Changing Direction

Well, it's official.
After 15 years of mural painting, I'm climbing down off of my ladders and scaffolding to spend my creative time in my studio. Nerve damage from working with my arm up over my head for so many years has finally forced me to head in a new direction.

Change isn't exactly my favorite thing. I usually go kicking and screaming all the way into a new season, job or place to live. But, as you know, sometimes change...even unexpected change, can turn out to be a nice, happy surprise.

I can still paint in my studio, but I've recently started to carve... and I love it! I'm carving wood, gourds and eggshells, and it's just about the most fun I've ever had in all of my creative endeavors. Learning something new has it's challenges, but it's also an enjoyable journey.

So...here's to the new paths in life....Cheers!

Slow Dry Acrylics

I've been playing around with the relatively new "slow dry acrylics" by Golden. I almost always work in acrylic, and I figured it would be nice to have more "open time", so I motored over to the art supply store and bought a few tubes of this "new" product.

Now, I haven't spent a ton of time working with these, but....my findings so far are as follows...
1. Does it stay wet as long as oils? Noooooooooo. To be fair, it does stay wet on the palette for about a day. That's nice. You don't end up wasting a lot of paint. When actually painting, though, it stays wet for possibly 8 minutes. I work with thin layers of paint....so...it would probably stay wet longer if I was using really thick applications.
2. You can "reactivate" the paint after it has dried to the touch with either water or the product that you're supposed to use with this paint....and that was a hoot.
3. It made it much easier to blend areas together. Nice.

4. Ahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ok...here is a tip. I work in very thin layers of paint. When working in acrylic (I usually use liquitex), I usually just use water to thin my paint down and "glaze". I did the same thing with the Open Acrylics....but....when I went to varnish the painting....the paint lifted and smudged all over the place....and some areas lifted completely. AHHHH!!! Ut oh. Sooo....I "fixed" that painting and then I tried the paints again, this time thinning them with a combination of water and matt medium (about 3:1). That time, I didn't have any problem with the paint lifting on me whilst varnishing.

Sooo....these paints seem fill a nice "niche" between acrylics and oils. Use them for more open time and better blending, but don't expect them to stay wet like oils or to move around like oils.

Waldner Gardens

I just finished this mural. It was actually more difficult than I had envisioned. The clients had a painting that they loved, and they wanted me to "extend" the painting into a mural. Matching the colors exactly was a bit time consuming, but I think it worked out well. I used: Ultramarine blue, Cerulean Blue, Raw Sienna, Yellow Ochre, a tad bit of Cad. Yellow medium, Dark Burnt Umber, Burnt Umber, and Alizarin Crimson. The base color (the color I wash in over everything at the beginning) was mostly Raw Sienna with some areas of Yellow Ochre.

I love painting gardens and flowers, so this was a great project. :-)

South Dakota Summer Memories

I just finished a commissioned painting for a client of her mother's childhood home....a farm in South Dakota. Her mother provided some old black and white photos of the various farm buildings (house, barn etc), but none of the photos showed the entire farm , and all of the building photos were from different angles. Trying to piece the various photos and angles together into a convincing scene was harder than I had anticipated.

I took some photos of the creative process...(from gathering the photo reference to sketches and value studies to painting) and put them in video form.

I finally finished and varnished this painting....

Studio work

This is week 3 of the "virus from hell". I've been sick for 3...yes...3 weeks now. Really. On the upside, I've spent time in my studio working on painting some things I've been wanting to try. I love reflective and transparent surfaces. These are the first 2 stages of "Which One of Us is Thinking Clearly?" . The first stage includes the sketching of the light bulbs and the glass bowl...stage 2 is the "blocking in" stage where the basic forms, colors and values are established.

For some reason, I've been wanting to paint light bulbs. For me, they are symbolic of ideas. It occurred to me, especially during the elections, that everybody has their ideas...their opinions...and everyone seems convinced that THEY are the one who is thinking clearly. So, I painted one clear light bulb and one frosted bulb. I do believe everybody thinks they are the clear bulb...and if you disagree with them, they consider you to "not be thinking clearly".

Whirlwind

When I began blogging, I was sure that I (unlike other artists) would keep my blogs up to date...uh huh. Since my last entry...in March...life has been a crazy, swirling whirlwind of debris. Now that the wild winds have dissipated, I can sift through the events..pick them up and put them in perspective.

The mural work has been fantastic for the last four months. I painted lots of things in a new Mexican restaurant.... "El Padrino". I'm tellin' ya...that was the most fun I've had on a job in eons. Everyone I worked around was just a hoot. We all had a lot of work to complete, but everyone was a riot. I was rather sad to finish that project. Such fun.

The next big project (multiple murals and a wee bit of faux) began immediately after the El Padrino work was complete. This work was for Stonegate homes...for one of their houses that will be on the Parade of Homes starting next week. A great job...working for great people.

During all of this work activity, my mother in law...one of my favorite people on the planet...was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I really thought that if anyone could beat this terrible disease, it would have been Wanda. She fought right up to the end....and she maintained her humor and grace through what had to have been the most terrible challenge of her life. Her memorial service is this weekend in Ohio. Her absence leaves an enormous black hole in our lives.

My cat of nearly 20 years is in the process of dying. She's had skin cancers for years now, so she's actually lived longer than I expected. Even so, that doesn't make it any less painful.

On the up side, my parents took everyone in the family on a cruise in July. We had a festive time, and it helped to get our mind off of the depressing events back home.

Now that things are settling down a bit, I find I'm feeling rather lost. This happens to me every time I'm involved in a large project. I work like a crazed painting chimp for weeks and weeks, and then.....well....there's sort of a let down. I readjust quickly, though. :-) I'm looking forward to puttering in my studio over the next few weeks.