When I was a teenager, or maybe it was when I had my first crisis of identity, my father shared one of his metaphors for life. “Life is a tight rope,” he said. I think he was trying to make me feel better by telling me about the first time he slipped off. At this time […]
Today’s watercolor experiment began with a swath of opera rose pigment that I painted with a 3″ hake brush. I thought about yesterday’s theme: lungs, air and cancer. The pinkish color opera rose, plus the medical them inspired an idea of somehow representing fluids of the body. I used English yellow and phthalo blue to paint […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I began by wetting the lower right portion of my paper with an arced sweep of a 3″ brush. Next, I used a 1/2″ brush to drag carmine pigment into this pool after a couple of zig-zags on the dry paper. I love the dividing line between wet and dry. I imagined that cadmium yellow […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I did a bit of sketching prior to painting today’s study. I have been obsessed with the passage of time, time lines, the color yellow and shapes lately. My sketch consisted “time’s arrow” between two flat planes. The far plane reflects the yellow time line in a faint purple hue. The blue pane […]
River of Time I heard a very interesting metaphor about how some cultures, probably far eastern, see the passage of time. It goes something like this: A person is sitting on a bridge over a river. The water is flowing away from him. Little paper boats come from under the bridge and float away. Those […]
Today’s experiment: I had a bit of success in blending the 12 yellow pigments from my paint box, I mentioned yesterday. I began by drawing the curve of the metaphoric time line I developed in my Time’s Arrows post. At the narrow end of the curve, I began with lemon yellow (a yellow with a […]
Today’s experiment: I worked with ink today. I am pursuing the same theme I began a few days ago: the portrayal of the past in visual terms. Although relativistic physics tells us that time and space are intimately connected (i.e., spacetime), it is impossible to capture the flow of time on a canvas without the […]
Today’s experiment: Today, my experiment combines my love for fire hydrants (Fire Plugs, Concentration, What Luck! Fun with Pipes) with my recent fascination with graffiti. The fire hydrant itself is a cast iron work of art. Placed in front of a white brick wall in an urban setting this hydrant could have provided an apt foreground for […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Yesterday I put together a picture story of how my photography archiving process photography affected me. That process unleashed mixed feelings in me, feelings of nostalgia for the past and at the same time a rude awakening about what I had actually captured on film. Now and then I encountered a good picture among the chaff. That […]
I decided to take a break from thinking about grief, drawing plants, ferns and fungi. Today’s watercolor experiment: I did not want to think. I wanted to try my new watercolor paper. It is larger (12″x16″) than the paper I am used to (9″x12″). I pre-wet the paper with my 3” brush, which seemed much […]
