I visited a few galleries recently, and as usual I headed right to the bright, saturated colorful pieces. I want to take my palette more decisively in that direction. So when I got home I checked out a book called “Acrylic Techniques in Mixed Media” by Roxanne Padgett and I’ve been doing the exercises therein.

The exercises are simple, fun, and despite having taken college level color theory I’m learning a lot from them. Never underestimate the discoveries possible through simple experimentation!

That’s right, my friends. I have just received via post not one, not three, but six big beautiful gallery-wrapped canvases!

My ideas for them include chunky-textured brushstrokes for the backgrounds, in green, teal, fuchsia, and all kinds of iridescence. I will have to up my game in photography if I want to get reliable pictures of these paintings (metallics and iridescents being notoriously hard to capture). But I consider it well worth it. Like some sort of fairy magpie, I feel I am making everyone’s lives better by infusing the visual field with glitter and sparkle.

For the foreground I’m imagining some sort of reclining figures and subtly dangerous creatures, but I’m not ready to commit beyond those glorious backgrounds just yet. Past experience indicates that the right ideas and shapes will suggest themselves as the background builds. Following those sorts of intuitions makes a painting feel alive and active to me. In the spirit of Spring, I want to develop that feeling as much as possible.

I’ve gotten a lot of painting done the last couple weeks. It gives me great satisfaction, puts the world back into something like order. Since I was a little girl, I was obsessed with drawing. The language of images fascinated me, especially the shorthand that allows a line to stand for a gesture, a tree, a force of nature. Somehow these things are not just in the artist’s mind, but are communicated, translated. We all have different emotional landscapes, and what triggers joy for me may trigger something else in you. The more of the intended feeling that’s evoked, the more successful I consider the painting.