Tag Archives: new art

Art Discussion, New Work

New Work: Space Is A Lonely Place To Be

Like many, my life has been affected by COVID-19 this month (though not as drastically as it could be, thank goodness). Here in Michigan, everything is closed but grocery stores and hospitals, and we have been urged to keep to our household until the spread slows down. I met this unexpected turn of events with a lot of anger, disappointment, and frustration at first. I had a lot of things scheduled professionally all beginning in guess when? March and April, that are now postponed until some mysterious pending date. My spring and summer last year weren’t so hot as I was dealing with a variety of personal issues, many which were out of my control. I was really planning to harness this year to its full potential to make up for what I saw in my mind as a lot of lost time in 2019.

These feelings right now are universal; we are all dealing with processing this in some form or another. One thing I came to realize though is being frustrated or feeling angry or cheated by the universe doesn’t change anything about the current situation. We all have this forced downtime right now, and we can either waste it or use it to our advantage to learn a new skill or otherwise work on personal development, relax if we’ve been overworked, and try to fill our days with simple things we enjoy.

I work primarily in drawing mediums and watercolor. I have always struggled to work with acrylic paint, especially when it comes to realism or painting portraits and figures. I decided to take this time to practice a medium I struggle in, starting with a self portrait.

persona

There were a lot of late nights involved with this piece, and some amount of cursing. I would show you what my acrylic attempts looked like just a month ago if I still had them, but I ended up re-using the canvases for other projects. Just believe me when I say, the difference is night and day. When we take the time to practice something new and fully devote ourselves to studying a skill, magic happens!

space is a lonely place to beThis brings me to my second acrylic piece, “Space Is A Lonely Place To Be”. For this piece I was very inspired by silent film fantasy/outer space imagery and costumes, with a touch of art nouveau. I am certain a lot of this came out of feeling a bit isolated and as if I am floating outside of time … It’s strange out there right now.

It’s looking like things may stay strange for a couple more weeks, but in light of using this experience to a positive advantage, here’s what I’ve learned so far …

  • I need to be mindful of building margin into my life when at all possible. I feel so much more healthy physically and mentally right now than I did when everything was normal, despite the current uncertainty in basically all areas of life and threat of danger. This is absolutely mind boggling and should not be.
  • I need to learn to say no. This kind of goes with the previous statement too, as not being able to say no is how I end up with zero time to breathe. I miss my friends and students, but I did notice myself in this time of social distancing feeling a tad bit of relief that I was free from a barrage of social obligations I didn’t feel like attending because, well, all social obligations are pretty much banned right now. Life is too short to fill all your time with things you don’t want to do. Yes, as a good friend and family member there are times you need to show up for people when you don’t necessarily feel like it, but there is a balance to this, and they need to be willing to do the same for you.
  • Wasting time is ok. I don’t have to have something to show for every moment I’m alive, sometimes just existing is ok! It’s ok to just sit down and read a book, or lay in bed thinking, or watch a movie in the middle of the day sometimes. It’s ok to spend time playing with a new project or idea and have it not end up turning into anything. Had I not been willing to experiment or practice with the risk of ending up with nothing at the end, I never would have learned how to acrylic paint!

What have you all been up to in your downtime? What have you learned about yourself?

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New Work

New Work Inspired By Spring (and Stress)

I’ve taken a short break from my new series to work on a stand alone project for a competition coming up. I always have a couple sketchbooks going filled with any ideas for art projects that I’ve thought up over the past 10+ years, some I’ve gotten to and some I haven’t. I think it’s the fact that I live in Michigan and the winter has been never ending that made me want to work on something inspired by plants, insects, and basically signs of life. When I began this project, I had also been having a bit of a rough patch emotionally with some minor life trials, nothing vast on their own but when all occurring at the same time… yikes. I had done a watercolor sketch way back in 2008 of a crying woman with ladybugs crawling our of her eyes, but it ended up looking way too gross which took away from the original intent. Another previous piece (Seriously, check it out if you haven’t already – it has a fun story.) from more recently incorporating butterfly designs into the human form had been well received when showed at a curated exhibit and to my surprise actually ended up selling right away. With this in the back of my mind, I decided torn butterfly wings were the perfect vehicle for melancholia – not so creepy crawly.

From this creative soup came my newest piece, Torn, on 18×24 mixed media paper.

torn

One of the biggest challenges with this piece was maintaining a balance of light and dark and achieving the bold contrast I knew I wanted without the figure looking disjointed. The white outlined pattern taken from both the background’s ginkgo leaves and butterfly designs layered overtop the black watercolor drip of her torso helped to blend the dark areas into the light and remove some of the heaviness. I included pieces of stark black scattered throughout the piece to balance everything out, from the hair and parts of the wings to the thin branches in the background.

butterfly shirtAn additional challenge – my two loves are watercolor and colored pencil, and I especially love to utilize these two vastly different mediums together. What paper to use, though? Colored pencils just cannot blend on watercolor paper with the strongly textured, bumpy surface so I tend to opt for mixed media paper when using wet and dry mediums together. However, watercolor does not  act the same way on mixed media paper as on traditional watercolor paper. Doing wet-on-wet color application leads to some really blotchy, unpleasant results so I had to be patient and do a lot more light layering to build up to the look I wanted.

All in all, I am happy with the result and enjoyed turning one of my concepts in idea purgatory into a reality :). Prints of all types are available in both my Redbubble Shop and Ebay Store.

 

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New Work

New Series and The Symbolism of Color

I’ve always been interested in the social significance of color, both in cultural symbolism and in the psychology of how color can affect our emotions. Showing solidarity for a specific cause through a group of people all wearing the same color on a certain day or for the attendance of a specific event has become a common practice. My partner has a viscerally negative reaction to the color yellow, and will be caused agitation if surrounded by a bright yellow environment (so basically he just loves the bright yellow flower print wallpaper that was complimentary with the bathroom in our home upon move-in). I have received shocked reactions even from people in my own young-adult age bracket at the mention that if I ever get married at some point, I probably wouldn’t choose a white wedding dress. These are just a couple of examples of the strong reactions people have to color as a form of communication, tradition, and emotional influence in both our exterior environment and more personally in how we choose to adorn ourselves and present our bodies to the world.

Of course, I will be working on other separate projects in between but my main focus going forward will be on a new series exploring the symbolism of different colors worldwide, taking the significance of specific colors from regions all over the world and integrating these often opposing meanings into a single story about that color. I will be focusing on 5 main colors, the 3 primaries of red, yellow, and blue and then black and white. The first color I have represented is white.

Depending where you are, white can symbolize new beginnings and a clean slate, or endings and mourning making it very much a bookend sort of color. It symbolizes traits that are considered more docile like purity, innocence and virtue, but also more courageous sentiments like protection and sacrifice. White is also a color that across cultures is often associated with femininity.

white final

For “The End Is Also The Beginning” I used a mixed media approach, choosing the mediums that would lend themselves best to the look I wanted to achieve for different parts of the piece. I used watercolor for the ice figures, snow, clouds, and water. I used prismacolor pencil (including metallic silver accents) for the figure, rabbit, and areas of fine detail like the blossom trees and patterns in the sky. I used scrap fabric for the pattern on the dress (actually left over from the hemmed curtains hanging in my art room. This is why you never toss scraps!), and flat-back acrylic pearls and beads for the decoration on the neckline of her gown, and her earrings.

I have a couple of juried shows coming up, and this will be one of the pieces getting sent off, so wish me luck!

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