Thursday, October 30, 2014

AWE IS FINISHED!!!

Awe      Oil on Linen      48 x 30

I made the big leap yesterday and signed Awe. That means it is finished. I seldom work on a signed painting. The horrendous time I had with this painting is well documented on this blog, starting here on July 9, 2012 and continuing through nearly two and a half years of trouble. The tear in the canvas is hardly visible, but I have reduced the final price of the painting from $6000 to $5000 in case someone complains about "damaged goods". It is going to Carrollwood Cultural Center tomorrow morning to be in the National League of American Pen Women show, which I am Curating. That will be my last hurrah as a Curator and I am thankful that part of my life is over and I can focus energy on the next Feeling Series painting which is "Guilt". Now that my house is stripped of most of the work on the walls, going out to various shows around Tampa Bay, I feel kind of weird, both relieved and at the same time unsettled. I never make predictions about my artwork, so I have no idea when Guilt will be started and how it will develop, and it is always sad to remove a all the trappings of Awe from the studio and clean up the mess of photos, paint tubes, and other paraphernalia I have accumulated for this painting. 


Monday, October 27, 2014

Divinum Spiralem









These are Egg Tempera "miniatures". The square ones are 4 x 4 inches and the rectangles are 5 x 3.5 inches. I was inspired to paint shells after writing my article on the Golden Ratio several years ago. Recently I did a more in depth investigation of the Golden Ratio and made a fairly extensive PowerPoint document about it. I collected shells as a young girl on the beaches of Sanibel Island, off the Gulf coast of Florida, back when there were few people and buckets of amazing shells. I have always had a fascination with shells, and occasionally they have appeared in my work, but this is the most ambitious offering of shells taking the better part of two years to complete, working on them part time several times a month in my painting group. I had started out with the idea that these would be submitted to the Florida Miniature Society show but sadly they do not fit in with the 1/6th rule of miniature paintings and I'm not even going to try, even though many have told me that they often bend that rule. I have made them into a group and attached them to a foam board for a show at Carrollwood Cultural Center in November 2014, after which I may break them up and get each of them framed separately. That remains to be seen. You may be curious what the "G and the number" means....G is my nickname and I often use that to sign small works and the number is the year it was completed.