So, I finished my earlier computer-age impressionism painting for my friend, Natalie – also known as N.B. Valentine.  And she just finished her “Buongiorno, Principessa!” painting for me.  We agreed earlier to do a painting swap.  I had to share the results on BV.

I love it.  She usually works in acrylics and does commission work mostly for children and babies’ rooms.  We talked at some length about what kind of painting would make a fair exchange for one of mine.  So when I suggested a freeze-frame I’ve been saving from the movie Life is Beautiful, she wasn’t entirely confident she could handle it.  Since I’ve been painting, I’ve been watching movies in an entirely different way – always looking for striking scenes to paint.  I’d saved this one for a while, and wasn’t sure I could do it justice at all.

I think she did a lovely job.  Lots of pretty details.  Great job on the big pink bow.  Nice horse.  Great job capturing the relation between the people.  Plus, she reports that she enjoyed getting her talent and skill stretched a little.  And taking on a little more difficulty than normal.  I agree that it’s fun sometimes to bite off a little more than I can chew.  It’s probably healthy for me, too.

If you don’t recognize this scene, you might should see the movie.  I highly recommend it, though it’s a tear-jerker.

It’s probably too hot to be outdoors, so there don’t seem to be a lot of events in Birmingham at the moment.  I’m staying in, too, and getting some stuff done.

Quite a while back, I found a stack of glass panes at a garage sale for free.  And anyone who knows me knows how much I like free stuff.  So I took them, thinking I’d eventually try and paint on them.

My first attempt failed miserably, thanks to a superball and a playful cat.  I’m much more happy with this attempt.

In preparation for using them, I went and took a bunch of pictures of trees, from under them, pointing straight up.  They’re interesting that way.

After I finished painting on one side of the glass, I was completely unsure how to hang it.  The last piece of glass I leaned up against something quickly fell prey to the aforementioned superball/cat combination.  The nice folks at Alabama Art Supply recommended I call the nice folks at Jingers Stained Glass.  Based on that conversation – and then another conversation with a blue-eyed girl at Michael’s – I glued some rings to the glass for hanging.  After waiting a little while for the glue to cure, I threaded that green ribbon through it.  (I might pick another color of ribbon, if I was going to hang it permanently, but the colors of ribbon I have handy around the house are significantly limited….)

I think it looks great in front of a window, too.  Especially if you lived somewhere more urban and less green.  But all my winderrs point out onto something green right now, so my house maybe doesn’t provide the best example.  The window pointing out onto my storage shed was the best I could do.  Maybe best in a small window, facing a brick wall, somewhere on Southside?  Or maybe a bleak dorm room or apartment on a campus somewhere?

The last two pictures provide an interesting contrast and are a good example of why painting on the glass may stay interesting for the future.  The first is taken with a flash; the second is without.  And I think the tree takes on a different character depending on the light.  So it changes with the status of the lights in the room.  Very cool.

I just hope those metal rings hold tight.  I already picked up shattered glass once.  The cat and the superball, remember?  Darn cat.

Okay, yeah, so someone contacted me and said the recently “finished” Computer-Age Impressionism painting looked like:

“…sunset at the beach…There is a rock out further in the water over the beachy hill. Closer there is a random rock formation..out of the picture there are mountains surrounding this beach which is not a public sort of place but something you just stumble upon and walk on. Not a beach where ppl are out tanning and building sandcastles. Not here because the mountains have it secluded.”

Yeah.  Thanks a lot…  So then I saw it like that too.  And it needed a hint of water.  And I’m an incorrigible tinkerer.  So I “fixed” it.  More work for me….  Why can’t I leave well enough alone?  But I don’t mind as long as it’s getting better.  If it’s still at my house, it’s hard to stop messing around with it.  What do we think now?  More interesting?  Less good?  Thanks for the feedback!

One of the hardest things with any piece of art is when to decide it’s finished – whatever that means.

So I finished this painting from the other day and a friend dubbed the style “computer-age impressionism”.  Yeah, I agree with that.  Click on it for a better view, though I gotta learn to take better pictures of my art.

I think one of the most fun things about having a blog is making up phrases and words.  If you google “computer-age impressionism” right now, you’ll only get Birmingham Verse.  Yep.  How awesome is that?

So this painting was intentionally commissioned for my friend Natalie.  She paints in acrylics and we agreed to do a “swap”.  She’s working on something for me, and I did this one for her.  She said she liked the earlier pixel landscape pieces, so I agreed to do another.  I’d been wanting to do one anyway.  I’ll tell you about what she’s working on when she gets finished and is ready.

I like the color palette here a lot.  I keep saying – imprecisely – that there aren’t any colors in this painting.  The main shades are all sorta between colors.  The top starts off pink and fades to a reddy-brown.  The bottom starts yellowy and fades to an orangey-brown.  The mystery landscape objects start reddy-brown and finish darker reddy-brown.  Not crayola, maybe.

I think part of the fun of doing these “computer-age impressionism” works is that I always try to make them a little mysterious.  There should always be some form in the picture that’s not quite obvious, just evocative.  I’m curious what people think this could be a picture of, besides what I think it’s a picture of.  I’d love to get an email from someone that says it looks like ketchup on pudding, Rapunzel’s tower, or whatever.  I always love the Rorschach Test nature of some of my paintings.  People say all kinds of wacky stuff about them that I wasn’t considering and I love hearing it all.

I’m in the middle of working on a painting, and I thought I’d share how it looks partway through.  I have no idea how it’ll turn out; it’s a mystery.

If you look closely, you can see the little notecard with colored pencil all over it that I’m sorta using as a guide.  I’m super incredibly high tech here at my house.

If this could’ve been kept under 140 characters – or if I was obnoxiously hip – this could’ve been a tweet.