fearless Creating: Red and more Red

Today we celebrate vernal equinox--joy in the longer days, warmth and sunlight, sorrow as my studio becomes dormant.  Already the farm has taken over--deliveries, orders, harvesting, planting, long days spent outside working soil.  Bittersweet.  I do not have the time, energy or attention span to paint--so I "paint" with my camera. 

 

This is the second experiment exploring red, painting Rococo tulips.

 

 This is the third session, I doubled the size of sheet and tried to make looser brushstrokes and let them bleed over the sheet.

I worked awhile longer after this photo.  It only needs three or four brush strokes, unfortunately it requires hours of contemplation to lay those strokes in perfectly.  It has been lying like this for a month now, my goal is to finish it before August.

fearless Creating: Color and Surface

I was so delighted with Rococo Red I realized my immersion in red was not over by a long shot.  It was absolute joy creating puddles of vibrant color and playing with my brush.  The finished piece was a tangible record of my play--very exciting.

"Rococo Flow"
  10 x 13 in.

Having exhausted my meager supply of illustration board I reached for a sheet of Yupo.  Yupo is basically plastic so painting on it can be like painting on water and sometimes that is exactly what you do!

My intent was to continue exploring red and making beautiful marks, very visible marks, on paper.  I stopped every once in awhile, to breathe, and to let the paint dry so that everything did not run together in to "color" soup.   And I took a few shots to record the process.

Because it is plastic and the water and paint really do float on the surface, Yupo records the act of painting with watercolors like nothing else I have ever worked on.

The trick is allowing the paint and water time to rest and dry so that the "flow" you love is not obscured.

As I look at this piece I can see the dance of brush and color.

There are a lot of hard edges, created as "dams" to keep the flow of one area from flowing into another.  I wanted my colors fresh and vibrant so I will continue to experiment with the surface tension and beautiful brush strokes.