Art Every Day month – Day 3

Spent a lovely few hours this afternoon up in my partially reclaimed studio – reclaimed enough so that I can use my table, the floor and my easel…my paints are becoming so thick, though, that working flat is easier…

I get lost in the drips, the overlapping and dragging together of colours…hours become minutes while I am transported away…becoming transfixed by how the colours mix and drape over themselves…I use paintbrushes sometimes – but I am just as likely to use the other end of it as I am to use the bristles…I usually have a brush one way in one hand, a second the other way in the other hand…I use palette knives a lot and at times squeeze paint directly from the tube onto the canvas…I quite often start with big utensils and end up finishing with tiny ones…the hardest part is waiting for things to dry so I can move onto the next step…this is why I work on a number of things at a time…

Today I worked on two canvases (30”x30” and 12”x16”), fifty 1.5”x1.5” squares that will be used for one of my “Pieces of Colour” series and one postcard…didn’t finish anything…but am close on one of the canvases.

The 30”x30” canvas that I started will be the biggest piece yet that I have done…it is going to be for my “Flow” series…I painted what will be the bottom part of it…but now I have to wait until that dries so that I can turn it right way up and paint the top part…the ‘flow’ part is painted last…after the top and bottom parts are dry…I am still unsure what colour combinations I am going to use for the top part on this one…

Here is a picture of one of my finished “Flow” pieces…


















The canvas I am close to being finished is one of my “Meditation Garden” ones…very similar to a smaller one I painted this past spring, but I wanted to see if I liked it bigger…I would love to try it really big…but it takes a ton of paint! I need to let it dry now and then I will probably put on just little bits of the different colours here and there…in some areas they have mixed quite a bit and I want to put back some of the highlight colours…


















I really enjoy doing the “Pieces of Colour” series because there are a few different steps to it, each of which has it’s merit…the one I was working on today is the third in this colour combination series on canvas…once I decide on a size, figure out how many squares, cut all the squares, tape them to a backing for the painting process…then I paint them all the background colour…once that is dry I do the really fun part (though each step has it’s own repetitive, meditative qualities that I do like, the step of laying down the thick colours is by far the most fun!)…that is what I did today…now I have to wait for all the squares to dry, then I remove them from the backing and play with them on the painted canvas like a puzzle to decide which pieces to use and in what order…then, once I decide how I like them, using gel medium, I stick them all down to the canvas…each square is like a mini painting on it’s own and when I have a stack of them in my hands and all around, I am happy! They each have a weight and life all of their own…