A few words from the artist

 Hello again,

It's a wet and grey day as I write this. One of those days where you feel like nothing and everything is going on. So many things to think about, lots to be done and few resources to manage it.

Is that a bad thing or a good one?  It's hard to tell. I just have to go where the day takes me. Here are a few of the things I've been working on.

All of these are using up the last bits of tube acrylics I had with the help of a bottle of black all purpose paint.

I have no idea how this picture got in here twice or how to remove it any of your suggestions or explanations would be welcome.

Some of them are small canvas panels that I had used for pallets while doing other paintings. Which of course reminds me of an old story that I told you in a previous post so I'll move on.

As you can see. Somewhere along the line fall set in and I was apparently too busy to notice it much. By the time I got around to painting falling leaves. They were all on the ground.

What I was attempting to show here is how well the transplanted strawberries were doing.

As always the marigolds did well and are the best of the color left around the place.

I love this picture up into the trees in my yard.

Somehow I think I should have stayed away form that blue paint. How many of you think I should have stopped earlier on the leaf painting?

The dark side

That last floral was a pretty interesting experience so I decided to take a crack at that sort of thing one more time...with a twist.

I wish I had stopped here. It felt good and I loved it.

The main reason I keep om with these and eventually cover up the best parts is because of the kinds of remarks people make about the state of my mind and my mental health compel me to keep painting until I reach something that people recognize and accept.

I never quite knew what to call the way I paint but I've been watching a lot of art shows and things on you  tube and the paintings that looked a lot like the way I like to paint and have always done naturally is called ABRSTACT EXPRESSIONIST.

 I've got to say "I like the sound of that. After 50 years I finally know who and what I am. The question now becomes with my heath being in the state it is whether or not it's too late to get a fresh start and create all of the new work that I want to do.

 The other question is how in the world did I waste an entire half a century going down the wrong path and caring what people think. 

Here I'm beginning to turn it into a vase of flowers. It's an old trick of mine that sold out my very first art show in high school in just 3 hours at the signal hills art mart back in the early 1970's. 

It got me out of school early and allowed me to buy school clothes as well. I'd been getting by on old dresses from the thrift store and people often made fun of my clothes.

For me art has always been the solution to my problems so I figured it was about time to give it another try.

My old technique (all done at once with pallet knives, my hands and actual silverware as well as sticks, kitchen and regular tools) took more energy and mobility than I have now that I'm confined to a wheelchair so I've had to improvise.

Now I have to do things in many short sessions and find ways to make it work. This negative space technique is something I picked up from a you tube video.

It gives things a whole different feel and I just wasn't happy with the plain background

At this point I started removing the solid background and getting back to some of original colors and feeling like "me" again.

I began to feel better about it but let the black lines fence me in. Because there is still that idea that I have to draw them a picture that they can recognize.

This was the best compromise I could come up with so I'll be eager to find out what everyone's reaction is to it.

This was the last of my tube acrylics so I had a very limited number of colors to work with. So for better or worse. Here it is. Take that world! You know what you can do with it.

I felt that I'd overworked it at this point so that I started by making the outlines thinner by painting them out.

 It began to make it look lighter and brighter.

I was really liking it at this point but didn't quite trust my judgement.

                          I kept on with it.

Expressionist floral evolution

 Today I thought you might like to go along for the ride as I turn the last odds and ends of my heavy duty acrylic paints into a painting of a vase of flowers while practicing a technique of negative space that creates the vase and flowers by painting around those shapes instead of painting the vase and flowers on top of everything else.

 I often have several paintings going at the same time. The one I'm working with here was going to be part of a series called crossroads.

I never quite know when a painting is going to take a sudden left turn.

I'm continuing to develop the flowers and get ready to finish the painting.

Trying another approach. After many different attempts at painting a background that I liked I decided to collage with materials that referred to the painting.

I chose papers  from drawing workbooks and a garden catalog so that i could slip lots of little messages into the painting to help explain it.

The art page were used in the background and the garden catalog was used on the table area.

I was VERY pleased with the results what do you think of it?