While Listening to Jazz: My New Series
This is a celebration of the surprising ways inspiration shows up in the life of a painter. One day I was looking through my Instagram account and came across this post by artist Bettina Hachmann. (If you visit, be sure to look at all 3 of the included photos.) It spoke to me immediately, and it was as if a little something clicked in my mind as I looked at the different ways the artist had used a very limited color palette (really just grey and black) and painted such a variety of pieces. I was drawn to the paintings themselves, and also to the ways she'd turned a single aesthetic idea into multiple pieces. I'd been looking at it for no more than 30 seconds when I thought "I could do that!"
Once I had committed myself to the idea of creating a series of my own, inspired by hers, I jumped on it right away. This led me to Jerry's Artarama where I chose the needed canvases that would let me paint on different sizes. I bought an array of canvases all the way from this tiny little 3 x 3" to the largest which is 40 x 20".
Even though I knew I would paint several pieces following the idea, I didn’t worry so much about what I wanted to paint. Inspiration would bring me a subject matter soon enough. Sure enough, when the canvases were in hand, the ideas started to come. I kept thinking of the family farm I grew up on, and how painting landscapes featuring that special place could be a really great subject for such a series. So when I started painting, my thought was I’d paint my daddy’s barn with the fields out in front of it. Starting on the large 40 x 20 I sketched in the barn, but when I started painting it I couldn’t get the shape correct. So I turned it into a house & now I’m happier with it. Sure… the farm was the initial inspiration, but in the end, the color palette I wanted to use led me in a slightly different direction. Although I often paint from photographs, this one came together a little differently. In fact, for the most part they’re all from my imagination.
I paint in oils and the colors you see in these pieces really make the whole series sing. I don't remember sharing my colors in a post before, but it feels fun to include those here! For the sky I selected Phthalo Turquoise with Cerulean Blue and a touch of Cadmium Orange to "grey it up" just a tad. And white. The greens are Ultramarine Blue and Hansa Yellow Medium, along with some Yellow Ocher and once again, white.
Now that I have it all completed I’m ready to choose a date to hang it on my wall at The Marshall Muse Gallery where I am a Passageway Gallery Artist. I think it will be a fun way of presenting my work and will give visitors and art-lovers reasons to pause and see my work in a new light. I don’t know when I’ll hang it, and I don’t know how long I'll keep it up, but I had such fun painting these and I've also gotten positive responses from friends who've seen it so far.
It can be so thrilling to get to do work I already love and follow a process I already find wonderful to be able to do. Painting these pieces magnified my pleasure in my work, because I was so enthusiastic about the experiment of using the same color palette and the same general subject matter on so many different canvases of so many different sizes. Series can be a lot of fun that way.
