A thoughful alternative

A great alternative to spending loads of money on framing is to paint the sides of a canvas. You can still frame the painting later but in the meantime, it looks so professional. You can have a lot of fun playing with color and even textured patterns on the sides. I just painted the sides of Crisp Autumn Leaves black and it looks SO much more striking and more professional. Ready to hang and be seen!

This has been a great idea for the bamboo series as well as my winter series.

Huh?

I was flipping through Salvador Dali's "Diary of a Genius" - was he crazy? Perhaps. Genius, probably. I came across a short entry: "We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have served for that: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art." What does that mean? How can abstract art serve our thirst for concrete images? Or am I reading it wrong? I do a lot of abstract art. Perhaps he means that like Picasso, sometimes the way to most purely represent a 3-D image on 2-D space is to paint it from many different angles and abstractly, thereby boiling down a thing's essence and capturing it on canvas. Hmmm. Are the two mutually exclusive? Conundrum.

Musings

I promised to talk about using glitter and acrylic paints together to form an impressive and let's face it, downright cool effect on the canvas. Sheva and I had been discussing my doing a seasonal series - depicting Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer. I had several thoughts on how to go about doing such a series as I already started my Autumn Series dedicated to my grandmother. The colors were chosen for me by fate so it seemed and the creative process, once overcome, poured out of me.

Winter has been a much bigger challenge. For how do you depict winter, snow, white, on white? You see, challenge. Amazingly enough, the answer also came through Sheva. We went to the Pearl art store which was having a clearance sale and Sheva insisted on buying all kinds of glitter. Now I get a bit messy when I paint but the idea of glitter getting in the cracks on the floor of my apartment gave me hives. I tried in vain to dissuade her from buying the glitter - to no avail. Once home, Sheva suggested that I might use the glitter in a painting. On the surface. Not thrilled with the idea, I once again objected. But then it occurred to me to combine the white glitter with white acrylic paint and see what happened. I had also bought an iridescent color series called "Interference" which was very glossy and fine and wouldn't show up very well on canvas unless combined with another color. Ah! The combination was there, all I needed to do was experiment. So with a palate knife, I combined the white paint, the glitter and the "Interference" red and went to work. The result is what I call my winter series. Born out of frustration and a total lack of ideas, these paintings ended up as the textured representations of winter scenes that we in Chicago and elsewhere - where snow, wind and cold are the essence of winter - know so well. They are fun to look at, surprising, rough to the touch and a triumph as far as I'm concerned.

They are difficult to photograph and much better to observe in 3D but I will post an example on the blog.

Gold textured painting

So I used the oatmeal-type paints that I described in my last blog. The one I used was a gold color paint that is supposed to look like pyrite when dry. Interesting to work with. When it first goes on, you cannot see the finished product. It's still white and somewhat gooey. Because of the way I layered the gold on, when it dried, the result was a raised 3-D look on a 2-dimensional space - it really did look like pyrite. What I did was pair it with gold and bronze shiny acrylics that look fabulous on the canvass. I used a palette knife to apply the paint so the result is a very textured look. If you run your fingers over it, you feel it. It has shining accents due to a bit of gold glitter that I mixed in with the paint. I love the warmth of colors. Using mixed media with acrylics has turned out to be a wonderful adventure but more on that next week.

Do people ever get this excited about buying paints?

I have been meaning to get to Dick Blick but a fantastic trip has interrupted that intention. I loved spending the Holidays with Jo, my cousins, aunt and uncle out in D.C. (actually Virginia) and now I'm back with renewed interest in getting started.

We visited the National Galleries in Washington D.C. and the modern art wing gave me tons of ideas. It was like my brain had these tiny little explosions and visions of what I could do next.

I just printed out a 40% off coupon that I intend to use before the end of the year. ONE DAY! I have to get my tushy over to the store and buy the coolest paint EVER! It is a textured water-based paint that when wet, looks like oatmeal but when it dries, looks like pyrite - stunning gold color. It's, again, AWESOME!

Further musings on Inspiration

Autumn Series: When my artist grandmother died back in 2002, my Mom urged me to take some of her art supplies. When looking through her paints, I came across a box marked “oils.”



I had been working with acrylics but I thought that I would eventually work in oils again. I set the box aside. A few years later I opened it and saw that the tubes of paints were not oils but acrylics!

This was extraordinary because my grandmother rarely used acrylics as her medium of choice. Even more extraordinary was that she had picked out an Autumn color palate. Grandma died in September, the month when all the leaves start to turn the luscious colors she had chosen. In creating the paintings, I have used only the paints that I found in her box. I dedicate this Autumn Series to my Grandma C.C.’s memory.


Bamboo Series: When I was studying at the Suburban Fine Arts Center as a youngster, a Chinese artist who specialized in Chinese ink paintings gave a session on how to create bamboos using the ink stick, water, stone and special Chinese brush. I’ve always loved the Chinese bamboo black ink drawings and began to wonder what it would look like if I used bright colors as a backdrop because of the contrast with the black of the bamboo. I chose yellow because I felt it had the best contrast and would make the black of the bamboo jump out. The writing in Chinese is actually my first name written in Chinese characters. The top symbol or “Shuh” means a light rain. The middle symbol “Li” means beautiful and “Sha” has the connotation of a grassy beach. After showing my first bamboo painting to my Chinese friend, she said it was a lucky painting and asked me why I had chosen yellow as a backdrop. I told her. “That’s interesting,” she replied, “because yellow was the royal color in China. Only the dynastic families were allowed to wear that color.”


General Inspiration: For most of my other paintings, I base my color combinations on the color wheel contrasts. I play with complementary colors. Red and green, orange and blue, purple and yellow, are all complementary pairs because they are opposites on the color wheel. You’ll notice that complementary colors are one primary color (red) vs. the other two primary colors combined (blue+yellow=green). When juxtaposed on a canvas, they tend to shimmer and have a vibrancy and life all their own. I want to express beauty, happiness and joy through my artwork. If you have any specific questions about the inspiration for a particular painting that you see know or in the future, I would be happy to share my stories with you.

Thank You!

I wanted to thank all of you who came out on what has so far been the coldest night of the year for my art opening at the Northbrook Public Library. It was great seeing all of you and a pleasure talking with each and every one of you. Thank you for your support, your presence, your input and your smiles. It meant so much to me that you were all there!

I hope that you all had a lot of fun as I know that I did! It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening and one I'll remember with great happiness for many years to come. I hope you enjoyed seeing the artwork - both vintage and newly minted! Please tell your friends as the show will remain up until the end of December.

Again, thank you all and love to all!