Tag: abstract

More Rocks – A Rocky Shore

It is always good to break up your routine. I have been sewing a lot over the last few days, and I am now ready for a change. I am also contemplating modifications to what I was making, namely pockets for a kit car. While I contemplate that, other things prevail! Today, I did all those fun things you have to do – specifically, clean house. A friend is coming in from overseas tomorrow, and I have no idea if he will be coming to visit, so I figured I better get it done. Who wants to welcome a guest to a dusty, dirty mess?

But messes are not really interesting to me. Color is.

So, back to the rocks in a quick sketchbook painting. In the US and elsewhere, some lake shores are not covered with soft sand, but are home to boulders and rocks at the edge of a forest. Trees fall and die, water freezes and thaws, snow and ice and heat and sun all wreak havoc as storms of all sorts come and go. I love the wildness of these places and their lack of order and tidiness imposed by civilization.

Today I wanted to express rocks in a more abstract manner – suggesting boulders and rocks. Fallen trees, too, and the edge of the summer as it moves into autumn. I splashed on some light washes in the trees and on the shoreline after doing the sky, and from there worked with negative painting to create the rocks and boulders.

I rather like the rocks, but in general, the painting is nothing much – I just like to paint some sort of picture when I am practicing things.

Lilacs

Negative painting? Check.

Loose style? Check.

Masses of color to create suggestions of shapes? Check.

I am pleased with this painting – there are areas which could be better, but is any painting actually “perfect”? Certainly not in watercolor!

Lilacs are one of my favorite spring flowers. Their fragrance is heavenly and a welcome sight as winter fades away. Sadly, it seems hybridizing them for a coastal SoCal climate is not successful.

I drew the flower masses in pencil, creating general shapes. A few pointy leaf shapes. A glass vase. Dropped petals. From there, the rest happened with lighter washes of color, white areas left behind, and eventual deepening shades of lavender, purple, and pink. Some blue, too. It sort of happened all over rather than section by section.

And then my next painting was a complete disaster!!

The Forest for the Trees

Another adventure in negative painting. As I have mentioned earlier, trees are a very good way to practice negative painting.

Here, I painted around the white trunks, and then more tinted trunks. I couldn’t find myself getting rigidly graphic with this, and just did a splish-splash approach. I also think I did a fairly decent job of moving from a dark, shady forest floor to a more sunlit canopy.

In the end, I used some white gouache, too, and rather like the vibrational energy of it all.