Tag: wisteria

Venetian Red and Wisteria

I have been looking for a lavender watercolor . . . and liked the color of Daniel Smith’s Wisteria.  So I bought it.  Lately, too, I’ve been reading a lot about Venetian Red.  I bought it, too.

Here are some sketches using the new colors.  The Wisteria works out quite nicely – it’s a good lavender overall.

It plays well with blues and other colors – but I’ll need to putz with it a bit more.  So far, so good.

Venetian Red is an interesting color.  It granulates, it ranges in value, and varies, it seems in transparency and opacity.

I threw a lot of colors into the stones and the buildings, all sorts of things.  Another new color to play with.

I spent a week up in Reno and came back with a stomach bug, so another week out of commission.  Not fun at all!  But painting is again on the horizon, and that is definitely good news.

Retrospective Introspection

Admittedly I have been feeling rather sorry for myself.  I get like this when I have no time to sit down and think about life and what I want to do with it.  Thursday I walked into my office at work and was just unable to make choices as to what to pursue next.  Oh, there were a lot of things to be done, but it seemed just so overwhelming and the mere act of choosing what to do was impossible.   The best thing to do in these circumstances – for me, at least – is to sit down with paper and pen and begin to write.  Five pages later, the world was in order once more.

Writing is therapeutic.  It’s like the pensieve of the Harry Potter stories.  I pull out thoughts and ideas and frustrations, and when they are all placed onto paper, there is structure found amidst the chaos.

Painting is much the same process as writing; however, I often feel pulled into different directions.  I never focus on one style.  The consistent factor is my use of water-soluble media and paper, but other than that, I don’t have a particular style.  Consequently, I am not as accomplished as I would like to be in watercolor.  I like many of my ink paintings and the simpler watercolors that are based on sumi-e.  Traditional watercolors are often disastrous failures.  Acrylic paints are not my favorite medium, but there are times when I have used them to create more graphic pictures.

Today, I went through my hard drive to look at some of the paintings I have scanned or photographed over the past year or two, and pulled out some which appealed to me for whatever reason – sort of a retrospective of the work of the last few years.  Here they are, not in any particular order, but just for me and anyone who wants to look at them to see and consider.