I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to be finished with a piece. I learned a lot, though. If there are any non-artists out there who believe art isn’t WORK, let me educate you. This one was hard. With a lot of back pain involved. I put in several full days of work. It took me two weeks of painting everyday. Some days I was a contortionist in order to get the paint in the corners it needed to go into.

So my love affair with this piece didn’t last. I made so many mistakes starting out. This created lots of extra work. Back breaking work – not literally, but very bad back pain at the end of the day. This is not my normal style of painting. I rarely paint with acrylics, or with flat color. The midcentury modern time period required it in the graphics. I show here 11 phases. Some of these phases have “temporary” items in them. Taking a photo of the “possibilities” helps me to see if it’s really what I want. In my next post you will see in the finale that I did away with some things that were there from the beginning.

I had a lot of images saved of clocks that were from the Midcentury Modern era.

I wonder if the general public realizes how much work artists do even before a piece is started. This particularly applies to conceptual pieces which for me are usually mixed media. In this case I had to make sure that my images were definitely all from that era. I also want any type that I use in the piece to be from that era. You can see that I’ve drawn some common motifs from that time onto my canvas. I will be painting them in the next phase – I think. Could be I decide to use some collage here. After that I definitely start turning it into mixed media with collage and the addition of objects. My path is much clearer now and things should move along quickly. I may just get this baby done in time for the take-in! * Some of the drawing here is from a previous idea.

I have to repeat myself and say once again that I LOVE to watch how an art piece EVOLVES. I’m certain most artists do, or we wouldn’t sit through the endless amount of demos that we do. 🥴 I’m showing you phase 2 even though it has evolved beyond this as well. As you can see, phase two was mostly about subtraction with a little bit of composition thrown in. However, while looking through the images I had saved on my computer for this project, other thoughts came to me. Please make sure to check out the last post to see the difference. You definitely won’t want to miss the NEXT post! Hold on to your hats! This ride is going to be a blast…from the past.

Starting a new work is almost always exciting. For me when it’s a mixed media piece, my exuberance might be a little too much. In this case particularly so. The idea for this piece called “Timing is Everything” has been in my head for at least 10 years. That means I’ve been collecting images and items for the piece for that long. The first phase is to bring out everything. It might surprise you that this in the picture ISN’T everything.

I have tons of digital images that I need to sort through and print. The next phase will be placing more things down, but also subtracting things and moving a lot of things about. During this process thoughts also come and go. These help me clarify what I want to say with this piece.

Given the amount of images and stuff that I have, I suspect this will become a series of at least 3 pieces.