Wednesday, June 30, 2010

New Paintings




In my last blog entry, I bemoaned the fact that I often feel as though I am really two people painting in two different styles. In the past days however, I have been back to my "Romantic Abstraction" style. I have a show coming up in November at the Aphrodite Gallery above Passionale near South Street, and I've decided to use the more abstract works there. The show will be called "Divining the Feminine" and I'll be showing the more feminist oriented work. The piece above will give you an idea of the sorts of images I am making for this show.


The process I am using for these works is a very mixed media approach. I like bringing a three dimensional element to my paintings. The central image is painted on watercolor paper. Sometimes I may also combine pencil. I then have a canvas pre-painted onto which I mount the paper, using modeling paste. After that, I shape clay onto the canvas, and then the clay is painted. In some respects, my process is still somewhat experimental - I'm trying different kinds of clay for different effects, and have just begun playing with the idea of bringing some of the clay onto the central image itself.


I used a slightly different approach for the Twenty-Two Gallery's show, "22 Artists in the Open," which was meant to compliment the larger Art in the Open event going on in Philadelphia. We were encouraged to submit landscapes - which is not usually a genre I paint in. However, last year, on our honeymoon, my husband and I went to Sedona, and I feel deeply in love with the area. I decided to orient my paintings around that landscape. You can see the results here and here. It was especially poignant to me to learn that Red Rocks National Park - where my husband and I were married - is going to be closed for the time being due to budget cuts in Arizona's state budget. It blows my mind to think that an enormous park like that could remain closed, but I suppose it is a sign of the times. I am happy we were able to be there for our wedding, and I hope that their budgetary woes will not last long.




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