Challenge: Title this work!

To Be Named

I am creating a NEW body of work. It hearkens back to my Streams of Consciousness series, with vertical strips juxtaposed to one another. These are collages. As always, I am having a very difficult time naming each work. I would even like a series name as they are all related visually, however, individual names would do well too. I don’t like titles that lock the viewer into one way of seeing a piece, so a bit of ambiguity is nice. So here’s your challenge: Name this piece, or name the series, or both. Your choice. What do you see? What do you call it? Please respond by April 27. Thanks for YOUR creativity…

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.