My Forest is split into two sections; mixed media collages on paper and mixed media paintings on canvas.
For four months I’ve worked and recorded the day to day growth of this collection. This small slide show gives you a look at how the pieces came together over this time.
As a whole these paintings give both an up close snapshot and an outlying back roads view of my personal landscape.
The Collages
Blue Mountain Offerings
I used mixed media painting and collage techniques to abstract the landscapes from the beautiful Blue Mountains where I live. The warming spring earth is where the ideas for this series of collages came from. Creating an exciting rich color palette of browns, greens, and purples brought cohesion to these paintings. I concentrated on the open views of the rural scenery around me. I found boldness within my quiet moments in nature.
The Canvases
My Forest
Life in my forest this spring influenced my choices for new colors, tools, images, and to trust new ideas.
I wanted to use earth tones with some of my normal colors in a limited palette. I mixed olive and thalo greens, shades of burnt sienna, a challenging combination of warm and cool purples, and ochre. The mixing of these colors made me think of a familiar area waking up. The colors were bright in a dusky enhanced way. Shadowy figures started taking space on their home turf.
The color palette has a strength, but the new art supplies I used added depth. With Oil sticks and water soluble crayons I made loose nonsense marks on my painting surfaces. These quick sketches gave me an energetic place to start; especially with using crayons under a shiny surface layer of spray paint. This sheer overlay gives a peek-a-boo look behind some of the figures and abstracted shapes. The semitransparent texture reveals line work similar, but more developed, to more simple lines I used to paint.
I found a new abstracted symbol shape in this work: brush. A new human character appeared: a stick person. This funny name for the figures on the canvases is from my kids poking at bonfires with long sticks. Abstracting the human and plant forms is about more than painting to document my literal activities or surroundings. The feeling of the characters, marks, and objects makes the story curious and hidden. This series is the result of creating mirages from ordinary situations.
It’s spring, but it’s a darker forest.
