Bacon, Eggs, Klee, and DaVinci

I love all this comparison to the Biggies and I don't tend to go there like you do. However, I will start with my partner's comparison of your final conception of the strawberry dish to Da Vinci's Vitruvial Man .  No, I didn't see it right away like she did; but as soon as she said it, I saw it, too. That leads me to the question! Are we too close to our own work to 'see' these comparisons unless we are purposely going after that style? I still cannot see the Klee in my paintings I posted a few days ago. How much do we, as viewers, need to have some degree of art history to appreciate works of art for the repeated themes and styles and colors and shapes in our own or others' works?

Then, there are your amazing photos of reflections in the glass in front of Francis Bacon's paintings. They are powerful, especially the one reflecting you in your scooter. What did the study of Bacon do for your thoughts about the images after you got home to really look at them from your camera? Maybe you've already made that clear in your post. It seems you had a wonderful visit to the museum.

I stayed home this weekend working in my studio most all day Saturday and Sunday. I am taking the Whimsical Portrait and Landscape painting course from Ivy Newton and finding it just a little too whimsical and tight. So, I've been deviating from the syllabus.  Because we are using encaustic and I had to get out my stuff for that kind of art work, I got sidetracked last evening by an assignment in the Dean Nimmer abstract painting book I've talked about here. Nimmer defined the difference between shape and form and set up an assignment to create shapes on a 2-dimensional substrate and use it to create a 3-d form. He showed an interesting example and I got a sudden idea about materials I have in a drawer waiting for me to get back to. Here is what I created with paper painted in wax and crayons with shapes painted into them. I turned them into 3-d forms today.

I call the 9 above Its a Wrap because they reminded me of cloth wraps, or blankets, or ceremonial capes. I love the color of the small pieces of paper (these are pretty small, maybe the biggest one is the third one in the top row at about 3 inches. The one in the middle is longer because I tied it to a rusty old nail so you have to count the wax threads that are holding it on.

Below is a set of small cone shapes tied together like a bunch of garlic bulbs. I also love these colors. These are thin wax papers that I heated and colored on with crayons. Held up to the light, the color shows through to the other side, which is the inside of these. I tied a bead inside each one of them with different color wax threads so I could make a long line of them like a garlic braid. 

I don't know what I am doing with these. They were fun to make yesterday and I like looking at them and thinking about how I would 'display' them so you could see all around each form. Shapes painted on papers that are twisted into forms. I did the abstract exercise and I had fun.

Yes, Helga, I wish my images were clearer (I need a tri- or mono-pod to hold my camera still) and probably a bit bigger. I didn't want to get that 3x3 collection too big, though.

Eileen

a slice of bacon

last weekend we did a 'guided philosophical tour' at the Gemeentemuseum, the Hague, looking at some of the paintings from their modern collection while trying to establish why they are called 'modern', what modernity meant then and now, and how the different ways of making art have expanded and changed after that era. (somewhere around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century)
viewed work of my favourite painters, like Cézanne, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Appel and to my great delight we finished with a room full of Bacon's works....!

here i am, in my scooter, reflected in Bacon's 'Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours, after Muybridge'.
Bacon wanted all his paintings to be shown behind glass, which many people (including me) at first find somewhat distracting, but this layered image wouldn't have been possible without the glass.....
found a great documentary about Bacon, where he explains why he needs this glass barrier between his work and the viewer:

"by glass, you cut the paintings away from their surroundings, and by 'glazing' them i feel it gives an added depth and texture to the quality of the type of paint that i use. i couldn't do the particular kind of thing that i'm trying to do, which is to make a chaos in an isolated area, with varnished pictures or other type of paint (....) i don't want the reflections to be there, i feel that they should be 'put up with'.... i feel that, because of the very 'flat' way i paint, the glass helps to unify the picture. i also like the distance between what has been done, and the onlooker, that the glass creates. i like, as it were, the removal of the object as far as possible (.....) in many ways they (the paintings) are more difficult to see, but you can still look into them. it's he distance....that this thing is shut away from the spectator....."

fascinating, eh? in my photograph you can clearly see the depth added by the reflections, they create another layer in which the painting is continued and expanded. i am an extended part of the paralytic child, reflecting its disability and deformity,  the rectangular shape of the white window in the painting continues both in the reflections of Bacon's other work hanging on the back wall, and of the tiled ceiling above. last but not least is Bruce Nauman's Carousel , reflecting the abusive way the world  treats 'deviants' and animals. it is almost as if the paralytic child is crawling on the Carousel's ropes, while an imaginary crowd beyond the frame is watching with a creepy kind of awe and curiosity, waiting for it to fall....

