Category: Painting

Too dark

PiaChit Chat

It’s a rainy day today, very dark. Great for indoors activities, and yet – my lamp seems to shine in the wet paint, so I’m going to have to hoist up the dinner table lamps (glass) even more so I don’t knock them out when I move the easel around.

I have quite a few ideas for using my “intuitive backgrounds”. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I get really into the stage where I lash on paint and create some nice effects and then I’m afraid to paint a motif over the top for fear of ruining it. Perhaps I’m to be an abstract painter? Yesterday I had the notion though, to incorporate some horses. I need to learn to loosen up, not try to paint realistic, because it deadens my work. When I painted before, I mostly had a plan before I even started or I did a bit of background doodling to see if it began to look like something, and then I made a plan.

Anyway, today’s question is not about getting ideas, it’s about taking photos of your work. I wanted to take some good photos of each stage in the paintings to use on the computer. Textures to blend with photos. In fact I have the notion to also leave some canvasses (how many s’s?) as backgrounds and simply save them to use for photographing yarn or found objects on/against. (Like my tulips above, against a blue painting, I’ve got a variety of those)

Do you have any good tricks for me, when they’re too large to pop in a scanner? Do you simply wait until there is good light? I really was counting on painting all day again today (although the loom is calling), but then I’ll miss some “stages”.

Or is it simply another exercise in going with the flow of life and wait for the sun….

coverup
This is just a first layer cover-up of the previous owner’s “cactus in a window”. It distracted me too much to paint on it as it was.

Tumeny words

PiaChit Chat

poppy01

I’m painting today and I’m determined to keep at it even if there are loud phone conversations upstairs, lunch requests and various pet related incidents. I started out with something easy, filling in the poppy shapes I did months ago (I think I’m going to have a look at real poppies before I move on 😉 ), but I also want to get a sketch done which has lived in my head for a long time. I bet it’s blocking the way for others!

sketchWhy am I persisting with a medium that seems so difficult for me? (not new, I did paint quite a lot many years ago) I actually wrote a 3000 word blog post on that over the weekend, it’s not even done yet and I don’t think I’ll ever publish it. But the short version is: A because it keeps knocking, B that I suspect the things which are easy at first may not be the ones where you ultimately excel, and C I have to get over my story of how I need perfect surroundings before I can begin. At the very least I should tell it differently.

See, in just over 200 words! That was some kickass editing if you ask me.

Right, egg sandwiches done and on my part eaten, back to work. While waiting for the others to dry I’ve hauled out one of the used canvasses I “inherited”. At first I tried to work with the lines and colour there, but it’s not working even if I see some kind of forest scene in my head. But nevermind, today’s exercise is simply: keep at it. That’s my only ambition. All day, only the necessary breaks when somebody is either hungry or needs to pee. After all, it’s not Molly’s fault that I’m an idjit. (‘m allowed to blog while I eat egg sandwiches)

I think I may have answered my colour question from last week. I keep wanting to mix in clean colours with the black and olive, I even happily dipped away in phtalo blue when I thought I’d reached for the ultramarine…

Colour choices

PiaChit Chat

I’m completely ambivalent and scatterbrained when it comes to colour taste. I like all the bright shiny colours at once and I like the muted greys/browns, I come up with ideas in both groups and everything in between.

Most artists seem to pick a certain corner of the palette that they work in, making a coherent body of work with a specific “signature”. At least for a while. I can’t help feeling that I need to limit myself in order to not be all over the place and end up doing nothing but sampling. But I don’t want to. I want both the bluish slate greys that I love and the bark colours, fog and dusk, as well as the circus.

I experience this in all areas, paint, photo and fiber. It’s like a kid in a candy store.

My latest yarn splurge:

linea

And the next to last one:

arwetta

I write down all my notions and if I set out a block of time to work properly on each, never get another idea in my life, I’ll be done in about 20 years I think.

Do you think it’s possible to work without constraints like that and still master a few things? Because right now I just feel like I have a head cold (ok, perhaps I do, it’s been a while), I feel heavy and unable to focus as well as rearing to get started again. Everything in my head is stampeding, the desire to sketch, weave, paint, more weave, cloth and tapestry and a mixture of both.

And of course this kind of panic leads to absolutely nothing. I know I can only do one project at the time, and anyway I got some stuff to improve the homemade tapestry loom, so it would make more sense to leave it alone until it’s rebuilt. That’s at least 50 projects off the list for now. 😉

And this is why I never get anywhere. I can’t choose my topic, there’s not one that burns just slightly brighter than the others. I wonder why that is.

It doesn’t feel like an inner critic “you’ll do badly anyway” kinda thing. Possibly it’s the usual result of too much downtime and then trying to cram in all the things when you finally have a slot for playing. Having to build up flow from scratch too often. I’ll first try my usual method, I just wound a couple of yarn skeins that I forgot to when preparing for one yarn adventure, and after I hit send on this I’ll spin the fiber I started weeks ago that should could have been done in a few days. Sometimes a project will present itself when I do these preparatory things. I’ve already discovered during the course of this exercise, one of my conundrums: I want to use the Rigid Heddle loom for two different projects in particular, one could turn out to take a while. But I don’t want to rush through the other to get it done and free the loom. And I used to snort at people with a whole room full of looms, like you can weave on more than one at a time…

Then I just have to figure out what to do with the sketching painting urges. I so admire real artists who get up at 5 every morning and get cracking, putting in 6-8-10 hours of work a day without distractions. (Like, I just realized, no matter how my thumb is doing, I should be giving big brown pony a pedicure asap)

So I guess this pertains to both of my current Keywords: Focus/Intention and Health. Improve both and perhaps I would not have to reboot so often! Perhaps then, my colour tastes could simply be seasonal, and I would have time to exhaust one before the next fascination happened?

Do you ever put blinders on yourself when it comes to colour themes, or does it happen naturally?

Playing with tapestry designs that are totally out of my league:
cartoon02 cartoon03