Bunny Girl

Bunny Girl   Watercolor   13 x 8

is a keeper.  Painted many years ago, it contains the essence of what I am still striving to achieve today.  It is, to me, a great example of "zen mind, beginner's mind", i.e. having a mind that is open to countless possibilities.  Experience in painting provides an ever expanding repertoire of techniques and ways to achieve works with more impact due to greater familiarity with effective design.  Rules.  Rules.  And more rules.  All of these rules can cause too much L-brain thinking and deliberation...and self-doubt. 

For me, "Bunny Girl" has a lovely effortless quality. 

I yearn to retrieve the child artist within.

At times.

Me, Myself and I

Me, Myself and I   watercolor   15 x 12.5

Every now and again it is, I believe, healthy to look inwards.  I believe that, over the years, I have painted about 5 self-portraits.  There is a bit of discomfort inherent in this undertaking, if one is honest.  Sweetness must be discarded, along with the multitude of masks we wear throughout the goings-on of life.  Am I the person I want and yearn to be?  We have the option to continually strive at our own notion of "goodness" and "correctness".  More than once I have heard feedback on my selfies that I didn't do myself justice...what does that mean?  Too many wrinkles?  Skin that is not smooth enough?

I am reminded of the words of Kirk Mangus who often thought about aesthetic judgment.  He said, "Beauty is a figment of the imagination.  It is also completely controlled by prejudices.".  Soetsu Yanagi, a potter and founder of mingei, the Japanese folk craft movement, expressed similar ideas born from the philosophy of Zen writes:

     A true artist is not one who chooses beauty in order to eliminate ugliness, he is not one who dwells in a world that distinguishes between the beautiful and the ugly, but rather he is one who has entered the realm where strife between the two cannot exist.

That is where I dwell...where I choose to dwell.  For me, beauty lies in the process of the work itself, how we choose to spend our hours, our days.

Haystacks...and furrows

Haystacks   oil on canvas   8 x 24 x .5

Push and pull.   (Thank you Hans Hoffman)  What is there::what is not.  Relationships.

The quest in this work was the relationship between the haystacks themselves...and the furrows...a play between the cool and the warm.

While a completed snow-covered scene can be beautiful, it can tend towards sweetness and become a bit Hallmark-y.  The rural Pennsylvania scenes that feature both dead grasses along with pockets and dustings of snow a la Andrew Wyeth convey great power and mystery to me.  As an Ohioan, I will attest to the fact that most of the winter scenes depict these two polar opposites.  One of my current reads is The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher.  I am currently in my second go-through in order to absorb his thoughts that I have chosen to underline.  He speaks of the poet's mind which is

touched by the attraction of opposites, which lends dynamism to the great archetypes.

This canvas was toned with orange, which became the base for the furrow.  The process continued slowly, as I tippy-toed toward the amount of snow coverage that satisfied my visual.  In the earlier stages, the diagonal furrows were more dominant....which lead them into distraction.  I did not anticipate just how much energy this problem would require.  I am also reminded of a similar horizontal landscape by the late Jack Richard.....it remains in my mind to this day....it was spot on.

Most of the bales we see today are machine-made and coiled.  These stacks are the work of the Amish.