this image is sooc (straight out of camera), just cropped it into a square and did some basic adjustments.
i used another of the shots i took during the tour to create this layered image

it is Bacon's 'Man in Blue I', with reflections of "Diptych; Study from the Human Body"  and a corner of Nauman's Carousel. i added several layers of my 'dark dude', silhouette of a headless manikin reflecting me taking the shot, as a repetition of the figure walking away through the doorway on the left.
think i would like to have these images printed, 'glazed' and hung together as a diptych...... what do you think?

child's play

wow, eileen, this is gorgeous! i love the dress/shirt.... and the colors too! so much movement and joy in this work, i can't stop smiling whenever i look at it.... kept thinking that i have seen a painting, somewhere, that radiates the exact same happy pleasure, so i started searching for it. and then i suddenly remembered an exhibition some years ago, titled: Klee and CoBrA: child's play, and i knew....
so now you are not only channeling Klee but a whole group of famous dutch painters as well.....ha!

another artist that came to mind is Keith Haring (i saw his retrospective at the Whitney in NYC, 1997)

his paintings always make me smile and wat to start moving. 
just like that dress of yours, it needs (and invites) to dance and jump around!

while digging around in my image-archive for photos i took of the Klee & CoBrA exhibition, i found these interesting abstract shots, taken with my old iPhone4 on 15 februari 2012,  the same day i visited the CoBrA Museum

think i might use them as backgrounds for my iPad collages and/or use the colors and lines in my paint work.

tried to find a preferred orientation for your second image, but couldn't.... every time i see the four versions, i prefer another one, lol! and i see so many familiar things in it i cannot even begin to mention them.... i just love it! it is also fascinating because the different orientations lead me into the image in different ways, and i keep discovering new details.

maybe you should make a collage and present it as one work:  four ways to honor Paul Klee..... 

this reminds me of an image i composed after you wondered how i created the green turmoil out of the bottle on the metal pole near the water

there are a lot of apps that you can use to distort your images in all kinds of weird ways, the one i used for the green turmoil is one of my favorites, called Roll World, introduced to me by Tina Rice, whose blog i am a big fan of!

after your question about the turmoil effect i browsed my collection of distortion apps and toyed around with a couple of them, using a shot of a plate of strawberries (freshly plucked from our garden!)

carpe diem

original shot with vividHDR, edited with Snapseed (note that the plate is on top of the newspaper's obituary page...)

three different distortions: 1: PixelWakker  2: Trimaginator  3: Roll World

strawberries served four ways

btw, the strawberries tasted heavenly, very sweet, juicy and aromatic. we have five plants in tubs sometimes pick twice in a day.....

Gift to me - no self-judging today's work!

Good afternoon, Helga.

Today I am giving myself a 'gift' of unstructured time in my studio - most all day - where I promise not to judge what I am making and I make it on anything I want to. This morning I painted in my art journal (a 'safe' place for me to experiment) on top of two facing pages where I'd painted something awful, i.e., dark with India ink and green with watercolor. I decided to take what I've been learning in my play with the Procreate software and cover these paintings with layers and layers of acrylic fluids and paints and using a black grease pencil and scratches to mark the surface where it seemed 'needed' (but I wasn't judging!).  Here are the two pages presented in one version for the first one because it turned into a shirt.

Dressed for Success

The next one is very abstract and doesn't have a correct orientation. It helped that I turned my sketch book around and around (not constantly) as I laid down paint and thin layers of stuff. I decided to show the painting here in all four directions to see what you - and anyone else lurking out there - think about the image. Vote - if you want - for the orientation you like best using the number I inserted below each view. Don't hold back, Helga, because I see something (familiar?) you probably see, too. I'm not saying in which view.

Have a great weekend, Helga, and visitors.   -Eileen

Paints and brushes

ah, yes. I do remember those early posts where you painted boards that provided backgrounds for your eventual digital fantasy island image. I took your idea into the images I've been making in Procreate. I've tried to take your other way of creating art images, moving your photographs into digital paintings. Some, like the swirling green turmoil going round your manikin figures I can not see the original inspirations at all. I wonder how you got to the end result and can only guess that both may represent calm waters and the final image describes the underlying stresses going on for you. I am amazed at how you transformed the hospital cafeteria flower into a lovely painting by abstracting the negative space around the flower. Finding a bright spot in the bleak atmosphere of the hospital? The other one makes me wonder if it reflects how you might feel split across several roles.

