Leaning Into Limits

My Dutch artist friend Simone Nijboer recently wrote an art newsletter about her love of color and the palette that has become her personal color signature. 

The sparks of her thoughts landed in my thoughts and lit me up with inspiration. My own recent experience of working with a limited palette over a series of eight paintings shook hands with Simone's color signature, and off I went to my studio! 

I have fiddled with grand contentment and engagement over the past few days in a creative inquiry, using a close approximation of Simone's signature palette as my base colors. I explored and experimented, fascinated by the color mixing I could do with Amsterdam turquoise green, Amsterdam quinacridone rose, Golden quinacridone nickel azo gold, and Amsterdam oxide black and Liquitex white gesso as sidekicks.

Way fun.

Painting, created by Dotty, using Simone's signature colors.

There Is No Cure for Curiosity
5.5 x 5.5"; acrylic, ink, and collage on card stock
abstract
2023

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Painting, created by Simone, using Simone's signature colors!

Third in a Series

I am once again mesmerized and astonished by the creative process. I take my very limited palette of acrylics and mix up various combinations, apply several masses of color onto paper with brushes, scribble with pens and pencils, trim the edges of the paper, and collage a few found bits and bobs into place. 

Any "thinking" I do en route is fully abstract, completely apart from representing concrete realities or specific objects. Intuition is the driver, and its attention rests solely—and with the lightest of touches—on color, contrast, and composition.

So how is it that now, in viewing shape, scribble, and collage, I feel story tickling the back of my mind? How is it that I see wheels, snow, shadows, cart tracks, a wooden hay wagon of the sort that would be horse-drawn? How is it that I feel the sharp bite of dry winter air? Hear the squeak and crunch of weight breaking through an icy surface of snow?

Where does this stuff come from!

Step Back, Crouch Down, and Walk Around Everything
5 x 7"; acrylic, ink, pencil, graphite,
oil pastel, and collage on paper
abstract scribble study
2023

A Summer Story

On June 18, 12-year-old granddaughter Emmy sent me a letter. The first I heard of it was about two weeks later when she and her family drove up from VA for the 4th of July weekend, and she asked if I'd received any mail from her. I had received nothing.  

Emmy explained that she'd come up with a painting challenge for us but didn't reveal any details. We thought the letter would surely arrive while she was visiting.

Nope. Not then, not the next week, not the next. 

Thinking back to a mail carrier tractor-trailer accident earlier in 2022, I knew full well that mail can go irretrievably astray. As summer continued to unfold I figured Emmy's letter was long gone.

But … just kidding! 

It arrives August 1st!

The envelope shows not one sign of wear or tear. It sports a postal bar code but otherwise has not one clue as to its adventures over the past six weeks—the stamp is uncanceled; there is nary a postmark.

Inside, intact and patiently awaiting my attention, sit my marching orders.

Hi Gma! NEW CHALLENGE!!!! I want you to re-create a Claude Monet painting and please attempt to finish it by the time I leave from the July 4th trip. Once you're done, choose ANY artist and send a note back. I'm thinking we could do this over summer?? LOVE YOU.

—Emmy

p.s. (When we see the other's painting we could have to find the painting they re-created?)

With a planned visit from Emmy and family just three days ahead, I kept news of the arrival of the letter to myself, put aside all other studio projects, and got myself in high gear!

Watch out, Claude!

Dotty and Claude Have F - U - N Painting
9 x 9" appropriation of Monet's Yellow Irises with Pink Cloud
acrylic and oil pastels on drawing paper
floral
2022

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Yellow Irises With Pink Cloud
Claude Monet
42 x 42 inches
oil on canvas
floral
1917

On My Nightstand, On My Easel 8/2/22

On my nightstand:

there is no place I know outside today

W.S. Merwin, "A Momentary Creed"

On my easel: 

In cleaning out some computer files I found an image of a painting that had caught my eye who knows how many years ago. Before deleting it, I decided to let it become a prompt in my sketch book, a bit of a steal-like-an-artist copy-a-piece-of-art-you-like exercise to set me on an unpredictable discovery adventure.

work in progress, layer 1

work in progress, layer 2

Anything Goes

I'm grateful for the times when (a) I know I'm in search of something, (b) I don't know what, (c) I trust I'll know when I find it, and (d) I do!

