simplified red square

Another hour of painting last night to simplify red square number one. I took a palette knife and scooped up all the paint on my palette and dragged it over the existing painting. Lost some precious statements but got rid of some awkward/tight areas. Click to enlarge. I'll get back to this painting next week.

resting red square

This is what red square number one looks like today after an hour of evening painting yesterday. It is resting in my studio, waiting for me, but today I am busy planting the first packets of flower seeds in flats. Oil on cradled panel, 20 x 20 inches.

snow light

Finished pastel paintings hang from a beam along the back wall of my studio. It's a good storage place while they are awaiting their frames but it is also usually quite dark. Today we have 3 inches of snow and the whole studio is illuminated by snow light coming through the opposite wall windows. Click on the image to enlarge.

red square number one

This is what red square number one looks like now. It was completely red with a strip of blues/greens in the upper left corner. After the red was dry, I applied an oil paint wash of several colors and left the red showing in places. We'll see where it goes from here...

another spaghetti sauce side-track?

A couple years ago I got side-tracked by the color of spaghetti sauce. At that time, I fell in love with the color and dropped everything to paint my kitchen walls.

Today I used the remaining paint in the gallon can to paint over three very bad oil paintings. I had the first panel almost completely covered, just one more brush stroke of red to go in the upper left corner, but I loved the original color peeking through so I left that area unpainted. On the second and third panels, I deliberately left areas without red paint. Now, I'm feeling myself pulled toward abstraction...side-tracked again.

31 to go?

Another try using the thumbnail sketch I liked so much. I might have to take a break from this winter-marshland series or maybe change the colors to represent another season. The little image below is the oil-wash foundation. This painting is "Hometown Yesterdays," 13 x 13 inches.

32 to go

I really love thumbnail number 4 but just as one can rely too heavily on a reference photo, getting determined to duplicate a thumbnail can be a problem too. I finally just put the thumbnail out of sight and let the painting go in another direction. "Hometown Memory," 13 x 13 inches, on raspberry ground.

Speaking of memory: artist Loriann Signori has been posting insights about memory painting for many weeks. If you want to go deeply into this subject, visit her blog.

I thought you might like to see the thumbnail I referred to. I may use it again for a painting on a different color ground.

33 to go

This painting started out based on the third thumbnail from left, top row, on the sheet of 35 but it stayed on my easel in the oil-wash foundation stage for days because the composition made me wince each time I looked at it. When I went back to work on this piece, I thought about how much my hometown has changed since I lived there and what it is that still binds me to the area. One fondness is the sound of the train whistle of my childhood that I heard again as I was shooting the reference photos for this series. I kept that sound in my mind as I painted this one, "Hometown Heartstrings," 14 x 14 inches, pastel on paper.

34 to go

One down, 34 hometown marshland thumbnails to go....oh, maybe not really that many but enough for a series of paintings from this photo shoot.  How many is a "series?" Maybe it is however many it takes to get bored with the subject. "Hometown Marshland," 13 x 13 inches, pastel on paper.