Then there is your art journal. Black paper?!?! I haven't tried that and you make it look like the perfect ground for all your bright colors. I like your description of how you approach painting in this journal. While abstract paintings can very much be about releasing the inner stuff, you describe a freedom from all that in just playing around with the colors, markers, and "meaningless" shapes on the page. I like when that happens and I am experiencing some restriction when I layer photo images in my digital paintings that are recognizable objects. I get stuck on what they are...until I completely obliterate their original form.

I like that you took the parking garage floor image and turned into a power background for your self-portrait. Tell me more about that class. What have you learned from it about creating self portraits and about you? Any new and startling insights? I was so glad to see a full-on selfie of you; but, I also like how you placed yourself in a small mirror, behind your camera, in the store photo. You've seen some of my selfie images used in various venues where I also hide behind my camera or a painted mask. I do like those the best...for projecting 'me'. I also like the distorted self portrait paintings I've shown you when we shared our art work via email.

No images to post today. Maybe this weekend. Oh, one more thing. Thanks for the photos of your renovation and studio-in-the-making. Mine is only about 10' by 10' - not all that big. You can see how much I get into that small space. With the right surfaces, wheels on things, and fold-up stuff, you can get a lot out of a small space. It also helps in my studio that we turned a closet into a set of cabinets where I store a lot you can't see in the photos. My other studio didn't have cabinets or storage. The walls are also covered by material that can take constant pinning. The covering is a thick, dense, composite of wood pulp we call Homosote in the US. It emits a terrible off gas smell when the air is humid. We can't get rid of it. But, I like what it gives me for opportunities to hang my work to study and scheme with before finishing it up. By the way, how can you not have an idea about what your space will look like? Didn't you design it before the builders came in? It is your space, right?

Eileen

wow, your creative workspace looks huge compared to my pop-up Ikea cart, lol! 

and it also looks well used and organised 

ok, here is half of mine, i haven't a clue what it is going to look like when it's finished and how much i will be able to cram into it and still be able to actually work, haha!

today they are going to put in a wall and a door, so i will get more of an idea about the amount of space i will actually have to work in. ahhh, anticipation.....

i have already shared some of the stuff i have painted, just reread this post
only, i have not really produced a lot in that area, because basically i am not a painter but a photographer. painting as an art, and is quite new to me.
actually, i just realise i am not a photographer either, i am more a creator of images.
i use photography as a basic medium that helps me capture moments of my (extra) ordinary life, then i create images out of those photographs, using anything and everything i can lay my hands on that will help me express the idea(s) that are racing around in my head and heart.
for me all is allowed in love and art, lol! so whatever i have available to transform those fleeting impressions i captured with my camera into the final image i am 'perceiving' inside, i will use.

just consider these two images i shot last week

(left one taken during my daily morning round with the dogs, right one taken in the hospital restaurant)

they eventually ended up like this

and like this

indeed, until recently i only painted with pixels, using different apps and blending several layers together. then i started painting my own backgrounds and creating my own textures and filters. only recently have i begun to paint and draw just for the fun of it, without any idea or concept in mind. 

this is a lot of fun, having no need or urge to express a vision or feeling, not being lead by an impression or a concept from a photograph but just happily messing around with colors and shapes.

here are some pages from my new 'art journal', created with the stuff i have in my Ikea-atelier

trying out my Posca , Sakura and Liquitex markers and trying out my new water brushes on my neocolor pastels.....

Sharing our spaces in space

I love seeing your art-making space, Helga. A push cart with hundreds of tools, paints, and color markers. Yum! How come I have never seen anything you painted with these things? You paint your pictures in pixels. At least that is what you share here and on Flickr. The cart is a great idea to keep your creative juices flowing during the construction of your art studio.

Here are three views of my art studio, which is located on the second floor of our house and has a door you can see that leads to a small porch, without a railing, looking over our back yard. Someday we'll put a little roof over it so I can expand my space a little in warm weather.

Ok. That didn't work. just fixed it. I will get the hang of this photo upload soon, I hope.
Eileen

Photo of my studio

I drafted a message about this photo of my studio. I just found out why I couldn't get it. So, I will post this now and go back and fix the other draft post.

