July 3: Green shelf

Pictures like this always look productive to me. I had agonized, shopped, and then spent some money on a nice wooden shelf. It was already made, but not painted, and for some reason I had a visual image of the color it should be. There was no paint in the store remotely resembling this green, so asked for the nearest color and the guy said he'd customize it for me, but of course I couldn't get my money back. I didn't expect to. He'd add more black and I'd say it wasn't enough. He couldn't believe I wanted more and more black, but he accommodated, and I finally got what I was looking for. I'm good with color mixing, and in fact, in high school I kept getting passes out of various classes to match colors for a Christmas project the art class was doing. I'd made the original design and apparently was the only one who could figure out how to get the colors mixed right to match when we painted it as a large backdrop. Anyway, mixing paint and matching colors is one of my talents. I wish I could paint as well as I can come up with the colors. Well, maybe soon I'll get back into it. I also like the collaged tapir box there on the coffee table. The table was one of the first things Marco and I bought in Colorado when we moved there with almost no furniture. My former landlady, Jane, gave me the Laurel Burch cat mug.

Getting back into painting

Today I photographed some of the arts and crafts I'd begun to pick up again. Above is a painting of Nietsche. It wasn't anything about him personally I wanted to paint, but I found a picture on a book cover in a magazine, and I thought the face was dynamic, so I got my old paint and brushes to see what came out of me. It's not a style I'd ever tried before. I wanted to use paint. I think that was my overriding feeling. I wanted to put paint on canvas. I wasn't sure what I wanted as far as the images, only the expression of feeling with paint, although I didn't want to do a complete abstract. I like recognizable images.

This is a bulletin board I had in the back bedroom, which I was turning into my art room. I had set up the canvas to photograph. For the painting, I'd taken an old frame, painted it black, and simply stapled some canvas onto the back of it. The blanket is just a backdrop for that. Above are pieces to a "watercolor quilt" I never finished. I love, love, LOVE the gradation of colors and pattern in this style of quilt. I'd found a book and was making my own design from the style. Here's a link I just found online to someone's water color quilt gallery (not mine :) Also on the bulletin board are several framed tapir stamp prints that Kate had made and sent to me to put in the online tapir gift shop for Christmas ornaments. Kate was very generous and creative that way, and we had unusual ornaments for sale each year. In the center is a page from a calendar I liked. The entire calendar was made of Egyptian prints by David Roberts. I just love this guy's work!

In another experiment, I found a photo of a Russian Orthodox (?) church, and used that as a model for color, because I liked the shapes. In the end, I liked the colors a lot, but the composition didn't feel right for a finished work. Still, I was getting into it, not sure where I wanted to go. Decisions about art are some of the hardest, and don't let anyone tell you differently! There are so few "right" answers, and so many, MANY decisions to make. It can really cause a person to feel nuts and very unstable. You simply don't have the easy answers of 6 and 6 make 12, and you sign on this line and mail the form. Of course, I hate forms much more than I am confused by creative decisions, so I guess I was born to deal with the inscrutable (from Latin: in + scrutari = to search).

In this case, I drew out some Egyptian heads and decided to let things flow from there, using both an Egyptian-style print fabric and paint. I kind of like what happened, but it's clearly two different paintings, which I never resolved and never finished. Interestingly, it also came from two different images. Here is an image from a collage I made showing three ancient Egyptian faces.

Here's the art room in it's current incarnation. I wrote more about it in an earlier post.