This is the second installment in a series discussing what’s happening with 36 mini-canvases I bought from Alabama Art Supply.

The first of these was the scene in the bottom left.  I wanted to do another nature scene, but I’m typically no good at realism, so I stick to being evocative.  I liked the way this started and the dots that make up the scene ended up fairly complex.  I think there are three separate colors in each area of this one.  One thing that repeatedly occurs to me when I’m doing these is that I wish I could be more “big picture”, but I almost always end up doing a lot of little tiny detail work.  Am I doomed to be detail-oriented forever?  Is that a good thing?  The tree was last, but it’s just for scale.  It’s not a very happy tree – Bob Ross might protest.

The second painting was the red and black in the bottom center.  On a creative whim, I first painted the edges black.  Also on a whim, I took my seldom-used fan brush and dragged the black paint towards the center.  I liked those shapes, so I highlighted the dragged black paint with some red.  It needed a foreground, so I drew the faux chinese symbol in the front.  I think it looks like a little stick figure, but it could really be anything.  It looks like it’s in motion to me.

This led to the stick-figures in the top left.  There may be more of these before I’m done.  I’ve wanted to do a whole teeming mess of stick figures on a big canvas for quite some time and here is the mini-version of it.  I think it’s a pretty nifty idea.  It’s kind of amazing how much emotivity you can wring out of a few lines in the shape of a person.  It may be very old school Benetton ads.

Next was the stripes on the bottom right.  I green-washed the whole thing – again on a whim.  And then fretted about what to do with it for quite some time, while watching MLB opening day.  I started tinkering with mixing other colors with the green on my palette and then messed around with these stripes across the canvas.  I like the nice, even slants in the pattern here, although the stripes are individually uneven and different.  I wish there was a baseball theme to this one, but there’s probably not.

The black and blue in the top right corner is a direct tweak on the earlier painting.  There may be more of these; I like them.  This time, I just exchanged the red for a somberer blue.  Again, a half-chinese, half-stick-figure character in the foreground.  And this one’s got birds!

Finally, the top center is a departure.  I traced some circles using coins on the canvas and just started playing with the colors.  It feels kind of mod to me.  I may play around with this theme a little, too.  The edges (which you can’t really see) are the same color as the space between all the circles.  I like the interaction between all the circular spaces.  The space, for me, is as important as the objects.  The same is true in music, probably.  Discuss amongst yourselves.