Saturday, January 27, 2007

I end up doing a lot of still life stuff in my watercolor classes. While I enjoy painting them I guess I have never really thought about them as serious "paintings." When I was cleaning up my studio [still] I went through my hundreds of unfinished paintings [I am not exaggerating] and I was pretty pleased. I think a lot of the ones I thought of as unfinished are good the way they are. Whether or not they are good to frame they speak of the journey I am making as an artist. Some of them I will frame as the opportunity arrives.
The most surprising of the bunch was the dozen or so flower still life paintings. Flowers have never been my favorite subject matter but when I lay them out together I like them quite a bit. I plan to take pictures of them and post them as a flickr slideshow or something. If I figure out how to do that and I can figure out how to link it you should see it soon. Here is one of the unfinished ones. Its one of my favorites and the only one that fits on the scanner. I like the simplicity of it and the negative space.
I dont think I will do anything else to it, I have never been able to leave well enough alone so we shall see if I can actually resist continuing to work on it!

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

This is an acrylic on paper painting I started in the summer.
It's a work in progress and I havent worked on it lately- but it reminds me of warm weather and afternoons at the beach. That and its warm soft colors put me in mind of better weather as I spent the day cleaning my studio [still not finished] and gazing outside at yet another rainy miserable winter day in Victoria. I havent picked up a brush in a couple of weeks and am really looking forward to starting my classes next week at Island Blue [check out www.islandblue.com for schedule] and finishing some paintings. That will get me through the dark and wet days until spring!