Sunday, March 15, 2009

Flowers in the Concrete


I've been a busy bee!

In this picture, you can see how I've completely taken over and trashed the dining area of the apartment. (This is what happens when you don't have an actual art studio!!) But the good thing about having everything in the main area of the house is that it does force me to see it every single day, and also makes me want to hurry up and finish so I can clean up the mess :)

(But I'm actually hoping to keep this momentum going and not give myself enough of a break to clean up. We'll see how that goes...)


I'm working on the 2nd grape painting, but I'm not a fan of repetition so it's already boring me. Don't get me wrong, I think when it's done it will be nice, and I look forward to having a series. But my mind is already racing with ideas for new paintings, which doesn't help at all with the repetition.

So to alleviate some of this boredom/repetition, I've also started small paintings of the tulip poplar flowers. I had those three photos (see previous blog entry), and I like each of them- so I thought I'd do some small studies before tackling a larger size painting, which I eventually intend to do. Plus I have no small paintings, and I want to get into the habit of working smaller than 16"x20" on occasion because smaller pieces take so much less time to complete. The great thing about working on 3 at a time like this is that I can work on a section of one, put it down, work on a section of the others, and so on. By the time I've worked on all 3 of them, the first is already dry and ready for more.

THIS MEANS HOURS AND HOURS OF NON-STOP PAINTING.

I feel like I'm back in college!!!


Here is the progress so far. They're still a hideous mess for the most part, but I've printed out my reference photos and put a layer or two of paint on some of the leaves, and about 3 or 4 coats of paint on the backgrounds of these. I can see in the daylight today that the backgrounds still need more work.


4 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for showing your not-so-messy workspace. Glad to know I'm not the only one!

My entire, tiny house has become the studio (except the bedroom). What I wouldn't give for a dedicated work space.

Good job on your grapes. Nice tohave a 'set' to offer potential buyers.

BTW, I'm 'EyeSpy' on WC. It's always good to have someone else over there who's also selling prints/giclees. These days, I'm feeling less and less like the WC minority voice.

Yay!

Doris Sturm said...

Looks like you're doing progress (wonder what happened to my other post here?) and the painting will look lovely, just like your grapes painting.

Samantha G said...

WJ, I know, WetCanvas can be very intimidating and opinionated sometimes. I've gotten quite the misconception that the art and art business world is full of hard guidelines and strict rules and it's been hard to overcome that. I recently put my things into a gallery and they are all about encouraging you to bend the rules as much as you wish- hand-touching your reproductions, even changing some of your prints on occasion by hand-painting on them (something simple, like for me adding a tiny bee to a flower picture or something). I would have thought that's not allowed, but it seems in art, there really are very few RULES you HAVE to follow :)

Samantha G said...

Thanks Doris! I really need to set aside an hour or two each night to paint. It goes by quickly and I really want to finish these up- I have so many ideas on the back burner that I want to start!