A newsletter from artist Carol Nelson announced last week that she'd created an Anything Goes Project as a challenge for myself and other procrastinators to produce one painting per day during the month of April.

I haven't produced a painting per month of late, let alone one per day. But I sat up and took notice. I knew I'd found something I'd been restless to discover.

The fact that the announcement didn't even reach my inbox until April was already half over was somehow perfect! 

I find myself skittering all over the place—adding touches to my 36 x 36" canvas in process, starting something else on a half sheet of drawing paper the next day but not returning to it the day after that, cutting up old starts from months ago, leapfrogging back to something after five days to muck about with it again, and so forth. It's a haphazard approach, but (a) I'm getting to my studio to paint daily, and … (b) anything goes! 

I haven't been this active nor this unfettered in a way long time.

work in process, third pass

5.5 x 8.5"; acrylic and collage on drawing paper

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history thus far:

first pass

second pass

all paths lead where truth is here [e.e. cummings]

in winter after-

noon light I am a pilgrim

hark! revelation!

work in progress; 
lost myself in the pure joy
of mixing paint and applying it with palette knife
over roughly and irregularly textured surface

Mucking About

Spent a completely contented half hour or so mucking about with color-mixing, palette-knife-wielding, mark-making, oil-pastel scribbling, and paper-crumpling. An efficacious prescription for well-being.

tissue paper for collage, hand painted 

Plumbers Both

Dan the bathroom man
plumbs the master bath, while I
plumb sea, salt, sky, swell.

work in progress
16 x 20", acrylic on canvas

Sleep Cycles

You know how you go through sleep cycles at night, moving from light to deep sleep and back again several times? Seems that I am going through similar sleep cycles in my hibernation.

A few days ago I rose up from deep sleep to light and came fully awake briefly. Just had to paint bookmarks for Caroline and Emmy to accompany the books that are gifts for Christmas. As ever, SOOO satisfying.

Then … zzzzzzz.

       An illuminated novel by Dana Kumerow with 
        illustrations by Brittany Tate and Jen Walls 

                                     House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery
                                   by Liz Rosenberg, illustrated by Julie Morstad

Scattered

I am going in multiple directions mentally and physically.

I am writing this post the day after Thanksgiving. It probably won't see the light of day at my blog until late next week.

I am grateful that I choose to paint, grateful for the moments of wordless expression, for the physicality of brush strokes, for the centering.

detail, new work in progress

detail, new work in progress

Grain by Grain

The word granite comes from the Latin granum, a grain, in reference to the coarse-grained structure of such holocrystalline rock. Granite consists of feldspar, quartz, mica, and amphibole minerals which form an interlocking, somewhat equigranular matrix.

Grain by grain today, a matrix of feldspar and quartz comes together, with scattered darker biotite mica and amphibole peppering the lighter-color minerals.

Then, grain by grain, the matrix develops cracks and brittle discontinuities along which the sides pull apart as splits open.

bookmark in process

Rockin' My Painting

How to create granite—a felsic intrusive igneous rock that is granular and phaneritic in texture—from the lava and magma in my studio?

I get a little melting, cooling, solidification, and cracking underway today.

Kinda fun to work in geologic time.

bookmark in process

Pulling the Oars, Testing the Waters

I row a little farther out into the unknown waters of my current bookmark-in-progress—collaging, color-mixing, painting, tearing paper, gluing, reading directions for masking fluid.

Surface conditions start to get a little choppy. Whitecaps whip up.

I toss an anchor.

Gonna sit tight for a bit.

bookmark-in-progress

17-Minute Painting Hat

I wear many hats. Today, it seems as though I wore each one more than once, often for only a few minutes before I had to switch to the next.

I did put on my painting hat just long enough to take bookmark #3 from my current series and develop it a bit, focusing mostly on color-mixing and seeing how close I could get to where I want to go.

Got closer.

Went from here to here: