Back Door Art / June 19, 2024

June 19, 2024

Back Door Art

Sometimes, I move forward and grow in my art by coming in the back door, so to speak. On vacation I felt both eager to experiment and … stuck. Couldn’t come up with starting points.

To move past stuck, I took note of what was catching my eye and used those noticings as a back door to get paintings going. When MaryAnn Shupe’s watercolor circles caught my eye, I painted some circles of my own to see what might emerge.

When a painting in a Thomaston coffee shop caught my eye, I decided to use it as a reference—to “steal like an artist” and let that painting spark me to create an interpreted approximation with my own hand and eyes. I wanted to see if I could replicate certain effects.

Nope, I could not!

But what I could and did do was learn a bunch about how watercolor paints do and do not work; advance my color-mixing knowledge a smidgen; make discoveries about using watercolor, acrylic gesso, water-soluble pencil, and ink together on paper; and muck about with unexpected challenges when drawing buildings with intended imprecision.

I unstuck myself!

Not only that but also I was thoroughly contented and absorbed as I puttered in my makeshift seaside studio setting, and I now have another study/experiment in my journal!

study/appropriation, after a painting by Pam Wellington; thank you!
8 x 8″; watercolor, acrylic gesso, water-soluble pencil, and ink
on journal page
2024

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1. 

   Joyful Puttering

   June 20, 2024 at 11:40 am

   Edit

   I love the concept of backdoor art and I use it all the time! YOU….being one of my doorways.

   Your “unstuck” version of the coffee shop painting is just a delight…complete with its own little backdoor. I especially love the “intended imprecision”….that’s hard to pull off.

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   1. 

      Dotty Seiter

      June 20, 2024 at 2:05 pm

      Edit

      MaryAnn, you and I do bat bubbles of color and ideas back and forth to each other through the door quite often!!

      Thanks for your feedback on my ‘unstuck’ painting and your comment re the ‘intended imprecision’—in hindsight, I think the challenges I bumped into came from having put my feet into two camps, i.e. one foot into replicating the particular wonkiness I was using as a reference and the other foot into letting my hand do freely whatever it would. I need to plant both feet together in my next such adventure.

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      Reply
2. 

   imajenationgmailcom

   June 20, 2024 at 3:06 pm

   Edit

   oooooh love the whimsy of this delightful painting! And how you unstuck yourself! It’s so hard sometimes – but you were open to the muse wherever she was! Huzzah!

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   1. 

      Dotty Seiter

      June 20, 2024 at 3:49 pm

      Edit

      Yes! Whimsy! Le mot juste for this exploration! Grateful that the muse tapped me on the shoulder, grateful that I was open to her tap. Thanks, Lola : )

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3. 

   roseanne333

   June 20, 2024 at 4:38 pm

   Edit

   Ohh… lots of yummy textures here – in the grasses, the sky. Lovely.

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   1. 

      Dotty Seiter

      June 20, 2024 at 6:27 pm

      Edit

      Thanks, Roseanne. Your appreciation of the textures spurs me to want to play with another grassy expanse in a painting. I’m curious as to how I might approach those grasses if I had more materials at hand than what I took to Tenants Harbor with me.