Eileen

so what have i been up to.....?

well......

i continued with the Be Your Own Beloved self-portraiture class.....

me and my willow, my willow and me

and someone sent me a very interesting piece of parking garage art i couldn't resist.....

i added an aerograph filter, then blended it back into the original photograph

my self-portrait assignment encouraged me to deal with my inner critic, so i blended in some more images......

summoning the demon-slayer

the post about your art-journal reminded me of Keri Smith's 'wreck this box' project, a rather unusual way of journaling, but i got the books out anyway and really got into the art of destruction.... lol!

then, inspired by your color studies i decided to go out and sample some colors myself....

from nature i took some different shades of green.....

in town i found more variety:  vibrant primary colors but also different hues of skin....

then back to nature, for some more subdued transparent browns and blues

ahhh....to be able to reproduce these on a canvas...... just imagine!

as you know we are renovating the house and building a studio for me. as long as the building is going on, i have no creative workspace , so i decided to design a portable pop-up painting-studio

here it is!

now i can push all my art stuff around the room and paint wherever i want!

finally, while at Ikea to buy the trolley, i had lots of fun with that day's self-portraiture assignment: playing with mirrors. 

mirror, mirror, on the wall...

so...now it's your turn again!

Made in USA

This one starts with a photo of a metal plate of some kind that I found during a walk, maybe it was on a sidewalk. I believe I wanted the raised bumps in a grid pattern. I could see it used as a background like this. I also believed, I think, that I might do something with the label 'Made in U.S.A.' I layered over the photo a photo of a small section of a very large painting I made on butcher paper when I took a two-week course 3 or 4 years ago at Penland School in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina, USA. The reddish circle in the original painting surrounds a lovely pale tourqois color eg shape and is surrounded by variations of that blue color. I've wanted to use that small bit of a painting as a model for a huge painting. So, maybe this is one small step towards scaling it up. 

By the way, I used the smudge finger feature in Procreate to soften the edges of harder-lines and I used the airbrush feature to lightly touch areas I wanted to brighten a bit or to tone down an area. I toned down the Made In text using the airbrush and smudge, letting just enough evidence of it show but not shouting out anything. In general, I don't use text in my art work. I haven't liked messaging so overtly like that. 

Three balls

Finally, though this may appear on top of the postings I've added to our blog over the last 15 minutes, this is a section of a painting I made about three years ago. By cutting it from the larger painting, I unintentionally created what appears to be three bodies lined up and rendered from the waist down. I don't even remember the original painting enough to know what the vertical shapes are 'supposed' to be. But, I can't stop making my own interpretation of what they look like now. Use your imagination - or not. Mostly I let my original painting colors and paint application style show in this re-imaging of the original. You can see I found a fun texturing feature that sort of makes the paint looked crackled. I do like this very loose and abstract style of painting and I've got to get back to it in my current work. However, this particular image doesn't have enough contrast and dynamic tension to be a good composition. It might be better as part of a collage.

OK. That's it for what I've done this week with my new art app. Any comments. From anybody. Always welcomed including negative critiques -- as long as they are constructive!

What have you been up to, Helga? Oh, renovating a house, you say? I hope you get time on the construction site with your camera. Lots of good photo ops at a construction site. Have a great weekend.

Manhole cover image

Another layering of photos I've taken while out walking. This is a manhole cover shot in early spring as the snow was melting but watery places were frozen. I like the rust on these covers and I layered it over the first stupid drawing I made in Procreate. You might be able to see the thin lines of a fish standing on its tail next to a 4-legged creature of some made-up origin to its right. Merely lines in the painting. Nothing to make a fuss about or try to interpret.

Flower garden

Just for fun. Very cartoon-like drawing over a B&W painting I made as a border in one of my art journals. Color play.

Collage

Three photos layered in this one image. I painted some shapes in one of the layers that shows as the hazy light circles. The red shapes come from a snow fence photo I took this winter where the dried vegetation was grotesquely woven into the plastic netting. Now we are getting into the look I'm aiming for. However, I have no confidence I could pull this off in a painting. It gave me some ideas, though, about how much an abstract painting can handle in editing and reshaping and re-conceptualizing. I am far braver these days using the procreate app experimenting with color, lines, etc. I need to move that bravery into my studio where I've had it before - even in the recent past - but, for some reason, I've been frozen with 'fear' of making mistakes! Get over it already, I say to myself when I'm painting on a computer screen. Ha!! 

Bird in paradise

I took a photo of this bird in Florida last year. I isolated it to the right side and drew in a setting. Cute. That's all I can say. It's not the style I'm aiming for. Good practice only.

