the art year

This week I’ve been busting my butt catching up. I got a little behind over the Holidays, as well as some other things coming up that were completely unexpected. I’m way behind after having one of those, lay on the couch, covered with a blanket, leave me alone I’m checked out, weeks. That was two weeks ago, and I’m still way behind. But I’m doing what I can to catch up. Sometimes the creativity and the motivation aren’t on the same page.

I’ve been working on a “Dramatic Sky” series. I’ve been taking a stormy sky setting that I developed years ago and pushing it further with more light, and more intensity. I’m developing this series to show a transcendence from dark days to happier bright days. I still haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to end the series with the happier paintings. Right now I’m still working out the “Light on the Horizon” type paintings.

The first one in the series is going to be a painting I’m titling, The First Sign of Light, which is a 30 X 40 acrylic painting. It’s as dark as you can get without it being black. I really wanted to create a focus on the light. If you were to see the painting in person you’d see all the layers, various detail, and time that is put into the dark area. I kind of wanted it to look like all of that area is pretty simplistic, but when you get up close and look you can see all the work put into it. I was inspired by a really dark painting I saw at the MET one time. I can’t remember the artist’s name, unfortunately. But it was just a big dark painting, and when you walked up to it you could see it was a landscape with tons of trees, and detail. It’s value variations were so minimal that it just looked blackish from a distance.

I’ve done a few others so far. I’m not sure where they will fit in, and which ones I will officially add to the series yet, but I plan on creating a progression to a very airy light landscape at the end. So stay tuned as I work this series out.

Another series I’m starting is The Forever Growing Heart series. It wasn’t originally going to be a series. It originally was going to be one painting, but I really really liked painting it, and came up with about 10 other ideas with things growing out of hearts. I’ll get more into that series as I go. I wrote about the first one about a week ago on this blog that you can read by CLICKING HERE.

For now, here’s a teaser for the second painting. I’m just getting started on it, as you can see.

And for final news for the week. We had an ermine try to get into the chicken coop. It was not scared of me at all. I actually almost stepped on it when I was getting in the coop to make sure the chickens were okay. I thought he might try to bite my ankles, lol. Here’s a little video of him trying as hard as he can to get in to eat some chicken. No worries though, our coop is rodent proof (we hope).