As a flyer I put it into a juried show just to market test it, so to speak. I also put in a mixed media work like what I was doing just as I was thinking about painting again:

No surprise, the old mixed media piece got in, and the new (AND UNRESOLVED!!!) work did not.

This was akin to my other piece I sold, entitled “For R”:

You see the motifs of circles and the cell structures etc. that I have been doing for a few years now. They came out in my mandala work a few years back, and this was where they had gone at this point. But now, here I was on a new mission with my new paintings. Still not there yet.

Meanwhile as I am teaching a Creative Visual Journaling class, I run into new motifs and realize the cell structures/topography have to do with the oneness/separation of my father and me as well as my daughter and me. Issues come up of abandonment and loss. Creative Visual Journaling is not for the faint of heart, but oh, is it powerful! I am thinking of old imagery to combine into my new work. Image transfers? Maybe. Back to mixed media? Maybe. So I went back to that other canvas and here’s what I did this week:

EXCITING things are happening. I unfortunately have been taking these pictures with my iPhone 3G. You can’t get the detail and the underlayment showing through, but this piece is going to go through a lot of metamorphosis still, so stay tuned. I’ll keep you posted. Thank god I am doing this, I wouldn’t be able to keep these stages straight otherwise! I can’t wait to get in the studio and continue. Will my father appear in the next iteration? One never knows what the muse will do. All I need to do is show up in the studio.