Meditations

 For a while I was doing watercolor meditations every morning. I would like to keep at it, I just got a little disorganized. These are my favorites.

Crickets

I'm working on an illustrated poem that stars crickets. I wanted to see if they still looked like crickets when the page was shrunk...chirp chirp.

Playing with Type

Because I love letterforms, here are pictures of a project where I am combining Garamond with Perpetua and Georgia. So much fun

New Leaves

The new leaves take over the forest.
The birds as as loud as ever. They never wonder what they are worth. A heart is a heart is a heart.

How Frogs Sing

Outside frogs sing like stars. Inside stars sing like frogs and the hawk waiting until dusk.

I am almost done with this painting. I still have to add the last half of the of the poem...and some stars, of course. The closer I get to finishing the slower my progress because I get nervous about wrecking things. I thought it would be fun to take a break and share what I've finished so far.

Treescape 14

There are so many interesting things going on behind these trees and on the surface of these trees I am a little overwhelmed. I feel like I need to go start some new paintings and come back to this later. Below is the plein air shot and the under-painting. I also changed treescape 13 a bit. i like it much better now so it is below as well.

 

The Trials and Wonders of Faux Impressionism

I appreciate this painting for the fact that I developed more ability to paint difficult tree scenes but it looks too faux-Impressionist to me. To be truthful, I did just go to the library to look at landscape painting in books. I wanted to see how different folks dealt with establishing foreground and background in the complicated scenes trees usually appear in. I could not help but think that Impressionists really know where it's at when it comes to painting a landscape, but I feel like my work gets gimmicky when I employ such techniques.

I was most drawn to Klimt's landscapes. There were so many moments in his pieces that, if it was a part of my painting I would think...that just doesn't work at all. Which reminds me that half of making good art is knowing when to stop and having the courage to recognize the beauty of what you put down. Anyhow, I was thinking of Klimt's birch trees while I painted these and it looks to me like any number of faux-Impressionist paintings I've seen in my day. I will have to add a new element to my treescape exercise which is to find that mysterious place where my own expressive voice hides. In the meantime I am happy to learn more about how trees rest in the landscape with each other.