29th & 30th panels

Cosmic Bowling, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on birch panel, 7" W x 14" H

These are the last of the 7" x 7" panels I got for myself as a 49th birthday present! A year and half later (almost two years), I'm finished! Yay! If I've been consistent, then clicking the tag shut up sit down paint will bring up the whole series. Of course, I've also worked on a few other pieces in between, and if you click the tag painting then you should see those too.

I started these two panels at the same time I started Lichen and Ancient History, and you can see that they started life more or less the same. (Although now that I'm looking, I see that I did not include process photos for Lichen...well, you'll have take my word for it.)



But pretty quickly, I turned it vertical and it became a very different beast, lobster claws and all. Here it is about mid-way:



I really wanted to get this done today, before I head to Seattle for the opening of the Gallery 110 exhibit, so I've been working on it pretty consistently for several days. And of course, the top image is the completed painting. It does not yet have the acrylic on it; I'll do that when I get back. I have several pieces batched up waiting for the acrylic and the edge finishing, all of which I'll do at the same time.

27th & 28th Panels

Ancient History, gouache & acrylic on paper on birch panel, 14" W x 7" H

Another diptych, but this one actually started out as a vertical. I was playing around a lot with this. This was created with dripping a lot of paint onto the paper and then using a hard brayer to move the paint around. There were several iterations of this, each time with a different color, all fairly thinly mixed. Sometimes I would let the paint sit for a bit before I took the brayer to it, other times I'd do it while it was fresh.



I think I turned it horizontal fairly early on though. Having decided that it was a landscape, with a bit of sky showing down the middle. I brought out the land formations. Then the last issue of the Thursday Home & Garden section had a story on peonies. I saved the photos and was doing some drawings based on the photos. Heck, I might as well put the peonies right on the piece...



I was watching a video of another artist working and was inspired to try some of her techniques. She works in encaustics and makes drawings of individual elements and then collage them onto her final piece. I know a lot of artists use this technique, but her work was the first to really knock me over. Her pieces are cohesive, integrated and complex, all the while maintaining that luminous look. (See Lori Field's website.)

Although I don't use encaustics, I figure I'd try out the technique — not sure where I wanted to go with this piece at this point, I made a separate peony drawing on mulberry paper, cut it out, and was playing around with placing it on the image. In the end, the additional peony wasn't doing it for me, and I really wanted to see the land/rock instead.



I considered putting a couple of giant praying mantises on there, but in the end decided on some pre-historic looking ferns. And that's the top photo. If you click on it, you can see the details on the larger version.

19th through 26th panels...

Lichen, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 7" W x 14" H

OK, yes, I'm still working on those 7x7 panels. Lichen was finished tonight, and they would be the 25th and 26th (out of 30).

These two below were finished last October, and comprised of panels 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd (seen here, here and here), and also 23rd and 24th (in progress here).

I made 2 triptychs out of them.



Hummingbird I, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 21" W x 7" H



Hummingbird II, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 21" W x 7" H

I actually started two more hummingbirds, but they didn't make it. They turned into Lichen! See above.

Last two weeks before Portland Open Studios

I'm not sure whether to be happy or sad, but Portland Open Studios weekends will finally be upon me in less than 2 weeks. I have spent so much time volunteering on the board (I've logged 570 hours so far this year) that I feel my own work has suffered. I've completed a bunch of the 7x7 panels and a couple of larger pieces, but that's it. I've not completed my senior's book, which I started on last year, yikes!

I know one thing, I'll be happy when my 3 year term is up. I will feel like I've made my contribution, and I can feel good about that. This is also my last year of participating in the event. Of course, never say never, and I might return in the future, but I'm definitely ready for a break.

So I got a commission from a friend, who wanted a painting of a hummingbird. Not having done humming birds before, and having those 7x7 panels that I can experiment with, I figure I'll play with some ideas here. I actually started 4 panels just as shapes and forms, without thinking that I'll put hummingbirds on there. But then, there they are, so I might as well.

