Ignore The No Trespassing Signs

Ignore The No Trespassing Signs

Ignore The No Trespassing Signs
(a diptych)
oil on paper
each 9 x 9 inches (plus a small border for framing)
This pair is unmounted and unframed.
(click on the image tp purchase)

Confidence ignores "No Trespassing" signs. It is as if he doesn't see them. He is an explorer, committed to following his own direction. He studied mathematics in France and still views his life as a series of experiments. The only limits he respects are his own. He is honest and humble and very funny. After all these years, his sister still doesn't understand why he still ice skates with Doubt. 
- from The Book of Qualities by J. RUTH GENDLER

​I've been thinking about creating inside and outside of "the box."

The art we collect here at Malarkey Central is mostly well outside of all the boxes (unless it is actually a box, like the enamel boxes of Marianne Velis Goodell or the assemblages of The Enchanted Museum Shop.  And I am drawn to those who push the boundaries of the box - the peculiar, the emotive, the immersive, the quirky, the odd.

But creating outside of the box is something else altogether, because it opens the artist (writer, sculptor, quilter, etc) to all that judgment, which pairs nicely with a helping of ​doubt.

As it is with many of our most fearsome concerns, the only way out is through.  And so from the very beginning of my art life I have created self-portraits every year. This year I challenged myself to create another self portrait without a smile and to use color pairings I do not really enjoy (red and green, in this case).  I often pull off the annual self-portrait and feel pretty good about it , but this year I got lost in the weeds. 

​However, as I have learned from my lovely friend Dotty Seiter, cutting up a piece of art is as much fun as painting over it, and so I doubled my fun on this one and dove right into an abstract in two pieces. Oh YES! Confidence boosted, I will go back to the drawing board and begin a second self-portrait. This time leaving the box wide open.

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About the art: beginning with an oil painting on paper, cut into two equal squares, I grabbed a palette knife and worked with bold stroked and saturated darks. Moving away from an obvious landscape but keeping the general composition of one, I  buillt up lights and whites for resting the eyes, then cut through the composition with diagonal lifework (using the edge of the knife) to break up the "landscape" and add movement. Voila!

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