This is the fourth installment in a series discussing what’s happening with 36 mini-canvases I bought from Alabama Art Supply.  For this six, I intentionally switched to landscapes, and I wanted to try some people, because I don’t think I’m that good at either.  I feel like these turned out pretty good, though, and I’m proud of them.

I was walking the dog in my neighborhood and got the idea to do little tiny suburban landscapes.  The first is in the top left of this photograph.  Green on the bottom, blue on the top, nothing too precise on purpose.  A couple of impressionistic houses shaded in, also not too precise.  And then, echoing a scene I saw over at my neighbor’s house the other day, two tiny figures playing catch with a ball.  It’s fun, though jittery, to paint human figures in miniature.  Each tiny glob of paint takes on a lot of meaning and can be a bear to place.  Unfortunately, each tiny blot can also go horribly wrong.

The second one is top-middle.  Same general principles, but I added the dog and the fence.  I could have played with that dog forever and I did.  I don’t think he ended up as good as he did somewhere farther back in the history of the process, but a part of art is just knowing when to stop.

The third is bottom-left.  I like the idea of this one, with the little girl maybe throwing the ball up on the roof and fetching her daddy to help. I think just about everything in this one turned out reasonably well.  If you put the dog one directly to the right of this one, it looks like they sort-of fit together.  Unintentional.

The last suburban people landscape is bottom-middle.  I wanted another child playing, but had to think a while about what to do.  I put that blue blanket in there before my idea had fully congealed and I thought I’d ruined the painting.  But now I think it worked out pretty good.  I like the idea of a little girl in her front yard playing with a doll and other toys.  I can just imagine the parents somewhere telling her to stay in the yard.

The fifth is top-right.   I wanted to do a really simple little landscape with some sort of twist.  Using the same blue/green palette from the suburban landscapes, I put in the sky and ground.  Although it echoes the pixellated theme from earlier paintings, it was really just kind of a wild hare to put those white lines across.  And then – in a definite throwback to those earlier pixellated paintings – I shaded some of those squares out to make them flat.  I’m not sure they show up very well, but I really like this canvas.

Last is bottom-right.  The idea was to continue the “landscape with squares” theme from the last painting.  So it’s got the same blue sky and grass, but with a square sun.  And then the little mysterious white square sheeples or tombstones or whatever below.