Doubt

Untitled

Ghost Serigraph with

Watercolour, Ink, and Graphite on

Rives BFK

Image 10" x 14"

Framed 20" x 24"

750.00

There are lots of days when I am in the studio riddled with self doubt. Questioning what I am doing. Questioning why I am doing it. Questioning if it matters.

Then a painting sells.

There is a rush. A feeling of yes, someone recognized me. Me. Not my skill, not my ability, not my choice of materials, but me. The me that was and is always there. The me that I had no hand in creating. The me that has connected with something I don't understand. Something that is beyond the word of defining and lies in the field of feeling. Something only the heart glimpses and the artist wants to share.

And someone else felt it too!

Always More

Detail of Work in Progress

"The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing" James Joyce 

Aesthetic arrest.

This is what I am striving toward.

Texture

Leap of Faith

Acrylic, Graphite, and Charcoal 

on Yupo

17.20" x 23"

Sold

I have been working on Yupo for the past few weeks. It has a lovely smooth surface. The graphite and charcoal glide across the surface. It accepts the paint and also resists it. It is a fascinating and seductive material to work on.

Detail of Leap of Faith

Generally I do not incorporate a lot of texture in my work. I prefer implied texture, even when working on canvas. However, I find myself building and manipulating texture on the Yupo, both actual by building layers that have more body and implied by layering paint of different values and transparencies.

Detail of Leap of Faith

I have no idea where this is all leading me to, but I am enjoying the trek.

Mad about Yupo

Comin' In

17.5 x 23

Mixed Media on Yupo

Sold

I LOVE the surface of this paper. Yupo is a synthetic paper made by a company in Virginia. It has soft and velvety texture. It accepts the charcoal and will then release it, leaving only a ghost of the line. A line like the memory of a dream.

I have been using acrylic, and gesso, and charcoal, and water-soluble graphite on it. I have been working with a limited colour palette, and yet I feel there is so much to still explore with in these boundaries. It's intoxicating, I love being a painter.

Light and Dark

Untitled

26" x 20"

Mixed Media on Yupo

Sold

I have been experimenting with Yupo. It is a synthetic paper and responds quite differently than traditional paper. I have been fooling around with it from time to time for that 8 or so years.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that it was time to complete a painting on the Yupo. I used Golden Acrylic along with water soluble graphite, ink, and vine charcoal.
This is the result. A horse in shadow with light illuminating the lower half.

Spring Cleaning!

It took a week, but my studio is clean and reorganized.

I sorted through hundreds of pieces of paper, collage elements, tubes of paint, and old works. Went through boxes, drawers, and containers and grouped all the like items together. Threw out old sketches, half finished work, and old pieces that I was over.

  

Now to return and create.

It's Nothing Personal.

I am fascinated by the arrangements in medicine cabinets and junk drawers.

Leave me alone with your personal correspondence, a diary, journal, or stack of open love letters and I'm not going to read them. I not even tempted. In fact I probably won't even you if ask me to. However, I am going to open your medicine cabinet or pull out your junk drawer.

Oh don't worry. I'm not interested in exactly what you're taking. This isn't about learning anything about you. It's about me, I am interested in the shapes, colors, and composition of things.

Medicine cabinets, in most cases appear to be ordered. Tooth paste and dental floss sharing the same shelf. Bottles of medicine line up, their round and oblong pills inside. A razor lying next to a comb.

And the junk drawer. Heaven! A pair of scissors, one rusty nail, spare change, a piece of red twine curling around a toy giraffe. Wine corks, rubber bands, a shoe horn, measuring tape, a solitary lego, the plastic clip from a bag of bread. The colors and the random way they seem to have been shoved together to spend and undetermined sentence until the are needed.

They tell stories, these places where the things we don't consider until needed reside.

This is why I love creating collages. I like arranging color and shape, bits and pieces taken out of order and assembled into the beginnings of a tale.

Once upon a time there was a sheep who fell in love with a fish.


My collage may be viewed and purchased at my Etsy Shop

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheSuperlativeHorse?ref=hdr_shop_menu