by Alison on February 13, 2010
Piet Mondrian - Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue - 1921
A very charming student from a local college visited me in my studio a few weeks ago, as they had to choose a living artist whose work they liked on whom to write a paper. She had literally twenty questions to ask me. One of the questions, the last one, stopped me in my tracks because of the response it engendered from me.
The most ordinary little question took me stumbling down a new path of understanding about myself, my art, and how it felt to be an artist.
She asked me, “Where do you get your inspiration?”.
I answered immediately with the first words that materialized, and as I said them I knew they were, for me, completely true: “Inspiration is irrelevant”.
She looked somewhat surprised, so I went on to explain my assertion to her. Each painting I create is a distillation of my experiences of perceiving and existing, they are my answer and reaction to simply being. My creative process requires me to cull and sculpt my possible artworks down to the chosen few that I can achieve in a day/week/month/year/lifetime. Being an artist fulfills every aspect of who I am and I am an artist every second.
Matisse, Joy of Life, 1905-6
There is a section in the book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark where the author describes Nature as writing questions and answers continually in the skies, and stones, and trees and grasses for those who can decode the language.
My ‘inspirational’ or creative process feels like a dialogue between the collection of experiences that comprise myself as well as my immutable core, and the lines, form, colors and light in the natural world.
She speaks, and I answer. I question, she replies.
I have no idea what she has told me or what I have replied on any conscious level, but each painting is a record of our conversation.
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>> Artist Deborah T. Colter has written her response to this post. Please visit her site to read it!<<
>>Artist Roslyn Dames has written about inspiration in response to my post. <<
by Alison on December 18, 2009
Work in Progress ~ "Al Fresco"
This week, I’ve continued my work on my largest work in my series exploring the motif of the tree, and trees. This latest work has officially been named, an important step for me as expressing in words for me is almost as beautiful as in paints. When one names something, for that moment one captures something fleeting. Those words do not define it, and hovering around the painting are an almost infinite number of other possibilities.
All art is, simply, a series of choices the artist makes. The choices may have gone otherwise, and I sometimes muse that perhaps the ones that were not conjured into life were, in some parallel universe, actually created. Consider the infinite possibilities that raises, as every moment a new artwork springs into life, somewhere and somewhen in a universe.
As an artist, I try to make sense of these choices by carefully sifting through my ideas and emotions, cross-referencing them, trying to catch them by surprise from a new angle, burying them and then digging them up to uncover perhaps the “truth” of what I want to express, and why I think it is worth creating, or saying, and how to express it. 
Consider the way the number of potential meanings explode when other observers enter the picture, from a “nothing” that contained all the possibilities, to a selection of definitions in the mind of the viewer. The rush of connections that are provoked by artworks is a profoundly human experience, as far as I know.
What It Is So, in naming my new work Al Fresco, I am on the surface referencing certain things. I am, obviously, referencing fresco art which is the visible cherry on the cake. Obviously, the style is fresco-like, with peeling, faded patches, mottled surface like plaster and so on, and the idea of being outside, as in a picnic al fresco, in the park.
What It is Not In this work, what is not in the words of the name is the exquisite balance of the Japanese adoration of cultivated and uncultivated nature. The refined appreciation of the ability of a colorset to evoke human memory and emotion. The ultimate death of the fresco as it fades, inevitably, over time, and the fact that even this most solid of wall will be gone in the blink of a Universal eye. The repetition of beautiful Spring, each year, and the rebirth that comes with it, the phallic branch. The rhythm and patterns on the surface of the canvas that views like music in the human mind. The first time a child sees and appreciates a Spring day for what it is.
I could go on.
But, when finished, it will be the viewers mind that goes on, that loops in references and ideas. Ultimately, the aim of this work is to summarize all these experiences as one image, for the viewer to uncover and continue creating. By choosing to paint my expression, I leave the physical experience of the object as an image on a canvas as the final definition, not the words of the title.
How much should I express in the title, just how important is it? For me personally, words are important and therefore maybe the titles should be important to me. They are important. Can I, and should I, consider the titles of the works more carefully, with greater craft? What would does a ‘good title’ of an artwork look like?
After all, what’s in a name?
by Alison on December 4, 2009
I am hosting an Open Studio Sale, offering works of art from just $100, ready framed! They are the perfect recession-busting way to give the gift of fine art to yourself, or your loved ones.
Please come and visit me on December 11th at 6pm till 9pm, and December 12th at 11am until 4pm. Refreshments will be offered.
I am located just east of the intersection of Northwest Hwy and Lemmon/Marsh, next to Bugatti’s restaurant.
by Alison on November 29, 2009
Day One: composition & color balance
I am working on this new still life, showing the bottles and cans on my table. This table is a large glass tabletop on two trellis legs. It is incredibly versatile for me, as I can use it directly as my palette, and it is a huge surface for me to spread out my paints on.
Day Two: shapes emerging....
This canvas will be composed of patterns, grey, blue, gold, black, white, that seen from a distance will form a recognizable image. Inevitably, it expresses my feelings about my subject ~ my warm golden oils that seem to glow with an inner light; the moody, complex overlapping glass; the can of Gamsol that has a skewed perspective, wrapping around the left of the composition; the balancing terracotta pot in which I keep my brushes being the compositional balance.
This canvas is, as all art objects truly are, a self-portrait.
by Alison on November 21, 2009
Bottles and Brushes, compositional sketch on canvas, first stage.
A pastel sketch of my brushes in their terracotta pot
Today I began sketching out the composition for a new oil on canvas still life, showing the bottles and brushes on my glass table that I use as my palette. These bottles sit transparently toning the light that slides down their glass sides and passes through muted, overlapping and creating new and subtle greys, greens, blues and browns. They transfix me with their unity and the loss of individual shape as they merge into a single mass, and I hope to capture this still life both in terms of the individual complexity of the items and as a skyline-like whole, a city of bottles and brushes rising and casting half-shadows.
There is more work to do on this composition before I begin to paint it, but the basics are all established.
I also sketched my terracotta plant pot that serves as my brush holder in pastels, with gratuitously brilliant and joyful color. This was a 30-minute sketch that also served as an exploration of the way the individual brushes merge into a ‘crowd’ of lines when so many are together like this.
by Alison on November 11, 2009
These paintings are part of my daily painting project. A mixture of landscape (en plein air), still life, abstract and figurative, this page will feature daily paintings that are for sale for just $100 (excl. shipping).
Email me at ali_Jardine@hotmail.com if you would like to purchase one. It’s a great way to own or gift an original work of art for the price (or less) of a print.
Alison Jardine

Little Brown Leaf, oil on masonite, 8″ x 10″

Leaf Love, oil on canvas, 12″ x 14″ /SOLD

Winter Grass II, 14″ x 16″, oil on canvas

Winter Grass, 12″ x 14″, oil on canvas

Yellow Apple, 8″ x 8″, oil on canvas board

Riverbank in Dallas, 8″ x 12″, oil on canvas.