Into the Blazing Hills

One thing I enjoy about a retrospective show of an artist’s work is to have a sequential progression of his / her development. As an erstwhile “artist” I find myself is bopping around. It is my erratic personality – my magpie personality – drawn to this and that. That is probably why I like Hawaiian print shirts – colorful and rather crazy. When I look at my own paintings over time, color is always the primary theme. Sometimes my color usage is quite bad – nay, awful! – and sometimes very much to my liking.

In this vein, I decided to just paint with the Golden fluid acrylics, spreading around colors and creating shapes. I figured it would make itself known to be whatever it is to be. As someone who likes landscapes, I figured it would become one. My thoughts were, as I progressed, a flower meadow, hills of flowers, trees, and then just putz. Using acrylics means putting paint down in a way which works with their quick drying qualities, but I did use matte medium. A lot of times I just dumped color on the palette paper, mixed, added white, and then mooshed it around on the paper. The matte medium creates a bit of transparency, and it makes a sort of glaze over underlying colors.

Painting was done with wide, flat brushes – 3″ and 1″ flats – later a large round – and my fingers encased in nitrile gloves. It took about 3 days and 6 hours to paint this on 15×20 watercolor paper. Golden Fluid acrylics, matte medium.

Colorism is something that truly appeals to me. Not Fauvism, which I find a bit too loud for my taste, but colors to create an emotion or feeling more than reality, with a bit of a suggestion of reality.