Changing a flat in zero windchill is not fun. I am so thankful to Matt who did most of the hardwork while I watched, lol. Today it is snowing big fluffy snowflakes. I am finally feeling that we’ve had a real winter, well enough of a real winter to actually look forward to spring.
Today I’m sharing a sample of what I’ve been working on for my next artomat series. I knew I wanted to continue contributing to Artomat, It is just such a great organization, but I really struggled with what the theme for my next installment should be. Last series I just painted images that caught my eye for various reasons, but most paintings were of a thing. Meaning: a painting of “a pitcher” or “a garden gnome” etc. It was hard for me to finish that series because I could only paint something that really inspired me and those types of images come around sparingly. Plus there was always the idea that a few of the images that I painted were pictures I found other places. Often I cropped and altered them, but still it felt bad painting someone else’s photo, whether it came from a magazine or some random place on the internet. I’d been finding a few photos here and there and just wishing that I could paint it, but not wanting to paint someone else’s images.
At the same time I had not done any of my mail-art collage pieces and was feeling a little blocked. Afraid to even begin because I thought figured anything I made would never live up to previous pieces that I really loved. Plus it hurt a lot when they would get lost in the mail. I told myself I needed just jump back into it and I thought I could just start making some unimportant collages in my sketchbook to get warmed up.
For a long time I wrestled with the idea of combining the collage and painting onto my miniature canvases. But I was afraid of the collage part separating from the canvas while in the box, and I haven’t done much collage on canvas. I want the final pieces to be good quality not falling apart. My brother made this awesome piece one time where his teacher assigned him to take different magazine images and create a composition with foreground, middle and background and recreate it in oil pastel. So with all these ideas floating in my head, I finally put together such a simple idea, to paint collages that I make in my sketchbook. This way I don’t feel so bad using small parts of images that capture my interest AND I am getting back into collage as well as getting to paint. These paintings are much higher quality, take more time to paint and friends have told me they look photorealistic. I am very proud of this series and could see sticking with this theme through a couple series.
