An artist's journal.
Here you'll find my paintings and musings, where the featured subjects could likely cover just about anything.
The last 4+ years I've been caring for my best buddy B during his courageous fight to live through cancer and it's complications. I'm tickled to report, he's getting better and I'm finding small bits of painting time again.

Looking forward to a daily celebration of life's gifts by using the brightest, happiest colors in the box!


Visitors looking for 'B's Journey', click here.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

"You see what you want to see,
and you hear, what you want to hear."~Harry Nilsson

Thursday, July 15, 2010


click image to enlarge

"C/1995 01 (Hale-Bopp)"2005
ACRYLIC ON 24" X 36" X 3/4" GALLERY STRETCHED CANVAS
SOLD
Corbin collection, Medford, Oregon

A whimsical minimalist painting I did in early 2005.
I made the sky huge in comparison to our small comet watchers to try to portray the vastness of our universe.

I have a photo of the Hale-Bopp comet over the Arizona desert when it was most visible one night... and I had always wanted to paint it. I wanted that painting to somehow convey the feeling of wonder I felt and still feel when I look at the stars in our big, beautiful night sky.
Looking through the telescope, I am humbled by how vast our universe is and how small we really are.

The mysterious Hale-Bopp comet won't be back around again for another 2387 years.

For this painting, to simulate glowing stars, I applied tiny chips of a material that duplicates a phenomenon know as diffraction, the same phenomena that makes the 3-D rainbow colors in a hologram. The sky was painted with many layers of transparent colored glazes, each layer getting some chips (stars). The comet is also made from these holographic chips. The result is a shimmering, starry sky with beautiful depth, that changes as the viewer moves around. Photos
can't do this painting justice.


Close up of the comet watchers.

click image to enlarge

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

a new look
My regular visitors to this blog will notice it's new look... for one thing, I've decided to start capitalizing letters again that are supposed to to be, capitalized....I'm not even sure why I stopped capitalizing, I just started doing it one day and the (bad) habit stuck for a few years. I am also using a new blog template. I like the soft green color.

Regular visitors have noticed that I haven't posted anything new since January of this year. ....well, that's about to change too as I'm headed back into the studio after taking a bunch of time off from painting to explore other things that interest me.

Painting is just one part of my life and it had once again taken a back seat while I nurtured those other interests... like my music... my garden.... and my family.

But even when I'm not painting, I'm thinking about painting, inspired by things in my everyday life that I know will make great subjects once I return to the studio... I've been taking photos... jotting down notes... and studying the colors and shapes of this beautiful world. All done knowing that, once I dust off my brushes, I'll have some exciting new ideas to explore.

Two things that have been continually beckoning me to paint them during this hiatus have been The Girl and the guitar... that's all I'll say for now... I'll let the paintings speak for themselves as they are posted.

Oh, and some of the works in progress from previous posts will get revisited, with a few of them hopefully getting finished once the brushes get wet again.

I think it might be interesting (for other *AAADD's like myself) to see the many incarnations some of my paintings go through. I try not to give up on a painting just 'cause it loses my attention.... but I will stop working on that painting until I get a new idea that excites me to continue. I get the best results when I'm enthusiastic about what I'm doing. Consequently, the look some of my painting's start out with, is vastly different from where they end up. This said, I think now would be a good time to add a photo of where the tornado painting is right now. It was the subject of my post in January, and it doesn't look anything like it did then. It's not finished yet, and who knows what the final painting will look like, but I'm telling myself it's not always the destination, but the journey, that counts. So far, Tornado Road has been the one less traveled, but fun, nonetheless. It's certainly turning out to be more colorful than I anticipated.



"Tornado Road"- a work in progress
I've added opaque shades of blues and violets over the warm Indian Yellow/Thio Violet washed under painting. I think greens and yellows will be next but that will depend on which one of my personalities shows up at the easel.


Note- I add labels to these posts, so to follow the progress of a particular work in progress, use the label feature at the bottom of this post, or the links found in the margin on the right.

*AAADD-Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder :O)
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"There are days when I feel I could've painted the Sistine Chapel and, then, there are the days when I'm not sure I could trace a stick figure.... the only difference between these days is my state of mind"~ Jenna Millward Corkill