acrylic inks, tissue paper (etc) printing and collage, pencil on w/c paper, 10 X 11″
Coming unspooled The threads that hold it All Together
Life Liberty The pursuit of happiness
Grab a bag Fill it with everything You hold dear
This is your chance to escape But watch out For flying pieces
Last week the Muse Group used semi-transparent (translucent) papers to add texture and interest to our paintings.
Tissue paper and thin oriental papers with fiber texture become translucent when glued on with matte medium, adding texture while allowing the underpainting to show through.
As you see in the painting above, we also used tissue paper, crinkled up and randomly inked to print abstract patterns on the paper, and even used the dried inked tissue paper for collage!
And while all that was drying or waiting for the next step, I was adding these torn translucent papers to other underpaintings waiting for next steps. . .I find it’s always best to encounter unfinished paintings when you reenter the studio. They are more apt to reach out and engage you than a blank piece of white paper!
Long ago I discovered that movement to music unleashes the wild and elemental nature which is so crucial to our artistic freedom. It was at a recent session of Sweat Your Prayers, Gabriele Roth’s Five Rhythms dance practice that I got charged up about painting the rhythms in my Muse Group again.
Using contemplative and movement prompts from Roth’s book Sweat Your Prayers: Movement as Spiritual Practice, The Five Rhythms of the Soul we painted along with a piece of music from each of the five rhythms; flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness, about 4-5 minutes each.
There was no time to do more than dive into the physical movement of painting with no planning and minimal mental effort, instinctually, in other words, with all senses activated! The music was compelling enough to get us going! We also had a seven year old granddaughter joining us for this and she modeled the behavior beautifully!
The following were my paintings, though I wish I’d had the presence of mind to photograph all of the works!
Flowing: fluid acrylic and acrylic ink on w/c paper 10 X 11″
Flowing
dance on a turntable hula lala hoopa lala watch the world spin, break up you’re in outer now not astronaut space but with a ticket to ride into the free zone ring around the world and all fall free
Staccato
Staccato
this EKG knows where it’s headed it doesn’t care what you think
sta ca ca caaaa toe knees and elbows strutting bony shoulders sharp and jutting
bump along clunk sta caca caaaa toe
Chaos
Chaos
been jagged lately all stops and starts going off half cocked and fully loaded
Spring does this busts out one day and stalls the next pops out the blooms then drowns them in a gullywasher
I prefer my Spring in slow motion not this heater skelter kill me with your beauty then wake me up the next day with a carpet of spent pink blossoms where the grass should be
makes me fragile like the tulip petal about to drop
Lyrical
Lyrical
obstacles gone now downstream with the current sparkling streams merging
go sprightly seaborn go lightly airborn the earth is but a jumping off point
Stillness
Stillness
eddies converge
ride the waves ashore linger in the shallows find the toe holds and listen lap lap left lap lap right you in the center where all comes to rest
And so the 5 rhythms Wave comes to rest with Stillness.
Want to try your brush at this? Find some music that speaks to these 5 rhythms and do a painting with each. My music app Spotify even has a playlist for each rhythm! Imagine you’re a 7-year-old painter. It always helps.
Googleyes has many questions They fizzle, fume and pop Each question just leads to another And the dots never get connected His problem is you see He wants to know the point of, well Everything!
So better watch out. Don’t get too close Looks like his potato head is about to. . . .
(loud combustion sound here and a bit of a stink!!!)
You may be aware, because I write about it a lot, that I have an issue with my eyes. Consequently whenever a face emerges in a painting, I want to put glasses on it. So I can totally relate to this potato head fellow who can’t see well enough to get the answer to his questions and doesn’t realize it’s the fault of his questions being far too general, rather than his eyes not seeing well enough. I can after all see the dots here, even without my glasses, as I’m sure you can!
Muse Group demo: acrylics and collage on gessoed w/c paper, 10 X 11″
The guardians of the planet arrive from all directions with unique stories we’ve been waiting to hear!
Listen without fear join forces try swimming in whale waters gliding on eagle updrafts riding on elevators that touch sky
I just started another six-class session of The Playful Muse workshop. For most of the students it is just a continuation of the every other weekly Muse group experience. But I like to keep going back to practicing all the various ways we put paint and other marks on the paper, working with wetness and dryness and a host of different tools. This piece demonstrated some simple ways to create texture.
So I made a list of as many ways to apply paint as I could think of and named it Creating a visual dictionary of spontaneous mark making with paint/ink and water. I stopped when I got to 12, but then realized I’d forgotten one of my favorite tools. . .fingers and hands! I did two demo pieces, saying that I was not going to try to finish them, but just use them as samplers. But then this one started to talk to me, so I embraced serendipity and finished it!
I give up trying to paint anything but plants, or more specifically blooms, for the current season anyway. It’s just too bloody gorgeous out now. My bird watching friend Lisa Genuit shared this picture she’d taken recently of a bushtit in a cherry tree. These birds are just little soft brown balls that bounce around like kids in a birthday party fun house. She gave me permission to paint this, so i thought I’d do a quick sketch to try it out. Now I’m afraid to try again and risk losing the freshness.
Then with the colors still on my palette, I tried another, painting from memory and with water first and charging in the paint, letting it blend on the paper.
And this one was more of the same, using an arrangement of alstroemerias and tulips as a prompt, but taking pains not to be too literal. The movement of watercolor pigment into wet shapes causes other rare species to appear!
For this one I used Transparent Pyrrol Orange, Quin Rose, Indigo, and a mere splatter or two of Hansa Yellow Medium, full strength.
So I folded up some paper, accordian style, and started taking inventory of fresh buds/blooms in the yard.
