To say the pace is busy is a joke! An understatement and I am not complaining. Lucky me! Every day is fresh start and filled with new ideas & it is a gift.  Education and observations from visitors to the gallery are beyond valuable and lend validation to my art, while sparking new ideas and directions.  No grass growing under these feet!  I have more ideas and directions I wish to go than time allows…but all in good time.

Friends at Brushstrokes Gallery were taking an encaustic workshop and invited me to come along. Wax is an interesting medium.  When studying in Italy….ahem…way back when…I worked a lot in batik. Encaustic is similar in that the main medium is wax, but almost a reversal of process.  I loved the workshop and left with a greater appreciation for encaustic painting, especially a Canadian artist, Tony Scherman, I have admired for a long time.  His works are large format and absolutely incredible!  What patience and talent!  For my own process of loving to layer with glazes, thick paint, thin paint, drips, palette knife scrapes…encaustic was a good exercise, if you wish, in further exploring the energy and interest that transpires with building of color in layers and texture.

I’ve always been drawn to painting interiors. I photograph interiors everywhere I travel, whether it’s an antique store, a friend’s home, or a restaurant. These reference materials allow me to be a designer, of sorts, on the canvas. Our June feature is INTERIORS: The Spirit of an Empty Room.  Italian Salon (24x24”) combines classical elements characteristic of many European spaces with a touch of contemporary.  My thoughts were to paint with loose broad strokes, drips and charcoal drawings as a part of rendering the space so that it had interest and tells the story, but not so literally. The eye can finish much of the details without my needing to fuss over the minutia. One stroke, one line, can express lines of a settee, a chandelier or something as simple as a book.  This approach will be even more fun when painting some of the many open air busy market scenes from photos taken in France, Italy and Finland. Stay tuned!

How many times have we read that all art is abstraction.  True.  Intuition and experimenting with different techniques keeps my creative juices flowing.   Searching for a balance between realism and abstraction and seeing where it takes me.  Sometimes an artistic diversion is a success and other times it is a complete mess!  The important thing is to keep playing with the vast ideas that I have and following my intuition.  One of these ideas has always been collage.  I was in Miami for Art Basel in December and saw some amazing collage works.  I’ve played around with billboard paper for several years and will continue to do so.  There are stacks of it in my basement from a billboard contractor!  Recently in New Orleans, I was drawn to a stack of old New Yorker magazine covers, so bought about 100 of them! Admittedly, ideas are all over the board, but somewhere in the jumble of my creative brain, there will be balance and with trial and error, success and failure, I’ll make sense of it all.  Taking risks with good faith and no expectations other than to enjoy the process, learn from it, keep the good, throw out the bad and keep on going. Gosh knows “boredom” is not in my vocabulary!

If I knew where I had read this quote, I would properly acknowledge the writer, but honestly, I have no clue who/what/where…but will share it anyhow.

IMAGINATION GIVES MAN THE ABILITY TO PROJECT HIMSELF THROUGH TIME AND SPACE AND RISE ABOVE ALL LIMITATIONS.