Thursday, March 6, 2008

These two little cards were actually done around Valentine's Day. I arranged a one-on-one trade with a wonderful artist in the U.K., Marita Freeman, who had posted a neat painting of her feet in lime green sandals. I wanted to give her two cards to choose from. I kept the one she didn't choose. Can you guess which one she asked for?


She asked for this one, the more colorful of the two. She uses a great deal of color in her work, so I suspected she would choose this one. This image was painted after a photo of some little girl shoes that I saw that I would buy in a heart beat if I had a daughter.

Chunky pages

Hi all. Sorry it's been such a long time since I posted. We're getting the basement finished, so, I've been down there hashing through 8 years of accumulated junk. What a tedious, mind numbing activity going through all that stuff. I'm also working on the illustrations for my children's book. Not telling what that's about, but, I will when and if it gets picked up for publication.

One of my other ventures of late is a swap called "In the Style of Yourself" 4" x 4" chunky book swap. There are 12 participants including myself, which means that I must create 12 pages of whatever I want. The big problem is that I don't consider myself to be one of those people with a distinguishable "style", so my pages are all over the place. I suppose that describes my excitement for the world. Many things catch my eye and draw my attention. Truth is, there will never be enough days in my life to allow me to make art about all the things that interest me. I guess that's good. Here are a few of my pages.

These first two were just fun "color only" studies that I decided to try. I wanted to create whimsical pages without using any black at all. I seem to use black outlines in much of my work, so I thought I would experiment with some color on color this time. I was amazed at how much it impacted the mood of the pages. Additionally, I thought I would experiment with text on the page. Several of the other artists in the swap really like text on their art.

This image was created using a sketch that Colby, my 6 year old noodled out. I just loved the spiral ears and the open happy mouth. It wasn't until after I finished the painting I realized that it's kind of scary. Darn those "Chucky" movies. Maybe this one should have been called "Chucky goes Chunky"? Too predictable?

This painting is simply a gestural study in movement and energy. It reminds me of the sleeping time between dreams when my subconscious mind is forming images and hasn't settled on anything yet.



This one is simply called "Butterfly Nose".


Con and Mary, my brother and sister-in-law have some beautiful Buddhas in their home and when we went to visit over New Years, I couldn't help but draw some images of them. They really are beautiful I thought.