After several months of non-activity painting-wise, I think I'm over the block. Good reason to be, since I decided on the spur of the moments to paint a sunflower in honour of my son's marriage (and gave it to them), and I was so pleased with the result that I'm painting it bigger than the 40x40cm for my own pleasure!
 |
| sunflower - almost ready to go |
As usual, I could not decide if I'd fiddled with it long enough, so this the penultimate stage. I forgot to take another photo before wrapping it, so here's what it looked like in cellophane, but still without the festive ribbon around it. A cellophane wrapping is practical (wound round twice) because it protects a viewed painting until it is actually hung. You cannot cellophane-wrap oil paintings, of course, unless they are very old, but this one is in acrylics.
The weather is at last warm and sunny again, after a spate of rain, which the gardens needed, but humans could have done without. I'm painting outside, which was not possible all last summer, and have several new ideas, including a second "space control" abstract, in a similar style to one I gave to a friend years ago. If all goes to plan, I'm visiting her in France this summer, where the first "space control" is hanging. Here's a photo of it in a beautiful gold frame (hung that way up - I did not make that decision and the lighting was not really suitable for photographing).
 |
| space control I |
I'm also planning to paint a pink rose I persuaded to grow a few years ago. It did not survive the winter, unfortunately. It's the second painting of this flower. The first one is somewhere in Delaware, U.S.A.
 |
| pink rose - acrylics on canvas 40x40cm |
In the old days I also made zooms to show details. I happen not to have deleted this one, so here it is. Interesting how small bits of a figurative painting assume abstract qualities. But really, everything we paint is abstracted e.g. from 3 dimensional to 2, and really making out own decisions about what is needed in the painting (artisic license). This does not apply to hyper-realistic paintings, but hyper-realism is not my target.
The photo I've chosen to paint this time is this one (copyright FREE):
This was a lovely plant, but the roses got paler and paler as the days passed. It was definitely redder when I started the first painting. I painted outside straight from the rose at first, but later had to use the photo because the bloom was getting tatty! You can see lovely red geraniums at the back. I'll leave them out of the painting.
So the zen doodling is definitely taking a back seat. I'm a bit bored with it, to be truthful, after 2 years of intensive pracising. I managed an A3 drawing based on patterns starting with the letter M. I could do more colouring work, but painting fascinates me more at the moment.
 |
| emms |
