Texture is a Bug – 2.5″ x 3.5″ Mixed Media Painting

“All the arts we practice are apprenticeship.  The big art is our life.
– M.C. Richards



Texture is a Bug – 2.5″ x 3.5″ Mixed Media Painting

This little bug is done on a small ATC sized canvas.  The legs are string, the body is spackle and the wings are spackle and cheesecloth.  All of it is painted with acrylic.  What I ended up with is a painting a little boy might like. 

I am inspired so much by mixed media artists, yet I rarely dig in and play.  This was done quite a while ago and even though it is quite ugly, it makes me want to try it again. 

M.C. Richards
Artist & Philosopher (1916-1999)


Mary Caroline Richards had a richly diverse life, which began in Weiser, Idaho on July 13, 1916.  She was raised in Portland, Oregon and later went to Reed College to earn a degree in literature and languages.  She wrote poetry, and when she became part of the faculty at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, she taught writing and produced plays.  At Black Mountain she also danced, studied pottery, and became increasingly interested in innovative teaching methods.  She helped create a commune in New York in the 1950s, taught and gave pottery workshops in the 1960s, and later worked in Camphill Village in Pennsylvania, an alternative educational community based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner.  In the last decade of her life she began to paint as naturally as if she had been doing so her whole life.  Her art-of-many-genres wove together all her concerns, including community, agriculture, craft itself, and spiritual ideas. Always a poet, she regarded the end of her life – as physically limiting as it was – as another fulfilling adventure, “living toward dying, blooming into invisibility.”
- Margaret Wakeley

Mother and Baby - Mixed Media Painting

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”
– e. e. cummings

 My mother gave me a beautiful framed quote of this.  I have always loved that quote!

 

Mother and Child – 6″ x 8″ Mixed Media Painting

This was inspired by so many things.  First of all, the background paper was from my unused paper stash.  It was prepared by wetting the paper, dropping watercolor onto it and the covering it with crinkled up grocery sacks until it dried.  I did that months ago.



Then I found some transparent wrapping tissue paper with glitter on it, in another stash.  I attached it to the watercolor paper, using Mod Podge, and let it dry overnight.

This part was inspired by what I have seen Leslie White do with masa paper.

The next inspiration came from Elizabeth’s (edtree at WetCanvas) photo of her niece and child.  Elizabeth challenged us to do some negative painting, so that’s what I did.  I paid special attention to the interlocking fingers.



I was sure the mother did that before she fell asleep, to keep her baby safe.

I painted this with watercolor and a little white gouache for highlights on the skin.

I had a great time doing this while listening to some old Big Band music. 




Click on any photo to see it larger.

About e. e. cummings

The writer who became known as e. e. cummings was an experimental poet whose idiosyncratic typography complements the music of his poetry; he published more than 900 poems, two novels, and four plays. He was also an accomplished painter. He was born in Massachusetts in 1894 and entered the ambulance corps in World War I but ended up in a detention camp after expressing his pacifist views. He died in 1962. His most famous poem was “In Just-”.

These Boots are Made for Dancing!

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg."
– C. S. Lewis

 

These Boots are Made for Dancing!

5.5" x 7.5" Watercolor & Acrylic on Yes! Primed Linen

This painting was done from a reference by KreativeK at WetCanvas.  Thanks, Kay, for sharing this great photo.  Yes! is a really fun surface to paint on.  It's smooth and normally accepts watercolor beautifully.  I think this particular pad has been compromised by extreme temperatures in my sign shop, because the watercolor was wanting to bead up.

Here is a photo at 2 hours.  

I imagine I have over 4 hours in it.  First I drew the boots with a watercolor pencil.  I then outlined all of the lines with a Sharpie.  All of the colors, except the black and white, were painted in with watercolor.   The black is Golden Fluid Acrylic and the white is Winsor & Newton Iridescent White acrylic.  

For the background, I smeared some iridescent white on with a pallet knife and my fingers, then mixed some yellow and red watercolor into some of the white acrylic and smeared it on.  When the boots were completed, I filled in the white background with watercolor.  

Are you ready to go dancing?  he he he

About C. S. Lewis

Anglo-Irish author C. S. Lewis, called Jack by his friends, is best known for his children's fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia. He was born in 1898 in Belfast but settled in England after serving in World War I. He belonged to a writing group with J. R. R. Tolkien, whom he credited for his religious awakening. Lewis went on to write many Christian-themed books. His marriage to Joy Gresham, who died of bone cancer, was memorialized in the movie Shadowlands. He died in 1963.

Mushroom Field

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Mushroom Field
9″ x 6″ Mixed Media on Yes!

I painted these little mushrooms on Yes! Primed Cotton.  I remember Yes! being more absorbent, but I have had this pad for quite a while and it was not accepting my watercolor very well.   Since I was unable to get the affect I wanted, I outlined it in Sharpie and then splashed some acrylic on it.  It ended up being fun to do.  This is the first of three paintings I did from this same reference.

Okay, now I want to show you what it looked like on Lake Eufaula, Oklahoma on Saturday evening.  The weather was perfect and I believe we had record crowds for the Memorial Day weekend.  This is just one little part of the lake, but there was a Cross Canadian Ragweed concert about to start at the outdoor amphitheater next to the marina.    These folks saved between $25 and $75 a head.    I took this picture from our boat (as we were heading in to the dock, to put it away and go home).   We just aren’t tough enough to hang with the twenty-something crowd.   

About Friedrich Nietzsche

Controversial German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is best known for his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Born in 1844 near Leipzig, he renounced Prussian citizenship in 1869, remaining stateless the rest of his life. In his work, he argued against the concept of an omnipotent deity, believing in a “will to power,” a drive toward creativity that could explain everything from natural phenomena to human behavior. He suffered from insanity, possibly syphilis-induced, for his last ten years. He died in 1900.

Three Tulips

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”
– Isak Dinesen

 

Three Tulips
4″ x 6″ Mixed Media

When I painted this, I loaded it with lots of color with watercolor!  It was flat and stripedy.  (yes, I said stripedy… he he)  I came back and brushed on bits of white and pale colored acrylic.  I liked it much better.  No more stripedy! 

About Isak Dinesen

Isak Dinesen was the pen name of Karen Blixen, the Danish author famously portrayed by Meryl Streep in the film of her best-selling memoir, Out of Africa. She was born near Copenhagen in 1885. In 1914, she and her new husband moved to Kenya to run a coffee plantation. She stayed on after divorcing her husband ten years later, living an unusually independent life. Her book of stories, Seven Gothic Tales, sold well, but Out of Africa made her a worldwide success. She died in 1962.