I feel very RED today

Actually it's pretty gray today and very rainy, but Autumn finally bit me on the muse while I was wandering around Dick Blicks and I found these cute little art panels on sale. After kicking through the leaves to get there and seeing humongous piles of leaves on the streets waiting for the leaf eaters to feed, the colors just overwhelmed me completely. I ran home and primed these babies with the last scrapings of my precious Santa Fe jar of gold gesso...sigh.....better to use than let it dry up, I say.

Then I pulled my old faithful palette of Quin crimson, titanium buff and a bit of paynes gray and off we went......and I was not really happy. You can't see it in the photos because the red really overran everything else, but I added some wonderful Manganese blue to those Autumn colors and WOWIE, did they ever POP. I love it.

Now with this leaf portrait, I did a little algebraic thinking in that I created a wonderful background in all those rich Autumn colors, then painted the leaf negatively with white. I added the veining details last. It was fun thinking backwards. Painting like that is such a lovely distraction from the rest of the world. It's like curing hiccups. If you do strange distracting things that are not hiccups, the hiccups disappear. well, maybe your issues don't disappear if you spend a few hours painting things backwards, but they do sort of slip back into a more accommodating perspective..one that may be a bit easier to live with. Silly little things begin to look more like silly little things and larger things begin to look more surmountable. There are times, when I listen to Beloveds describing the trials and tribulations of their lives, which are very real and very challenging, when I want to just hand them a paintbrush and some paper and leave them to paint for awhile, then come back with a hot cup of tea and some really good pink cookies with cream cheese frosting. What misery could stand up to that form of therapy?

There is that story about the tree that bends in the wind and does not break, because it flexes. The winds just blow through it, around it, but it never gets knocked over. We all get the wind knocked out of us from time to time, but if we remember how to flex and that flexing can be as simple as focusing on something outside ourselves..like some Autumn leaves and trees and some paint and how that all goes together to become something way bigger than just a hour of painting.

I seem to be working in triptychs recently. I like working over a few small pieces and making them fit together, but still be independent like little families of art.

I am also taking an online class with the fabulously inspiring Misty Mawn and painting madly every night. There is a point for every artist where you must find your art family and be inspired and fed by that family. Misty has managed to create that kind of an online ambiance through the website dedicated to the class plus a facebook page and a flickr site. I am amazed that I can be exchanging information and inspiration with a friend in Dubai, along with artists in Australia, North Carolina and just about every other area of the Blessed United States of America. It is magical. I thought blogging was a kind of mystical cyberspace community, but this is another step beyond that. What fascinating times we live in.