I finished a new painting.  It represents two days of work and it was the mini-canvases that more-or-less inspired this idea.  The last batch of the mini-canvases I worked on all used a green that I liked, so I appropriated a similar green here.

I’ve been wanting to paint a background similar to this for several years and had it in my head.  It starts with sharp, violent strokes up from the bottom of the canvas with darker greens.  Lighter greens are then added over the top with the same strokes – up and to each side.  Finally, the lightest green and whites are added, but proceeding in clumps down the canvas to cover the bottoms of earlier strokes with the tops of final strokes.  I painted the background while I watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which I got from the Emmet O’Neal Library.

I liked the background, but I knew it eventually needed a foreground of some sort.  Before thinking about it too hard, I used simple white paint and loaded up my biggest brush and smashed it around in little circles.  Twisting it counter-clockwise into the canvas with an overload of paint.  I kept making more and more of these, thinking that they’d be flowers, eventually, but not really knowing where I was going.  I didn’t worry about whether they looked nice, pretty, or even like petals.

It’s difficult, I think, to create a “pattern” for the flowers.  In real life, flowers don’t grow randomly and they’re not evenly placed.  So I started clumping them and intentionally leaving some spaces between blooms.  I didn’t want it to look too “regular” or orderly.  But it needed to have some sort of cohesive force behind it.  When I figured it looked okay enough, I stopped.

I mixed a healthy amount of red and purple paint into a nice color and used a small brush to detail the surface of the big flower-blob things.  I tried my best not to disturb the shape of the blobs, instead focusing on painting the outside of the flower-shapes.  Some got more color than others – just like in real life.  And some are a little misshapen – just like in real life.

I wanted to leave it this way, just red and white flowers on a green background, but it didn’t look right.  I stared at it for several hours before getting the confidence to throw in some stems.  These green lines were surprisingly tricky to paint, but I think it gives some good texture and context to the foreground flowers.

It’s maybe the first painting I’ve done that looks really mainstream.  I keep telling people that I can imagine my grandmother wanting to hang it over her couch.  Which is a different feel for me, I think.  But I like it and will probably experiment with more in this vein in the near future.

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.

This is the third installment in a series discussing what’s happening with 36 mini-canvases I bought from Alabama Art Supply.  I finished this set on Sunday night during the Cubs/Brewers game.

Most of these echo themes that I wanted to explore from the earlier sets.  The peach/reddish foreground in the top left was the first one finished in this set.  This technique is continued from the last set and involves dragging the black paint into the middle of the canvas and then overlaying it with a faux chinese character or stick figure.  The primary reason this one is notable is the wavy line in it.  I think it’s maybe a little like Superman.

The next will be the last “chinese character” painting.  A little off-bluer than the other blue one.  Very different in that I specifically didn’t want it to be obviously a stick figure look-alike.  I don’t think it is.  Or, at least, you have to strain a little to find it.  Viewing this one along with the other three kind of plays that trick on your brain.  I have an idea of what I think it looks like, but I won’t share because I don’t want to spoil your fun.

The next three were the bottom row, left-to-right in order.  These echo the earlier painting where I used circles as a theme.  I love the idea in the first one of a balloon getting away.  Or a cell coming loose.  Maybe it’s a representation of sometime around 18 hours before my conception.

The middle bottom looks, to me, like a highly themed/conceptualized version of the beginnings of a rainstorm.  And – of course – I photographed it upside-down.  Crap.  So, just imagine it turned over, and, like I said, it’ll be like the highly themed/conceptualized version of the beginnings of a rainstorm.

Bottom right: Third rock from the Sun.  Or, some other rock from some other sun.  This was very fun to do.  The texture of the sun spills over the edges of the canvas.  And the moon is roughly the same color as the background, which means you might not notice it at first, so the blue planet just has a hunk out of it.

It’s hard to see in the picture (I need to learn to take better pictures of my paintings – HELP!), but the red stripe in the middle is highly-raised and highly-textured.  It came first.  I then took a bunch of other colors and dabbed the brush into the middle of the red stripe and dragged them out to both edges of the canvas.  I like the interplay between these colors.  Little bits of the canvas was left uncovered on purpose, if this technique didn’t cover it.

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.

Yesterday was an incredibly perfect day to be outside and a perfect day for painting.  I sat outdoors in the sunshine, ate fresh strawberries, and opened a bottle of champagne.  I’ve rarely felt more decadent.

Plus, I got some work done.  I finished the first six of my mini-canvases.  More to come as they are completed.

The island scene was first – it started with an idea for a tiny island surrounded by water.  I wanted to use the purple paint, so I put it in the sky, and it’s reflected in the water.  The scene was finished, but it needed a focus, so there’s a tiny little figure – which echoes an idea of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Monk By The Sea”.

The second completed was the yellow on top.  The brown lines followed the brushstrokes, just for fun.  I had no idea where it was going.  It sat to one side for a while, and then I liked the idea of the tiny pink flowers over it.

I wanted to use the yellow again, even brighter, so I yellow-washed the canvas bottom left.  I let it dry for a while and then put the black stripes over it with masking tape.  The stripes were uneven – precision isn’t my strong suit – so I added the red.  But I think it works.

The blue waves in the top right came next.  I added some thickening Res-n-Gel to the paint and started just messing around with the texture.  I like the effect it gives from just blending it together on the canvas.

I continued the thickening trend with the pink and gray on the bottom right.  The pink dots stand out from the canvas like little confections.  One dot is dirtied up with brown and black.  If you look carefully, little dots of ugly are spreading throughout the picture.  It conjures its own narrative, maybe.

The last completed was the stripes in the top right.  I did the first thick stripe with masking tape and had to wait on it to dry.  I realized it would take forever to do a lot of stripes like this, but the idea for this project was speed, so I filled in the rest of the stripes quickly by hand.  My favorite is the subtle white stripe in the corner.  It’s a little Eddie Van Halen, I think.