Inspiration all around us

A friend invited me to attend an art show a couple years ago.  These are always fun for me and I always come away with some kind of inspiration or new thought. I see it as a way to jump-start my creative thinking - to view the world through someone else's artistic lens.

So....there I was wandering around the hand made jewelry, oil paintings and furniture designs and I found myself standing in front of several large oil paintings.  I have this 'moth to a flame' attraction to LARGE works of art.  Probably explains why I am a muralist?  The art was of birch trees in a forest glen and it was backlit...meaning; the background was brighter than the foreground.  I love this style of art and Bierstadt (my favorite artist) used this technique a lot...it's always been an attraction to my eye and seriously makes me look deeper into the painting. 

I was also curiously drawn to several large paintings on masonite.  The artist used heavy bodied oil paints and a palette knife to form and carve the pigment in such a way that just a few strokes evoked images of landscape and sunset and it got my mind expanding....what kind of material do I have in my Studio that is similar to heavy bodied oil paint?  What kind of material do I have comfortable knowledge working with that is impregnated with pigment and can be troweled and manipulated like this?

I went back to my Studio and just thought about this for a day or so and even found myself rummaging around through the various cans of old product - searching for something to make this happen....and then it clicked in my head.

I needed to work LARGE for this to work though and I needed the painting surface to be solid - not flexible.  That meant masonite panels.  I live next to a forest preserve and I have always been attracted to images of trees so my subject matter for the art was resolved....I just needed some way to make this come out.

I drilled four large anchor screws into the drywall of my Studio and created a vertical mounting system to hang the masonite panels (4x6'....seemed like a good size to start) for working.  I gathered my materials of color and set them out in terms of color and hue and began...background lighter and foreground darker and I manipulated the heavy bodied stuff...overlaying colors and blending, sometimes creating visually texture solely through juxtaposition.  I had FUN!  The first three panels just flowed from my heart.  The largest one.....birch trees in a forest glen...backlit with soft blues and lavenders as shadow tones on the trees...has become a favorite of mine.  I have high hopes of making it into giclee format and selling smaller prints of it.  I just fell in love with this one painting.  I even sold a smaller one 2x3' of the New Mexico desert.

Oh.....the product I used to make this all happen is Venetian Plaster.  I have gallons and gallons of various colors in my Studio left over from other jobs.  Venetian Plaster originally was made of marble dust, beeswax a binder and pigment and is in a toothpaste kind of consistency.  It proved to be perfect for this experiment and I was able to trowel and play with the color wonderfully.  When it dried...I did a light sanding, waxed and polished the surface and I'm very happy with what developed.  This is an art form I seriously want to explore deeper.  I have several cans of Cera d' Atore wax that has color added to it for further experimenting.

I guess the point of all of this is....art is everywhere and it's really just about having fun with form and color.  Explore the 'what if' in you and just try stuff.  I have so much art in my home laying around that I've run out of wall space.  What a wonderful problem to have.