Whatever Leads To Joy

...played around with the background just a touch, then added those hot hot reds - still a very busy painting, but now resolved, I think!


oil on stitched canvas
23 x 46"

work in progress

River

oil on stitched canvas
18 x 21"

before & after

Well, I am getting to the final touches on these, so the changes from "before" to "after" are quite minimal...

A Street Divided






Whatever Leads To Joy






Bridges to Light






These are still in the middle stages, I think:




they went through several incarnations before I split them up into two separate paintings...
neither of which are quite finished yet - this is how they look now:

The Object Of Play



Building Blocks

What I Did Today

Well, ok, I didn't do all this today.
Most of these paintings have been in progress for quite some time now...

That said - I did work on them all today and some have changed quite a bit since this morning. I am getting the feeling they are going to look pretty good when they are finished! That'll probably take a couple more weeks though.

Here are some before & after images.


This one has no title yet:


it can go either way...



...but I like it this way, it just feels more peaceful with some space in the middle rather than having the city all crowded together.


Lowering:



this one may be finished, maybe.... or very very very close....



The Gamble:



Well it was a losing gamble, putting those portrait drawings in there with my black sharpie marker... maybe the paint will cover them, though I suspect they will continue to ghost through no matter what I do.


Whatever Leads To Joy:






A Street Divided:





Oh, how nice to be finally at the point where they are starting to be close to finished! I have been going through periods of discouragement and just slogging along in the studio, adding layers and more layers, wondering where it's all going -
It always seems like things go on forever with no discernable result, and then suddenly...!

the hurdle has been put behind me
*sigh*

:)

some final finishing touches...

"Pattern Recognition"
oil on stitched canvas
66 x 66"


It went from here:


To here:


Can you notice the changes?
They are relatively minor.

The lighting is always difficult for this painting - I think because it is so big, and because I am not really a great photographer nor am I using a really great camera, and because it is a painting studio first and foremost, and not really properly lighted for photography, &c.

Oh, excuses!
Really it's my artist ego, insisting everyone should know that this painting looks much better in real life than it ever could here on my blog!
:)

And here is a crop to show how the stitching looks:

velocity

this


now looks like this:


gonna try doing it all up in chromatic greys, keeping the bright centre areas...

have been working almost full-time for the last several weeks & feeling like I'm going crazy, not enough time to do everything that needs to be done.
getting a bit of painting in nonetheless.

a couple of singles & a triptych
all still in progess...





on march 13 I made a post which included this picture:



this is what they look like now:


slowly, slowly but surely...

Urban Playground

from here:


to here:


& a few more small changes to here:


acrylic on stitched canvas
16"w x 17.25"h

Finally the acrylic seems to be working for me...

Experimentation

First I learned to paint with acrylic, and used nothing but for ages.
Then a few years ago I decided to learn to use oils, and have used nothing but since.
Now I have decided to try acrylics again, partly because they are less toxic than the alkyd mediums which I love to use... and partly because acrylic dries so much faster than oil!
This could be an especially nice benefit for me, since I love to layer on the glazes, and 20 or 30 layers of oil glazes makes the painting a long time in the making!

Well these are not finished, but already I am feeling pretty ambiguous about the results:



This one is a little more subtle, and may work out yet:



That purple tree has got to go, but the building shapes in the background are showing some potential:



I am forming the conclusion that acrylic just will not give me what I want! However, this is just the first bit of experimentation and perhaps I have a lot to learn and re-discover...

Postcards

I have a friend who is a really great photographer, and many of her photos are undisputed works of art, in my opinion at least!

But (like all us artists) every photo she takes is not a success. A few nights ago we took some of her less-than-successful experiments and cut them up, and then glued them to pieces of card-stock paper to make our own postcards.

Her idea is to use a computer program to digitally "cut and paste" some photos into collages for postcards.... my idea is the hands-on approach with a ruler & carpet knife, glue stick & heavy paper!
She has a lovely open mind and so agreed to try the "hands-on" method with me. (not so sure I would be interested in trying the "mousing" method - oh, my dismally closed mind!)

These are a couple that I came up with:




Next I would like to take them to a print shop and get copies made on card stock paper, have them cut - et voilâ: handmade, original postcards!

Velocity

You know how the city just sort of grows & grows...?
Calgary has no natural boundaries, no mountains or ocean's edge to stop the sprawl, and I have come to see it as very amoeba-like, enveloping whatever lies in the path of its residential psuedopods.

And I got to thinking about the relative speed of various types of changes.

Usually, the word "velocity" is associated with fast speeds: the velocity of a moving vehicle hurtling down the hiway, for example.

But my Webster's Dictionary defines velocity simply as "rate of motion" - no mention of fast or slow motion - and in chemistry velocity refers to "the rate of dissappearance of the reactants or of the appearance of products in a chemical reaction"

The next entry in the Webster's is "velocity of escape *escape velocity"

Hmmmm, interesting.


So, I had an idea:

City meets trees - not clear which is being overtaken by the other...


Here are the canvasses just finished being assembled, pinned to the wall sideways for lack of space:

That's a fourth canvas on the table, just begun.


This is my sewing assembly setup, after the floor has been swept!




And here is the fourth canvas, now finished:

Just visible is the stretcher it will go on, measuring 37 x 58".


This is the cumulative effect of three and a half days' sewing at a slow but steady velocity - whew!

Next I will build stretchers for the first three canvasses - they will measure 32 x 42" each. Then I will stretch them, seal the seams, apply several coats of gesso, and finally begin painting.

Is it really worth all this effort?
Yes.

Rising

oil on stitched canvas
26"h x 28"w

Whatever Leads to Joy

Bought a bag of oranges which came in a mesh bag - was about to throw it out, then thought "hey, wait a minute... this looks a bit like that chain-link fence they put around playgrounds....!" And thus an idea was born.



See that little dark spot on the orange mesh? That's blood. Pricked my finger while sewing the thing.
Yup, there's proof: I bleed for my art.


8-)

btw, "whatever leads to joy" is a line from a poem I heard on the radio a few days ago... not sure title of poem or author, but the line stuck in my head & I hope I'm not breaking any copyright laws by using it for a painting!

A Day in the City

My little chromatic grey paintings which used to be coloured until I went too far and screwed them up...


So I said to hell with it & painted them over, avoiding the colour issue altogether by making them grey.
And then realizing that greys are colours, too - very subtle colours!