Showing posts with label Fractured Glass AND Kaleidoscopes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fractured Glass AND Kaleidoscopes. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Fractured Glass Meets Kaleidoscopes: Day 5

Because the canvas (140# Arches paper, actually) is beginning to look half-finished, I started to count the bubbles, dividing them into three categories: complete, partly-painted, and undone.

No matter how I calculated, counting and re-counting, there are just 9 finished bubbles with all of their painted lines, and I'm nowhere near even half done.

I should have known better.  When I painted "100 Buttons," I began to count and learned that there were far more than 100 buttons, and that the finish line was far, far away.


"100 Buttons" was inspired by a line drawing of a shoe  with covered buttons.

I said "Ah ha! I can do that!" and traced nickels, dimes, quarters, and an assortment of French coins, painted Davy's Gray outlines, and then painted in their solid colors.

These "buttons" were particularly engaging, and most of them have multiple layers of watercolor underneath their painted threads.

Although most of my paintings are part of families (Bright Boxes, Small Friends, Kaleidoscopes, LLLamas, Cats, Rings & Links), 100 Buttons is now and probably forever will be an orphan -- just one in the family.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

When Fractured Glass and Kaleidoscopes Collide

Having acquired a number of new paint colors during the past few weeks, I want to explore them and to see how they work with one another, and with the related colors on my ever-expanding palette.

As you can see, I am not yet finished with Fractured Glass (three paintings unambiguously celebrating random color), nor have I abandoned the nanoscapes' vision of Kaleidoscopes and Molecular Biology. DISCLAIMER: My version of molecular biology is not a reflection of what I may have learned in 9th grade Biology in 1963 at Hyattsville Junior High School in Hyattsville, MD.


Fractured Glass #1 celebrates random color and begins to answer the question "What happens when triangles go wild?" It is 12x16 inches.

For a painter who can't have or make too many colors and who (as she learned from Russ Dittmar) never met a color she didn't want to enhance, Fractured Glass is a platform for fun.



Among the earliest nanoscapes, Molecular Biology 112 shows things heretofore unrevealed by electronic microscopes.  It is 4x6 inches.

In 2007, in the beginning of the nanoscapes' creative process now called Painstaking Enthusiasm, I used cookie cutters to create the circles, drew the patterns, painted them with Sepia (now abandoned for the lighter Davy's Gray), painted in the shapes, and outlined the shapes with a Rapidograph,  a technical pen with a very, very tiny point. Once I was brave and confident enough to use a tiny watercolor brush, I ditched the Rapidograph.

This first and as-yet-unnamed marriage (or collision) of the Fractured Glass and Kaleidoscope Families (12x16 inches) may be an exploration of patterns of surface tension on bubbles of unknown origin.  Or perhaps not.


But each color will be fun to explore.