Paintings Summer 2008

Most of these paintings were completed in the last 2 weeks. I have been painting every morning before I go to work.

I want to enter one of these (not the portrait though) into an Atlanta Artists Center show at the end of the week.
Let me know which one you would enter.

Cobalt Glasses

2' wide x 3' tall
Oil on canvas
Date: July 22-29, 2008

I wanted to start a painting with this really brilliant cobalt paint I bought from an artist in Boston who was selling away all his art supplies. The first strokes I made were the shapes of cobalt glasses. I made a geometric painting with the blue, red and yellow, on an eisel. Today, I decided to move it to a horizontal surface and experiment with covering it with white and smearing it together a little bit with the pallette knife. I had to make the decision before the paint dried, and I cheated a little bit and added back some of the alizarin crimson and cobalt, because it had dried a little too much. The knife strokes are made rhythmically almost like drumming, and it gives the painting a more scattered and interesting texture. I like the result and will probably try this approach some more.



Geraniums Reflected

2' wide x 3' tall
Oil on canvas
Date: July 28, 2008

Although not much of it shows through, this painting started with some cadmium red light, a sharp reddish orange. The color reminds me a lot of red geraniums. The colbalt I love had to hop into the painting too, and it took over. I have the choice to go into this painting some more, because it's still very wet, but I think I like the water effect and the muted red-orange.







Sam's Kiss

2' wide x 3' tall
Oil on canvas
Dates: February - July 23, 2008


Painted from a photograph of my boys taken when the baby was 6 weeks old, last summer. I still see things I want to fix in it, so maybe it's not done yet. This is the painting I've been trying to do for a while, and the abstracts are the fun stuff. This one's been a lot harder and time-consuming for me, but it's turning out well.
Started with a brush and then switched to pallette knife after the brush wasn't working out. From doing all these abstracts, I've gotten much more used to the way a pallette knife puts down paint and moves it around. I had to move the canvas up to finish the baby, because he was getting out of perspective when I painted him below my shoulders.



Sunlight and Shadows

2' wide x 3' tall
Oil on canvas
Date: July 21, 2008

Painted on a horizontal surface with rhythmic, drumming strokes of the pallette knife. Sometimes, I just have a visceral urge to use certain colors. This time I really wanted to start with that bright yellow. The purple and alizarin crimson are unusual matches for yellow, and I was curious about what kind of interaction they could have together on the canvas. There's a little bit of white on the canvas, too, to keep the darker colors from getting too muddy or black looking.






Begun with Green

3' wide x 4' tall
Oil on canvas
Date: May 2008

Completed in one Saturday while my huband was watching my little boys. I painted the canvas horizontal on a table so I could walk around it. I couldn't decide which way it should face, and it was way too wet for me to be moving it around, for a couple weeks. I signed it after it dried and I had a chance to choose the orientation. This style is similar to some paintings I did about 6 years ago, but the color choice is pretty different, less primary and bright.