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!

All in the Family

 Look at these brothers and sisters all together, wouldya?!

inspired-by-scribbles series

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Yammer, yammer, yammer! They're all asking for solo portraits. Okay, okay!

In the Lab

the creative adventure  

of any one painting

even if

declared complete 

cannot be separated 

from the ongoing 

never-to-be-completed 

work-in-progress 

of becoming the artist 

I am 

(always) 

becoming.

Be the Mad Scientist of Your Own Life,
Each Experiment One in Meaning-Making and Discomfort-Embracing
7 x 8.5"; acrylic, oil pastel, and collage on paper
abstract scribble inquiry
2023

Egg On My Face!

Oh my gosh! I stop in my tracks this morning while preparing breakfast when Maisie Dobbs, Psychologist and Investigator par excellence in the crime novel I'm listening to via audiobook, says to her companion, "I believe I may have over-egged the pudding."

Over-egged the pudding!

I love me a good idiom, and I am particularly enchanted by British ones.

This over-egging-the-pudding idiom exquisitely captures the downfall of many a painting that is spoiled in process by an artist's trying too hard to improve it.

…

And by artist I mean myself!

There may be just a wee bit too much egg in this very pudding right here. Just sayin'.

Being Right Here Right Now Is a Wide-Open Door to Discovery
7 x 8.5"; acrylic, oil pastel, and collage on paper
abstract scribble inquiry
2023

A Little Smile of Discovery

I took Nicholas Wilton's 2023 Art2Life Free Online Workshop this past week, during which several live painting demonstrations took place. 

The funny part was that in one case I found myself becoming one with the artist at hand doing the demo. As she made certain marks that created instant impact—most often because of very pleasing contrast, my own (empty) hand involuntarily stayed in motion continuing to make more and more of those dynamic marks … even when she did not!

I broke into a little smile of discovery. I have new insight into how some of my paintings turn into chaos that leaves me not knowing how to navigate. I now see new choices about how to direct my energy. With any given painting, I might choose to put no brakes on making marks that are exciting to my eye, for the sheer joy of expressing myself in that way, end result be damned! But I might not. I might choose to limit or subtract some of my runaway mark-making for greater impact to see what I learn. Win, win.

Fun!

All the Living We've Ever Done Happened in Some Now
7 x 8.5"; acrylic, oil pastel, and collage on paper
abstract scribble inquiry
2023

Stuck, Unstuck

Jan Frazier writes in a recent teaching:

That word reality tends to be surrounded

by unwelcome associations and feelings.

Isn't that telling?

The last thing many a person wants

is to be reminded of reality.

And yet what gets called spiritual liberation

is about coming at last

to rest in what is real.

Imagine:

that relaxing into the truth of things,

without recoiling,

is utterly peace-inducing.

Yesterday, I could not for the life of me relax into the truth of things—the truth that I didn't like the paintings-in-progress in my studio, that I couldn't make sense of what I as doing nor where I was going, that I didn't know what to do to fix the messes, that the paintings weren't going to resolve on their own, that I had to find the courage to take a step, that I had to risk whatever would unfold. I could feel recoil and resistance in my body. Discouragement. Fear. 

I was stuck.

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And then I wasn't.

I awoke (awakened!) this morning relaxed in the truth of things. By early afternoon I took that peace-inducing relaxation into my studio and began playing.

I'm Saying We Don't Have Forever. For Anything.
7 x 8.5"; acrylic, graphite, pencil, pastel, and collage on paper
abstract scribble inquiry
2023

A Series, in Spite of Myself!

My history with painting in series is on the sparse side, but lookie this! A series of four!

Enough Space

I can't find words to pin to the process here, can't find words for all the ways nothing about this piece is what I 'had in mind' to paint when I started.

Maybe that's the point.

The language here is visual, not verbal. The painting comes only in a very small way from my mind.

I sit here now walking around this piece with my eyes, taking an unexpected tour of mystery—inner mystery, artistic mystery, the mystery of the universe.

I got stuck so many times. I got stuck in so many ways. Fear and resistance yammered at me, taunted me. I considered stopping, considered letting whatever was on the page in the moment be sufficient as an exercise.

But I kept returning. The painting kept calling me back. 

I let fear and resistance yammer at me and run roughshod around my studio as I tried out new tools from the courses I've been taking. I made space for not-knowing, trusting that not-knowing held energy and gifts to move me forward.

And forward I moved! To a painting that scratches a wordless itch and feels complete.

Enough Space Hides in Plain Sight to Hold All We Need
11 x 5.75"; acrylic, ink, collage, and oil pastels
on paper canvas
abstract
2022

The Long Way Home

"Fear lives in the head.

And courage lives in the heart.

The job is to get

from one to the other."

"And between the two

is the lump in the throat,"

said Gamache.

    —Louise Penny, The Long Way Home

Naples yellow, Paynes gray, white gesso, a week-long on-again-off-again conversation, lots of time in the lump-in-the-throat space, and now a pause again. 

Will I finish these compositions while they're still on a single sheet of paper separated only by painter's tape, or will I pull off the tape, cut the page into its four components, and complete each individually? I'm going to live with that question a little longer.

work in progress

NY (2)

Limited palette, limited tools and materials, limited responsibilities, a kitchen table, some water, a rag, and a painting exercise done on 6x6" canvasboard in 2015. I felt looser and freer than on day 1.

Visual history of 2nd NY-vacation painting start:

detail