"Wind in the Pines" is a pastel painting, 28x22".  It was painted over an old pastel I had started and lost interest in.  With pastels, you can only apply a certain amount of material to the surface before it won't stick anymore or you begin to pull up the bottom layer.  That limited my options for content, since I needed to accomplish the piece with very few strokes.  I took this picture of a silhouetted pine tree in Pisgah National Forest back in the early 2000's.  I have always loved the shapes and lines of the branches.  The tree, however, was entirely backlit and thus a very flat dark shape.  That was uninteresting to me so I improvised light hitting the trunk and branches.The result is textured with lots of movement and visible strokes of the pastel, again letting the medium have a prominent role.  Happy Thursday!   

Autumn Breeze I & II are 15x22" mixed media collages on watercolor paper.  They started out abstract with a vague linear underpainting and random pieces of collage paper applied, actually with a vertical orientation instead of the horizontal one you see here.  I let them sit for a while to see what they might tell me about where they should go.  Sometimes that takes a while and then one day, I suddenly know exactly what I want to do.  I realized the shapes of the paper reminded me of leaves blowing around in the wind.  When I rotated the images, the brushwork in the background became a forest with light dappling through.  From there, I used acrylic paint to define and explain the backlit leaves with their veins and shadows.  The result is not highly realistic but an impression, letting the materials themselves have as much presence as the imagery.  As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed working on these.  Happy Tuesday! 

"Salvia" is an older painting I decided needed more work (it has been in our inventory for over 7 years and we've never placed it).  I painted the original one day at a workshop in dreamy Sedona, Arizona, and it had a very recognizable human figure flying through it.  If you've been to Sedona, that will seem perfectly normal to you.  If you start with the black oval as the head, you can still extract my dancer soaring across the painting from right to left with arms outstretched.  However, now it's not so obvious.  I added quite a bit of depth and line to the composition as well.  Overall, I'm much happier with it now!  It is 20x25", acrylic on paper. 

"Magnificent Maple" is 40x30", acrylic on canvas... another pop of red for the new building.  I used an image I found online as my source material so I had to edit some things and I'm not certain where this was taken.  It definitely could be right here in my backyard in North Carolina, though.  Cheers! 

 

 

"Samba 1 & 2" are very small, 11x15", acrylic paintings on paper.  They will likely hang on either side of a larger piece to create a grouping for a long wall.  These are high-energy, the complete opposite of the other painting I currently have on the easel (soon to come).

An end to the dry spell!  With 4 months of morning sickness, it's been a while since I've wanted to paint.  It felt great to do this one not only for that but because this sort of work is very relaxing.  I also enjoy the color theory aspect, seeing how different temperatures of color react to one another.  "Rainbow Road" is 30x30", acrylic on canvas.  You'll be seeing more red from me in the next few pieces because it is the accent color in our new building.  Happy Tuesday!