Imagina

After having done several paintings with bright colors, I decided to go with something more subtle. I mixed up some unbleached titanium, green gold, rust, raw umber and navy blue. When they hit the paper, I was horrified. It all looked awful. I had completely written off this painting. I didn't even want to bring it in the house. Well, first impressions can be deceiving. It's amazing how something that looks like a trainwreck overall looks quite different matted. I extracted two 16x20 paintings from it, and I love the real organic look to them.

Butterfly Lost

A lady at work wanted to me to paint something along the lines of a mermaid or butterflies for her daughter's room. I used leaves to create a couple of butterflies in the paint. The first photo is the full sheet when completed. As I looked at trying to get the butterfly on the left with the mat, I couldn't ignore the really nifty composition going on underneath it, and to get it, had to sacrifice the butterfly. Oh well, will try again with another painting!

Full Sheet Painting Cropped

Well, I finally got up enough nerve to go after one of the full sheet paintings with a pair of scissors (or more precisely, a ruler and a rotary cutter). These 2 paintings were extracted from the bottom of the 3 full sheet paintings depicted below.

Nina Williams Workshop

These are the paintings I did in the workshop with Nina Williams last weekend. The first one is half sheet matted and the other 3 are full sheet. I haven't decided on cropping on the full sheets. Nina said that the first of the 3 full sheets should be matted and framed as is.

Primordial

This was an attempt to do a batik type painting using wax resist. Acrylic paints and inks used. Full sheet of 140 pound watercolor paper. Looks more pale in the photo than in real life.

Mandala

This painting is 24" square. I painted it impasto style, mixing my paints with heavy gloss gel. It took an immense amount of gel and paint to complete. The paint was laid down with palette knife.

Ru-Ru 2

I'm playing catch-up here a little bit, making up for some lost time. This is a pair of paintings based on an earlier painting I had done on the same theme. The original painting was named "Runes and Ruins". I decided to name this pair "Ru-Ru 2", since it is the second iteration of this theme, and because there are two of them.

They were done with heavily sculped Utrecht gesso, which was then painted and block printed with assorted ancient runes. The prints did not come out clear due to the textured surface, which adds to the archeological feel of the painting, you just get enough of a hint of the runes.