About the art: beginning with an old acrylic painting and a tub of black gesso, murdering the old painting to make room for the new. Carving back through the wet gesso to reveal a spot or two of the underpainting color. For this piece, I used no inspiration image. Just a color palette and my Planes of the Head mannequin - https://planesofthehead.com/products.php. I sketched a basic shape and features with a small brush and some thinned oil paint. Then the requisite 80 million layers of thin washes - darkening the background, highlighting the face, the flower petals, the hair. Allowing the texture of the original painting to create a kind of old-world crackling of the skin. OH! A walnut-oil laden brush over wet petals to create the dripping effect. A final layer of Gamvar gloss over the dried painting to make the darks sing. Congratulations to Sara V.H.! Wonder Mike selected your name at random as winner of the April Reader Giveaway. Be on the lookout for your prize package in the mail. And thanks to all who participated! Hooray!
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About the art - another piece created on top of an old one, using the underpainting colors to enhance the background and to cut through some of the foreground. In using the poem as fodder for the art, I used harsh, edgy brush strokes and wedge edges for some of this piece, keeping the colors fairly stark and full of contrast. Some soft blending, but mostly allowing the piece to fill with unrefined texture. Especially important to resist perfecting this one, which feels Seaton's poem so deeply. It's the last week to enter the April Reader Giveaway! This month we're talking about poems (or lyrics or quotes) that hit you in a visceral way. What's your favorite? Leave a comment to enter - one lucky reader will receive a piece of original art FREE, just for participating. Hooray!
And that's the trick, isn't it? Shielding our spark, evolving our shimmer so we can see all the beauty and feel compassion for our small selves and our large world and each other in the soup. It isn't easy, and it's not for the faint hearted. But Seaton says of course the Earth would be dear to us if we saw her there in the blackness - and maybe, just maybe, seeing ourselves from afar, sea creature, translucent we evolve compassion for our bubble-spitting selves. About the art: another piece on artist printer paper, an absorbent and fairly smooth substrate. I learned from prior pieces on this medium to go heavy with the paint, build layers and allow tons of drying time. This figure began as an idea for another queen (I so enjoy painting them) whose crown became heavy, jester-ish, weighted. Sometimes when you follow the paint, these things reveal themselves. Rubber wedge, brushes, fingers, paper towels and chopsticks used in creating this piece. She's been given a coat of Gamvar to deepen the darks, making her even more mysterious. It's time for the April Reader Giveaway! What poem (or lyric or quote) gives you a deeply visceral response? Leave a comment and you'll have a chance to win an original piece of art - FREE - just for sharing your thoughts. Huzzah! The winner will be selected at random by Wonder Mike and announced at the end of the month.
Think of DNA, Seaton writes. Oh, I do. The things that make a person odd are odd themselves. Oddly, 50% of my DNA is mysterious, of unknown origin, vague shadows of Turkey and Italy and other unexpected lands. An unknown father. A story that died with my mother, before it was ever told. It remains her secret. It's odd to come back to life, says Seaton. And yet we do, cycling through seasons of turning within and blossoming without, coming back to life when we rediscover lost parts of ourselves and when we discover new parts we perhaps never knew existed. Seaton's words take us down into that dark valley, hinting at the irreversible and then suddenly resurrecting us with a single sentence - she came back to life. Oh! About the art: beginning with black gesso over an old acrylic painting and carving through the gesso while wet to expose some of the original colors. Once dry, a loose figure sketch in white. Working from the outside-in to further define the figure by using a rubber wedge and walnut oil thinned paint. For the figure and the moon, many layers of thinned paint with broad strokes, keeping it loose. Blending with fingers and a soft cloth. Allowing some edges to remain crisp while blurring others. Carving through the wet paint with a small rubber edge to create texture in the "fabric". Standing (or sitting) ten feet back periodically to keep from losing the gesture of the piece. I've got a small sofa at a set distance from the work in process now. Sitting there and contemplating each piece daily has helped me see better where a painting works and doesn't.
About the art: the AI bot is learning my innermost ballgown bot dreams. It has begun layering my reference images with dripping fabric and paint, spring pastels and the soft hint of wings. Oh oh and OH! Beginning with a cradled wood panel gesso'd in white and drawing the form shapes with colored pencil. Working from the outside in for the base layers to keep the form edges crisp, then from the inside out to allow the oil-thinned paint at the bottom of her gown to drip and mix with the background underpainting. Brushes, rubber wedges, fingers and a soft cloth were used in creating this piece. Allowing the thickness of final paint layers to create texture and fabric folds. As always, resisting the urge to perfect, walking away and looking back from a distance to see her essence. I think she's quite content.
In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis. It belongs, in the most acute and panicked way, to the search for self-knowledge. - Alain de Botton The School of Life: An Emotional Education
It can begin with a fear of public speaking, or heights, or social situations or something seemingly silly and benign. It may be based on a frightening or painful past experience, or it may not. The why does not matter to the Honey Badger. You can waste a lot of time asking why. The real question is: what? What is your body experiencing, what was the situation before hand, what can you do to feel better?
Congratulations, Candis and Thea! Wonder Mike chose your names at random as winners of the March Reader Giveaway! Email your mailing address to thewanderingsofllola@gmail.com and your free art will be on its way to you. Thank you for sharing your super powers with us. xo
As Harjo says so beautifully in She Had Some Horses: She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she hated. / These were the same horse. Esme has looked herself in the eye and stared down the bully. I think liberation looks good on her. :) There is one more week to enter the March Reader Giveaway! Leave a comment - what's YOUR superpower? (see last week's blog post). One lucky commenter will win a piece of original art - free! Huzzah!
I am actually grateful - this ability is pretty good for keeping life from going off the rails. But a day of leaping tall buildings, invisibility, flying or even just figuring out who done it in the crime novel we're reading would be nice. Just saying. SUBSCRIBER PERKS!
This month, take 35% off anything in the shop with coupon code SPRINGFORWARD35. Books, art cards, paintings and prints! Coupon expires March 31. Thank you for being a subscriber and for participating in this little zone of connection and art. I so appreciate you!
The only way to get better at conversing is to - you guessed it - converse. And the only way to have control over things is to - you guessed it again - give up the idea you have any control in the first place. Which leads to art, the creation of which is a conversation of sorts. And no matter how I see and rehearse the conversation with the canvas in my head, what happens at the end of my fingertips is something else. Often so so SO much better than anything I could have imagined. Well. Who knew? About the art: This piece began with a gesso murder of an old acrylic painting and a vague idea of what I wanted to create. Something that hints at a dystopian setting, but could also be a landscape, or maybe a contraption or a view into another land. How's that for wishy-washy? But I knew the colors I wanted, so I began with a loose sketch with a long brush laden with thinned oil paint. From there, the piece developed solely with two sizes of rubber wedge and a chopstick. Moving around the piece, sharpening lines here, softening and blurring there. Adding paint with the wedge and then subtracting by dragging another wedge through the wet paint. The ghosts of city buildings (or are those the masts of ships?) appeared on the "horizons" so I let them be. In the end, it is nothing like I imagined, and yet it is something more than that. It packs a lot of punch and drama in a relatively small painting. Huzzah!
Congratulations to Mary C.! Wonder Mike chose your name as winner of the February Reader Giveaway. Be on the lookout for package of free art coming your way in the mail. And thanks hugely for participating!
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AuthorLola Jovan |