Our sumi-e group, Hisshin (Spirit of the Brush) is one of my favorite art groups. It’s a small community who simply get together to paint. Each month one of the group does a presentation to teach us how to paint a particular subject. Today it was Poinsettias and I think I did pretty well. Sumi-e has been a struggle for me, but I still enjoy it very much. I thought I’d have a leg up since I am a watercolor artist. It’s a whole different animal though. The brushes and paper behave totally differently!

No, I’m not talking about the plant. My blog is about my art. Here is the one from yesterday that I tweaked some. I did two today because I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to do any painting tomorrow – other than the Sumi-e I do every second Thursday of the Month. My favorite day of the month! I did, however, prep two pieces with some frisket just in case.

So I discovered that I was posting to the wrong page. Evidently I somehow have another WordPress site that is sharedvisionsart.wordress.com or some such. Not sure why or how.

Yesterdays piece was not completed, though you can certainly see where it was going and how it would end up. Todays piece was also not completed ( too many extraneous HAVE to’s). It’s obvious this one was “done on the fly”. I will definitely post the finalized version of this, since it is NOT as obvious how it might end up.

These are 3 more abstracts that I did the day before yesterday. I used the good old “salt technique” for one of them. I often use 3 different types of salt – kosher, regular, and popcorn. Their different size crystals create more variety in the effect. I happen to love texture, so this is one of my favorite techniques. Like most things you can over do it. My favorite of these is “We Can See Eye to Eye”. The composition turned out better than I thought it was going to, unlike “Go with the Glow”. I did, however, enjoy the process while painting it. I made a point of using my watercolor brushes the way I would use a Sumi-e brush. It was very meditative.

These are 3 more abstracts that I did the day before yesterday. I used the good old “salt technique” for one of them. I often use 3 different types of salt – kosher, regular, and popcorn. Their different size crystals create more variety in the effect. I happen to love texture, so this is one of my favorite techniques. Like most things you can over do it. My favorite of these is “We Can See Eye to Eye”. The composition turned out better than I thought it was going to, unlike “Go with the Flow”. I did, however, enjoy the process while painting it. I made a point of using my watercolor brushes the way I would use a Sumi-e brush. It was very meditative.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing art. I’ve just been doing more mixed media than painting. I miss watercolor painting in particular. So, in an effort to make it “more accessible” to me, I’ve recently spent hours, days, months going through the photos on my laptop. Now, you have to understand I have thousands of photos. In the cloud there are over 45,000. I’m not certain if all those are on my laptop (that’s the next step…way down the road). Over the past 10 years I haven’t been as organized as I use to be. I use to immediately Title any pictures I took and put them in an appropriately labelled folder. 

Here’s my standard organizational chart (feel free to steal it):

Abstract

Buildings

Cats

Fauna

Flora

People

Places

Scapes

Still

Life

Things 

Most importantly I’ve made a folder called Paintings 2B. Since it’s been so long since I picked up a watercolor brush, I started with some abstracts.

So some how my last three post weren’t actually posted to my current website. Here is one from April:

This isn’t the prettiest piece, but I’ve always liked it. It’s called “Don’t Be So Negative”. That mostly comes from the fact that I worked on making sure my focal point would contain negative space. Say Goodbye! This is being disassemble. I will reuse the substrate and some of the bits within it. No one can keep EVERYTHING they create. Sometimes the decision to destroy is easier than others. 

I sold “A Happy Tension” on Saturday at a local art event that the Jacksonville Artists Guild participates in every year. The RAP Home Tour is a Jacksonville spring highlight. It’s one of my favorite events to participate in. I had never really thought about why until this year. One of the main reasons is being able to interact with the buyer of my art. Too often they remain anonymous. It’s wonderful to meet and converse with those who love your art enough to take it home with them! I got to explain about scraffito (sp?) and they got to learn about it. In a discussion about the title, I mentioned I love dichotomies. The woman of the couple said isn’t that the definition of Family Life: “A Happy Tension”. I had to agree, especially after the year we’ve had in our family. There are other things about this event too. The less tangible is that it just has a good “energy” or “vibe”. More tangibly, you get to imagine life in another’s house. Lot’s of reference pictures are taken during the event. The conversations with the non-artistic public are always enlightening

No, I didn’t forget that this is an art blog, not a gardening one. Sadly because we artists don’t manage to sell every thing we create, there is sometimes a need to purge our walls of work. It’s that time of year for me. Luckily for certain of my works, they have one last chance to find a new home. (They will be having in our local Town Hall for the next 2 months.) If they don’t … it’s … no big deal. If they are watercolors, I will take them out of the frames and store them. Other paintings will also be taken out of their frames and may or may not be gessoed over. This can be a sad process, but I’ve rarely regretted it. Mixed media pieces can be harder to reclaim, because it can be hard to undo all the gluing. It’s still doable. Below you will see the pieces on the “chopping block”. Sometimes before an installation, I will do mock ups like this to see how well the pieces will play together. The one piece in this lot that will go back on the wall is the Queen Conch. It’s 3’x4′! Until I know what I would paint on that large a canvas that is.

For some reason I think the word ‘exhibition’ is particularly apt for this art show. It’s got 64 pieces of art for one thing! These 64 pieces from the members of the Art Guild of Orange Park on display at Mossman Hall, show just how talented their diverse members are. Lucky me to be one of the first to see them and have the honor of delivering them to the venue. Here’s a wee peek for all of you….