I started 4 panels with similar ideas, and you see that on the panel on the right. All 4 had those seed-pod like shapes. I was thinking horse chestnut pods. But they also read like circular cages.

Over the seed pod shapes, I layered a landscape (inspired by my trip to the Steens...come to think of it, I got the horse chestnuts on one of our previous trips to the Steens too), and hummingbirds. This you can see in the left 2 panels. Then the panel on the left has been 'scrubbed'—I take a wet, stiff angle brush and I push the paint around. Before I do this, the left panel is much more like the middle panel:



Then I start to work on bringing out or pushing back the different forms & shapes that I want to work with. They're not finished, I hope to have them done this weekend though.

20th and 21st, among other things

Escape Velocity, diptych in gouache (and acrylic surface to be added later).

[These were really the 21st & 22nd panels.]

So these two, and the two below of the monkey king, were cut up from this piece from back in 2006, which went from bad to worse to pretty much given up for dead. Although now that I'm looking at these old photos, I think it could've been saved when I was about half way through. So I cut it up into these 4 pieces (plus there are scraps left).

I'll mount these on boards before I finish them.



On other fronts...

I'm recovering from a long streak of work, work, and more work. Between organizing and installing the Collins show, getting the iPhone app together (and the Good Prince had to get involved too), and installing For the Love of Food (opened this past Tuesday), I had my first day of 'holiday' yesterday since mid-July. I sat around and did nothing...it was bliss.

20th

Rocks & Wings, gouache on paper mounted on board. Yet to be sprayed w/ the GAC 500.

This one has had a long wait. Here's how it started, as a pour, on Feb, 19 this year:



Then I started working on it again on July 11:



Then over the last few days, it went through several phases, including one in which a mosquito made an appearance. But I quickly swatted it out. The rocks went from pink:



To blue:



To spotted & lined:



And finally to marbled and it stuck:

19th

Wet Spring, gouache on paper mounted on board

Again, have yet to spray it w/ the GAC 500.

Here's a shot from a little earlier:



And before that, see this entry.

Most of the 'spots' on the first layers got covered up; and then as a last step, I uncovered them by using a stiff damp brush to remove the layers on top, controlling how much of the top layers to remove and therefore, how much of the spot to reveal.

An almost perfect day

One fine spring day earlier this year (and needless to say, it was pretty wet), I was walking somewhere SE, and the sidewalks were just covered, I mean COVERED, in maple seed pods. Bright chartreuse over wet, dark, shiny cement sidewalks. I've been waiting to paint that ever since.

So after almost 3 weeks away from the studio, I've started 2 more of the 7x7 panels, two different types—a paperbark maple and a vine maple. I'm not finished, but here are a couple of progress shots of each.

First one, paperbark maple. I created the background a few months back with some gray and bright color spots. Today, I added the pods, first in ultramarine. The pods are about actual size...you can see a real pod on the left:



Then I layered a light green and a yellow on top. They kind of look like bugs:



Then the vine maple. Until I decided to paint them, I hadn't really paid attention to how different the different maple pods are. Not only in shape, but also in color and texture, and some are really tiny. So these are starting out the same as the paperbark maple, but there's a lot more red in these pods. The wings are also a lot thinner:



This is as far as I got today. They almost look like peas. I guess they're rather similar ideas:

Inifinite Loop, picturesque chickens, and gocco fail!

Infinite Loop

Acrylic, medical test strips, blood.

I couldn't stop making these mazes, and so now I have six. This is all six mazes stacked up, creating an infinite loop. I haven't permanently attached them to each other yet, but most likely will eventually.

The neighbors got 3 hens a while back and they seem to enjoy my yard quite a bit. I'm happy to have them around, hoping that they'll do a good job of eating my slugs and fertilizing my plants.




On the Gocco fail...

I've been wanting to try pressure printing on the Gocco for a while now. This is a very successful technique in letterpress printing that allows you to print with a fair amount of detail just by inserting something behind your paper and printing it against a flat sheet of inked plexi on the print bed.

