This latest work (in progress) continues my motif of the tree, and my organic pointillism, adapting it from the stillness of Trees Squared towards a more active surface. Here, the variety in the size of the squares creates a pull, focusing the viewers inwards towards the centers of the canvas.

I write “centers” plural deliberately as there are several in this piece; I have created a visual dance as the colors I have taken from looking upwards to blue skies through trees dance in spirals, some small, some larger, giving a vibrant rhythm to the image.

The tree branches take on a figurative role, dancing and contrasting in their fluidity with the squares, reaching out and offering the beauty of the tree to the viewer. These are being created with hundreds of thin lines of colors ~ purples, yellows, browns, reds.

It is a visually arresting image, while still capturing the essence of the landscape, a summer festival of lights.

There are many more layers to go on this painting before I am satisfied …. watch this space!

Sunday was kind to me. I was able to spend most of it at my studio in Dallas, completing my Before Dawn painting. In developing from my previous painting in this series, Trees Squared, the edges of the squares in Before Dawn are beginning to blur in places, giving energy to certain areas, and also the optical illusion of brilliance. The ‘moving’ squares also contrast with the sharp stillness of the pieces of sky, as they radiate around the center of the composition.

The starlit branches are graphite, black, brown and blue, with warmth-giving ochre, a visual reference to Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

I found the colors for this piece from the hours before dawn, when warm purples affect the blues and silvers, and plants are backlit, sculptural against the smooth translucency.

I will post a better photograph of this new painting as soon possible. This iPhone snapshot misses the purples and silvers of the actual painting.

I also began a new work, an exploration of my beloved trees with the vibrant, moving Fall air rushing through the leaves. The energy of the bark is more fluid, faster, like a Japanese ink drawing.

The leaves will move towards the viewer, the foreground pushing away from the smaller leaves in the background. The colors will most likely be greens, silvers, yellows, with grey-blue colors from the sky appearing.

Watch this space!

Sunday sped by slinkily, as I painted from dawn till dusk (nearly) at my new studio space.

I worked on  my Starshine (Before the Dawn) abstraction and by the end of the day I had made great progress. One more session should get it to where I can stop work on it.

My husband and children worked diligently fixing lights, spackling holes, painting over them and generally making the space look immaculate. What would I do without them?

My space is open for business, although I won’t be there full time for another three weeks. Currently, I am there on Saturday and Sundays. On October 24th, I shall have my launch party … fun fun fun!

We spent most of today at my new studio~gallery. We made huge progress not only in the phsycial appearance today, but also in my conception of how I will be best able to ustilize the space.

These four photographs show a progression of work today. More to come soon!

This Labor Day weekend has been the start of my lease on this new studio & gallery space. We spent time setting up yesterday, and today we will continue getting things into their proper places. Eventually, I plan to spend my days here painting, in blessed isolation 🙂 In the meantime, I aim to fill it with artworks and have a launch party as soon as possible.
Here are some initial photos of my gallery, and moving in.

This is a work in progress in my current series, “Squared”. Constructed of squares of color that reflect the changing light of the night and pre-dawn sky, the branches of the moonlit trees frame our point of view, our reference to the universe, from the Earth.

This painting is based upon some pre-dawn pastel sketches I did of the night sky, which is so beautiful as the lavenders and deep cobalt blues, punctuated by the white stars, creates silhouettes of the branches of the trees.

I very very grateful to have won the Elan Art Contest, and very grateful for the wonderful prizes. I have always trodden paths that were not conventional, in directions that were fiercely individual, and to have my art ~ which is deeply personal to me ~ chosen is an affirmation to me to keep on working.I am looking forward to developing my series of natural abstractions further over the next months as I move to my new gallery on Northwest Highway. It will be hard work, which is always the most rewarding and worthwhile kind.

For now, I am off to Easel Art, my local art supply store, to replenish my stocks as I begin my next painting. This one, which will be called “Before the Dawn” is inspired by pre-dawn pastel sketches I made, of the silhouette of some very Texan plants against an infinite purple~blue pre-dawn sky. I find the scene bewitching and primal, and I am compelled to capture it’s essence through my squares of color, and enclosing lines. I love the world when no one else stirs, and it feels as if they sky belongs to you alone.

I sketched in pastels as the sun came up today, in my back yard. There’s a particular view that has inspired me, and is now churning around in my head. I will stretch and prepare a canvas for it, today, and work on it alongside my current series. It is related in it is all about edges and depth of field of vision, but it will look quite different.

Working on several paintings at once is a method that I think most artists employ ~ Monet did so, working on the same scene on many different canvases that depicted different times of the day, which enabled him to waste not a second of time, switching between different paintings as the light changed. Using the methods I use, it is simply not possible to complete paintings that quickly, or in one session, unlike my plein air paintings. This is part of the attraction of painting outdoors, in a single session. It removes a level of complexity and brings painting to a level of spontaneity and reaction that is pure creation.

It is magic, and the state of contemplation an artist enters when painting is a magic state. Plein air painting in particular links us to the earliest artistic stirrings of humankind. Personally there is no doubt. Had I lived 100,000 years ago, I would be the person in the cave covered in freshly dug ochre and and black from charred trees making marks, seeking to understand our existence through pictures.

An art piece seems, at first glance, to be utterly useless (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde). It hangs on a wall, or stands in a room, passive, sleeping. It is far from this. It is deeply useful. Art has been used over the years as a tool. It has been used to attempt to influence the outcome of hunts to ensure food; it has been used to acquire money (this comprises most of modern history); it has been used to influence other people and to pass on concepts and beliefs, or to condemn, as in propagandist art. It is also a potent and universal method of understanding the astonishing fact that we are conscious at all. It is a hard-wired expressive response to being able to perceive.

Artist learn to recognize their own impulse to create, to understand it, and how to express and to summarize it in strokes of paint, or the arrangement of physical objects so that the viewer will respond. Every time you glance at a painting or artwork, you are being influenced and, in a sense, manipulated. Artists are master manipulators.

Update to the last post! One of my works shown below as a work in progress is now finished! The next one is still in progress, and is becoming a vibrant, firework show of a view of nature.

“Fragmentation” is a step in a series exploring visual perceptions of forests, trees, leaves. I call them natural abstractions, and my technique ‘organic pointillism’. Perspectives are flattened into patterns, leaves become brushstrokes and the sky behind becomes part of this flat pattern, broken into discrete shapes.

I layered lighter shapes on darker, to create limited depth or a sense of tactile roundness. Still two-dimensional, the leaf patterns begin to edge out the rhythm of the branches, creating an overall unity of pattern, color and size of stroke.

The blue sky remains, though much less of will remain in my next piece.