Month: June 2018

You do get to that point where your only pleasure in life is busting the chops of young people. I was driving tonight down a quiet street near my home, past two lovely, thriving preteen girls–one of them a good 25 percent taller than the other, as can happen at that age. This taller one, slim and blond, had her hoodie sleeve stretched up over her fingers and was firing it like a weapon in various directions and mouthing, “Boom.” Finally she fired one off at me, which seemed like a challenge, so I stopped the car in the middle of the block. She froze, then took off running, although not very far. As she slacked off, I stepped on the gas and, because we were on a hill, my tires squealed. That set both of them giggling and running.

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This rose and last evening’s light:

Here are some recent abstract collages that include references, one way or another to real world things.

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I made this collage on top of an old drawing of glasses that I found in my (voluminous) unfinished pile.  Then I worked in a number of scraps from my (also voluminous) binder of doodles and fragments, This one really puts the “multi” in multimedia, as it includes pen, colored pencil, and watercolor as well as acrylic paint.

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In this next one, I used a painting from 8 or 9 years ago, where I was trying to convey how the shaded parts of magnolia blooms look almost transparent. As my friend Tish said, this work is “more formal” than a lot of pieces, because of the squares (Tish is not a big fan of squares, but on principle she doesn’t say negative things about people’s artwork.)

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I wanted to make a sea monster breaching from what evolved to be a yellow ocean into a pink sky.

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A female figure, undaunted:

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This was supposed to be a rain shower, but it didn’t work that way. Tish helped me figure out that it was a flag.

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Weirdly enough, I got inspired to play with a composition from my optometrist’s Star Trek calendar, where a pilot looks out from a cockpit onto a long line-up of harbored starships.

I spent the morning making prints from little pieces of cabbage core left over from last night’s dinner. I’m going to paint over some of them, but here are a few patterns in black and white.

 

 

I also recently bought some sun paper and have been experimenting with cyanotypes.