I thought I'd try the technique and see if it works. So here's the setup—a simple design cut out in fairly thick fun foam, an open screen that has some texture in it, papers of various thickness.



I inked up my open screen, stuck the fun foam design on the print bed, and placed the paper on top of the fun foam and printed as normal. And as you see to the right of the fun foam design, what I printed was the entire inked up area. The design was no where to be seen.

I also tried it by placing the fun foam design between the plexi staging glass and the screen. That achieved more or less the same result.

Back to the drawing board...

14th

Maze II

Still just having fun, and still acrylic, medical test strips, and blood. Must do something about the camera situation here. This is terribly out of focus and colors are off. It's much more red-bluish in real life and less orange-y.

So all of these have been following more or less the same process—each panel is gesso'ed and gets several coats of paint (whatever leftover colors I have). After I attach the test strips, I either sand the test strips lightly or I take an X-acto knife and I peel off the black plastic off the surface. This reveals the paths that lead from the blood droplet to the little machine that reads the glucose (the faint white lines). Then I coat the whole surface with gel medium.

At this point, the panel is black & white (the colors of these particular test strips) and whatever colors the panel already had. Once the gel medium dries, I paint the whole thing with a diluted color. Because this paint is thinned quite a bit, the original panel colors come through this layer. Then I pull some of the colors off the test strips by laying down a wet rag and rolling the rolling pin over it. So I basically pull a relief print onto the rag:



Then I figure out what colors I want the open spaces to be, and start working on that.

I probably have another 2 or 3 panels worth of the black & white strips before I start on the black, white, and blue strips! I'm thinking that I should make a really big maze!

13th

Maze

Acrylic, medical test strips, blood. This takes a bit more working out than I originally figured—not only do you need to set a path that works (which is easy), you have to remember to make some fake ones too (which I forgot). Not a very good maze if there's only 1 way to go at any moment.

But, it is still a pretty easy one.

12th

Regularly Irregular II

Acrylic, medical test strips, blood. In reality, the colors are not quite so saturated and vary quite a bit from a dark red to an orange. This was a snap shot taken sideways with a flash that I then squared up.

11th

Regularly Irregular

11th of the 7x7 panels. A slight deviation from what I've been doing with these, which had been gouache & acrylic on paper mounted board, this is acrylic, medical test strips, glass beads and blood. No, no, no, not the droplets you actually see, those are droplets of acrylic paint. The blood is in the test strips. Just miniscule amounts.

I've been accumulating great amounts of these and wanting to do something with them. The last experiment with them did not work out very well—I was trying for something more sculptural and it didn't work. Lots more test strips where these came from, so more are in the works already.

And about that book...

And I've been pretty silent on my current book with my senior, but I'm happy to report that some progress has been made. Here's a fairly full mock-up of the book. A lot of the content has been decided, I have all the papers, I know the final size. I'll probably start trimming the paper sometime in the next couple of days. I even went out and bought a much larger cutting mat in preparation. Now I have a 24”x36 ” mat and won't have to struggle with the larger sheet sizes. Tried it out yesterday, what a relief!



On other fronts

Lots of things have been happening—wrapped up one collaborative project, researching/discussing another for next year, working on a video with a friend, and thinking and writing about future solo projects. Nothing is set is stone yet, but hopefully some of them will wrap up or gel in the next few weeks or so.

10th

Peering In

The 10th of the 7x7 panels. (I'm still photographing with my cell phone. The camera lens turned out to be beyond rescue—the camera shop sent it to the manufacturer for repairs, who is returning it to the shop saying basically, haha, this lens is so old that they haven't serviced it in 10 years! So forget it.)

This panel was one of those that I 'poured' several weeks back. I was running out of the little clear film containers that I use to store paint, so I gathered up all the ones that had just a little bit of paint left and poured them on several prepared panels. So here was the original poured result:



And, again, doing whatever comes to mind, I decided to follow the poured lines. I've always loved the images from those electronic microscopes, and this one was inspired by that. The finished result is the first image at the top.