The idea is to do one a day for a month, but of course now I’m already a bit behind. The garden wants more from me than to be painted, but truly the idea here is to capture the blooming events quickly with watercolor.
Ah but the intricacy of these small flowers carpeting the garden is so irresistible that soon more time than was budgeted has elapsed. And truly, how better to spend one’s time?
If you’ve been visiting my blog for a while you will doubtless have witnessed my complaints about dwindling eyesight, an obvious handicap for an artist. So I took my frustration out on a poem, which I then shared at an open mic night with the Olympia Poetry Network. Afterward several people came up and told me their stories about errant glasses (and eyes), and I felt ever so much better.
But I’ve never shared my poetry here without the art which inspired it. So in keeping with the purpose of this blog, I painted my experience of the poem. . .and did it without the help of glasses (since they were before me on the table). And that made me feel better too! because imprecise as it is, it proves that I can see more or less without the glasses. So today they have just a little less power over my happiness than before.
If you want to stick around for the poem, you’ll understand what I mean. And I’d be happy to read your glasses story too, if you want to share it!
The Migrational Patterns of Eyewear
Do your glasses have a will of their own
Or do you plant them on your face in the morning,
After a careful course of cleaning
then go about your day with no further thought of them
Until you tuck them away at night
Mine are the willful sort
And there are several pair
Each with their own statement of style and comfort
Highly specialized in application
Likeuniversity professors with their precious academic niche
They will not condescend to participate
In a generalists mentality
The round blue ones are the scholars that prefer
Close study in a comfortable chair
The only ones that will sit with a book and then
Only with excellent lighting or Kindle-ing in bed
They prefer their perch on the bedside table,
occasionally migrate to the living room but
Are affronted when finding themselves in the bathroom
You never know what will come of pouring acrylics, except maybe fun. There’s simply no better way to produce bizarreness, wild creatures or at least wild ideas. So those of us who always brush and floss and eat a healthy diet and wouldn’t think of breaking the laws of art, driving or taxes, really need to do this. It was the lesson in my Muse Group this week.
Add some pouring medium (Liquitex) to your fluid acrylics and start pouring! The ratio is up for grabs. I’ve read 10 parts pouring medium to one part fluid acrylic, but that would make it quite plastic-y I think. I used one part medium to one part fluid acrylic paint. I gessoed the watercolor paper first. For this piece I mixed an ultramarine, a black, an Indian yellow hue and a thin white gesso. I like to pour out colors close to or touching each other and then gently tip the paper in different directions and watch the flow. The colors don’t shoot like they do when you touch fluid paint to a water shape. They move slowly, sinuously, and with a mind of their own. Like it or lump it. I always like to see what appears with this method. There are lots of pouring methods you can see on youtube, many which pour over the edges, filling the whole surface with gorgeous patterns. That looks like fun too. And you can try using Golden’s GAC 500 or Polymer Medium Gloss.
some landscapes are mutinous
on some, pieces of ground take flight
on some, a round hilltop wears a lacy glacier collar
Back in my Olympia Muse Group last week I offered the lesson inviting a Grid design, the same as with the California group the week before. My own piece rapidly took the form of a house foundation. Small wonder since we had just called in the pest control folks when the scurrying, gnawing sounds under the house alerted us to an incursion. Our pest control specialist was an enthusiastic fellow who described the activity he found with great flourishes and graphic descriptions which I will not repeat here. My errant and overactive visual mind seized the opportunity. And what fun to create a 2D version of a 3D building with paper and paint!
And here’s some more of the works which came out of the Muse Group that day, each with their own story:
black gesso, iridescent gold acrylic and collage on w/c paper 10X11″
Curtains flapping in the wind?
Wraiths of light?
Ask the one who lights the candles
The one who dances on both sides of the veil
Not concerned on which side she’s landed
Does it matter?
The light shines both ways
The curtains blow in and out
The light wavers
And eventually blows out
The second week of experimenting with iridescence, the look of patina in Muse Group. I took a simpler approach this time, starting with black to see how the translucent iridescent would show up on black and white. In moderation I love it. It’s like putting the crown on the queen after she’s dressed.
I’m off to California today. Going back for a week to my former home of so many years. My schedule will be packed with visits to many places and people dear to me. I’ll be back here to share any art and a few photos of the trip in early March. See you then!
Still playing around with the patina effect on this one, which started as the demo in the Muse Group last week. To prepare I had made a textured surface by pressing gesso through a stencil and a circle of netting (cut from a plastic grocery net bag holding lemons). In the demo I wet the whole surface of the dried texture with a water loaded brush and then painted the patina mixtures (Micaceous Iron Oxide, Iridescent Gold, Turquoise, Naphthol Red Light and Quin Nickel Azo Gold) on wetly, letting them settle and blend into the textures.
The circle shape dominated the design because of the texture, but I didn’t want to be too literal. Days later I spent an afternoon with Grandfather Roy Wilson, a retired Cowlitz Tribal Leader, after a guided tour of his longhouse, art gallery, museum, library, and Spirit Medicine Wheel in the garden. And after that I knew how to finish the piece.
fluid acrylics on acrylic textured surface and collage on watercolor paper 10 X 11″
Spirit Wheel Turner hums incantations
stirs the primordial soup that works me
makes skin and bones stretch and crack
keeps the wheel twirling, shining and polishing
worn joints, sockets, and latches that hold all together.
A few more years only Wheel Turner chants,
keeps spinning round heaven’s axis
and me skewered, born along
complaining and rejoicing in turn.
Pieces keep flying off the wheel.
I watch them spark and fade,
close my eyes, sense dizzying speed.
Stop a few moments? just let me off?
I’ll be quiet here, no trouble, write a little poem,
hum along, bother no one.
ok?
chuckle, chuckle
Stay tuned for more on the visit with Grandfather. . .
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