Inspiration

I recently saw an exhibit of Roberta Richman's abstract landscape paintings.  What intrigued me most was that she used oil sticks and they were very textured.  When I got to the studio, I dragged out my oil sticks and started messing around.

I started out with an 8 x 8 and turned it into a landscape, using my usual color pallet.

Then a couple of days later I just decided to use a bugger piece of paper and scratch some texture into it.  I was still in stripe mode.

Then as I was cleaning up for the evening, I stacked the papers up and I thought this looked pretty good. 

I'm not sure how she got the texture but my guess would be that she mixed the oil sticks with Dorland's Wax.  I plan on doing some more experiments on this.

Finally Done

After at least two other incarnations, this is finally done and I am very pleased with myself.  As you can see, it is nothing like the previous posts and maybe that is how this ended.  Any thoughts?

Bits of the other incarnations show through in the corners.  Come to think of it, this is upside-down.

Works in Progress

Here is what I have been working on for the past few days.  This piece started out as this

and then I cut it down to a square

but I was not happy with it because I thought it was just another thing I did.  In other words, it was too much like all the other things I do.  So back to the drawing board and I came up with this:

In retrospect, maybe it was not so bad and at least it was different from what I had been doing.  To make along story short, it did not stay this way.  More on this later.

Yipes! Stripes!

I had some fun making stripes.  These are acrylic on bristol paper.  It is a fun exercise that Jane Davies does on her website so I thought I would give it a try.  I do not know what I will do with them but I think they would look fine by themselves.

I bought a new paint in a tube from Michael's (I forget exactly what it is called) but it makes a fine line with dimensions which is the mark on the upper left.  Maybe I should have started with a clean piece of paper.

This is the second piece I did.  I think I will do some more but with more defined lines.

More on the Previous Post

I have continued working on the previous post and other things.  At this point I am overworking it and it has has many incarnations, none of which make me want to stop and say it is done.  Nevertheless, I am pressing on with it.  The most important thing I learned is to never buy cheap white paint.  It just seems to get sucked into the paper and makes things muddy.

This, however, is done.  It is my experiment with the limited pallet using only black, white, red and yellow.  It is Portland Head Light  from a photo I took last summer.

I started off painting loose but as usual I got fussy with the details.  I discovered that I have no idea how to paint rocks but I am pleased with the over all drawing.

Inspired Work

I have been a follower of Jane Davies' blog for quite some time.  One of her videos shows the 5 minute painting which I thought I would try. I have to say I cheated because once I started, I liked what I saw and continued on for a lot more than 5 minutes.

This is acrylic on a recycled piece of watercolor paper.  I gave it a crop and popped the colors a bit with more paint and my trusty water soluble oil pastels.  I want to add something like a big circle or bold lines but I'm not sure that will be over doing it.  We'll have to see.

Road Trip

I went on a photo walk in Lowell, Mass to the Boott Cotton Mill.  I don't feel I got really good stuff but it was a pretty interesting place.  They had some machines running and making cloth as well as a museum that told the story of the cotton mills.

Here are a few pictures from that day:

Snow - Day 2

Snowing again.  It snowed during the night and then restarted at about noon.  It was coming down pretty good so I self imposed home confinement.  I wanted to go to the studio to check on my tiles and pick up something for the juried show in Wickford but it was a good thing I stayed home.  I amused myself by repainting a wall.  Not what I had in mind for today.

An Unwelcomed Surprise

So this is what greeted me when I woke up this morning.  It was also very cold and windy.  So much for Spring.

With this plowable snow, I hesitated about going into Providence for the opening of the Providence Art Club's national juried show of which I was "not invited", which begs the question:  If you applied for a juried show, would you rather hear that you were not accepted or not invited?  But I digress.

Anyway, I did venture into Providence, and by the way, they did not get plowable snow even though it is only 10 minutes away but the wind was fierce.

The Providence Art Club show was somewhat disappointing since they only accepted 10% of the 750 entries so I was expecting to see something more.  I was baffled by the best in show which was a small piece that was all black and the theme of the show was Color.  Go figure.