Lemons and a Lime

New fruit. Happy with many things about this painting - the cloth, the lime and the lemon on the left.

Acrylic is becoming my friend.

Lemons and a Lime
6x8 acrylic on panel

My Buddy Billy

I was laid off in the fall. Besides losing my job, my income and a lot of confidence, the thing that really bugged me was that I was freaking crazily self-involved. My solution? Get a second dog.

It's hard to focus on yourself when you are housebreaking a 10 week old puppy in a snowstorm in December at 2AM. 

This is a portrait of Billie, the fantastic dog I adopted from Sterling Animal Shelter. She's the second dog that I've adopted from there, the first was Sammy, almost 9.5 years ago. She is also a wonderful dog, but Billie is something special. Sweet, attentive, loving and affectionate. Only negative so far is she manages to find and roll on every dead thing in the yard/woods/pond.

Billie

Grey Pear

I painted this last week and I'm really pleased with it. I like the palette, more muted than I usually use. I didn't paint much this past week because I had a visit from my wonderful old friend Timmy. It was fun and relaxing - we spent 3.5 days catching up, laughing, watching movies, walking the dogs and then seeing my son's play.

It's really amazing how your oldest friends are your best friends, and how - no matter the mistakes, no matter the amount of time that passes - the love is always there.

Grey Pear
6x8 acrylic on panel

Bowl of Fruit 1

Lots of glare on this photo but as good as the iPhone camera is - it's not perfect. Not loving this one, I really struggled with the paint - acrylic colors change when they dry! So irritating. At one point this painting was very dark, and each time I thought that I had lightened it up it would dry and be drab again. So then I decided to just exaggerate the colors to get the brightness and light that I like in my paintings, but then it got overworked. Oh well, try try again.

The colors aren't quite as vivid as this photo. The two things I like are the pear on the right and the tomato on the left attached to the vine. I like the bowl too. The orange on the left looks like it's losing air :).

Bowl of Fruit 1
9x12 acrylic on canvas

Beware the Pit

Since I said I would post everything, even the weird - here is a painting I did a couple of weeks ago. It's a creepy painting that I did the week before the horrible Boston bombing and the insane, and scary, aftermath.

Beware the Pit
Acrylic on 9x12 canvas

Crosshatch Mac

This is the latest acrylic. Getting the hang of it - I like painting in layers. I don't have the patience to do it with oils - you have to wait a day between layers because they take so long to dry.

Crosshatch Mac
Acrylic on 8x8 canvas

Two Greens and a Red

So it's fruit again. But fruit is the old reliable that I go to when I need to figure out the paint so there will be more coming (lucky you!)

Two Greens and a Red
6x6 acrylic on panel

Boston You're My Home

Sad day in Boston. My thoughts are with everyone impacted by today's craziness. So cruel and so evil.

Is 22 months too long between blog posts?

Well well, here I am. I feel as though I have stepped out of a cloud and back to crisp, bright blue clarity. Cerulean blue.

It's been a long time. Lots of things have happened - got a new job, worked many hours and had a hard time separating work from life which didn't leave time for art.  I did have time for my son, of course. He probably would have preferred if I had backed off a bit because he's a senior in high school - which makes me an awkward annoyance with a wallet.

After not painting for well over a year - almost two -  I started again a couple of weeks ago. I have kept my studio this whole time, but rarely went and when I did I just sort of puttered around. I was completely and totally blocked.

I still struggle to get to the studio, but I started painting at home with acrylics.  Painting with acrylics is completely different than painting with oils and I'm learning all over again. I'm going to post one of them, even though it's kind of embarrassing, but the whole point of this blog - and my art - was to focus on THE PROCESS, not the end result.

I lost sight of that.

Shapes and Colors
11x14
Acrylic

My focus right now is to learn what I can do with acrylic paint and reveal the shapes and colors (hence the title) rather than the subject matter. That's hard for me to do because I'm the most literal artist in the world (poetry is usually a mystery to me.) With oils I can goop it on and move the paint around and things blend and overlap and do wonderful things. Acrylic dries very fast so no gooping and moving unless it happens in 5 minutes; instead I've been doing many thin thin layers of paint. I'd like to get to a where my acrylic paintings are less literal and more painterly.