9th

Putting It Delicately

The 9th of the 7x7 panels. The turquoise chains going across might be a bit hard to see on a lighter display...

Finally got back to painting again, and have been trying something different—working on several images at the same time. I know lots of artists do it successfully, and it seems like it's a perfect way to work when you have this wait time between layers drying. But I've never been able to navigate that.

So this last few days, I've been working on 3 pieces at the same time, but really, ended up mostly working on this piece and just dabbling with the other 2 pieces while I wait for things to dry. I suppose that's ok.

So this is how this piece started, and I almost decided that I liked it just like that—very simple and minimal. But I'm glad I continued on.

The new 8th

Slightly better than the old 8th. Maybe.

There's very little difference, actually. I thought the old 8th was just a bit too dingy, and so I added a bit more spectrum red and ultra marine to the edges. Although I have to say that now it looks less desert like, which was what I sort of had in mind before, the desert colors. I'm also wondering if it's a bit too red-white-blue-ish. I guess I'll sleep on it some more.

I actually got to this point last night/this morning around 2am or so. Spent most of today doing Portland Open Studios stuff (preparing to ship some tour guides, meeting minutes), and also getting ready for my 3rd session of the solarplate intensive with Barbara Mason tomorrow. I have some etchings from our 2nd session that I haven't scanned in yet. I'll do that sometime. Tomorrow, I want to do some relief prints.

8th

Am I done? I'm not sure yet. I'll sleep on it.

7th

Queen Bat and Her Royal Jewels

Going to Bend knocked me off my painting track for a bit so I had a chance to catch up on some Portland Open Studios chores. You can now buy a tour guide using PayPal, and I'm also working on another feature, and an artist profile.

Got back to my bat this afternoon (see this entry for where it was last I worked on it). I'd say this is a worthy facebook picture alright!

For those keeping count, this was another 5 1/2 hours of work. That makes the total 10.5 hours, excluding preparation time. I prepare the boards a bunch at a time (3 coats of gesso then mounting paper), so it's hard to track how much time it takes per board. I'd guess maybe 15 minutes. Of course, I'm not done-done yet—I have yet to spray it with the GAC500 mixture. Again, I'll batch that step of the process too, so we'll say it's another 15 minutes. Which brings us to a grand total of about 11 hours.

Half a bat...

I was hoping to get my 7th panel done today before I head over to Bend to see my mom tomorrow, but well, it's past midnight and I must go to sleep now.

I've wanted to do a bat image for a long time now. The other day, I was going through my books of images with Susan (who's doing a bat pin for me), and I got inspired by all the bat photos all over again. And after my 6h panel, which was very red, I wanted to do a blue image. So a bat at night seemed like the perfect antidote to panel #6.

Here's how it started this afternoon:



And here's where we're at tonight.



This is a fantasy bat. Some fruit bats do have extremely fancy noses and others (the ones that hunt) have extremely fancy ears. So I've combined the two. I think it's looking very Balinese, which is not intentional. It's also looking a little grimlin like, which is also not intentional.

For a change, I'm happy with how the panel is going, and I don't see any major revisions in its future. But maybe that's bad?

[And people always ask, so...it took me about 5 hours to get to this point, which does not include the preparations part. And for the most part, I'm painting with a size 0 brush.]

6th

Going Around in Circles

This piece has had a rough life. It started out as this (you can still see this pattern in the finished piece above, sort of):



Which I decided I really didn't like. So I brush an earthen red all over it:



Before it finally arrived at its current state, which is the 1st image above.

Another fairly labor intensive piece. This was a 4-part repeating image, created using the same basic method as the 6-part repeating image here. I have to say that the 4-part repeat is a lot easier to do than the 6-part repeat—the 4-part repeat is at least symmetrical, which is a lot easier to deal with.

But as you already saw above, I did not care for the resulting pattern, it looked kind of crudely done. Even though it wasn't finished yet, I had the nagging feeling that I could put 10 more hours into it, and I'd still see it as kind of 'crude.' I'm not sure why, maybe the pattern was too large?