Grunge self portrait

You've seen this painted self-portrait before. I took my photo image of the painting into Procreate and layered it with an encaustic collagraphic print I made last fall. You can detect the impressions made in the print through the collagraphic process. They give this layered collage of photos some depth in odd places. I also used the paint and pen/pencil features of Procreate to re-color the face of this portrait. It gave my some more experience with the app that was useful. I'm getting better using my finger as a pen, pencil, airbrush, paint brush, smudger, and a texture applier. Quite fun. I seemed have been a bit heavy handed with my color choices, though, and this is very dark. I used the Brighten feature and it washed it out more than I liked. So, it is what it is. It's all practice at this point. I won't go back into the original painting to change anything. But, eventually I want to use the app to "try" colors and lines in a no-risk platform to make the actual art in my studio with real paints, paper, and pencils.

Tulip patch

The upload to the app didn't quite work the way you described, Helga. They came into our Blogger as individual draft postings. So, I am publishing them one at a time.

This is a layered image that focuses on a photo I took in Washington DC, USA last month where the sun was so bright and my setting so wrong that it blew out the color of the massive bed of tulips at the hotel where I stayed. I kept the image because I just knew there would be a use for it. Here it is, colored in a bit in the foreground from lower layers and 'air brushed' in specific areas of the image. It is very pastel and 'pretty' - isn't it? Don't worry I have some grungier stuff coming up.

Cat image redux

A fix to the cat image with a little speckled sunlight added. Works better for me.

Not the best attempt ... but it lets you see what I am doing

OK. I got this one up; but, I haven't figured out to get the others even though I put them in some other iCloud in an Art folder that I don't remember creating.

This is my cat le Bouche sitting on our outdoor chair, which is NOT purple. But, I like it in purple. You can see I layered another photo of le Bouche into this app painting. I have another one that I'd wanted to post tonight. I'll just have to keep working at it.

This Procreate app is actually quite fun to work with. I'll be filled with questions - or answers! - by the time we take the September Paint & Pixels class. I have a lot to learn. There is a lot to learn with the app. Right now I am discovering trick accidentally. I don't mind. I'm just playing. I do find that I am inspired to try some of these tricks with real paint, paper, canvas, pencils, etc. But, I am also feeling that I couldn't possibly recreate these images that. I am layering images like I have not been successful doing in painting using transfer techniques.

Hope you have are having a good week. Summer heat arrived today here in Minnesota USA.

Eileen

Stuck

Helga,
I am playing with my new app Procreate and I have something I want to show you but I can't get it from my iPad photo stream to this blog. Do you know how to do that? The only way I can think of is to send it to my email, drop it into my Pictures folder, and upload it to our blog on my big computer instead of this iPad. Yes. I have a cloud. No, procreate doesn't offer me an option to send my image to it. Do you use this app?

Eileen

Creating Abstract Art

Laurie - I mean, Helga (darn you look just like Laurie Anderson in your selfie! I like her, too. Sat in the front row at a small performance in Georgia several years back. Couldn't get enough of her talent!)

Thanks for showing us the inspiration for your selfie and I just love what you did with the photo of the inspiration. I like YOURS better. What fun.

Thanks, too, for telling me (off blog) about the September workshop where we - you and I and others if they want to sign up - will use Procreate software on iPads to use photos to create something we can then paint in whatever medium we want and vice versa. I am quite excited to get some lessons since I just bought that program a few days ago. Paint & Pixels

Today I was inspired to start a color study art journal that I would have created had I been selected to receive a fellowship with a 1-week retreat at a art resort in Minnesota. So, I was a little disappointed that I didn't get selected; but, they sent me a really nice letter that didn't sound like one they sent to everyone who was not selected. Anyway, I said in my application that I wanted to study the colors of June in Minnesota during my week long retreat. There is nothings stopping me, I figured today, from doing that here in the city. So, I grabbed the book I purchased for the retreat. It is a 9" x 6" Crescent with non-bleeding paper. Crescent sketchbook  Here is how I set it up for this purpose:

Lettering is not my area of expertise. I just felt a need to give the journal a bit of a narrative introduction. Below is the first double-page study of a cluster of seeds from a tree. I pulled it from a tree 2 years ago because I loved the purple red color and wonderful tan gradient in the seeds. I made a color study of all the colors in the cluster then used them to make shapes in different colors (right side page). After that, I used the colors in an abstract painting (left side) where I tried to express my feelings about the colors more than the seed cluster. I worked with the book turned on its side rather than vertical the way it is open in the photo below.

I have a wonderful Japanese paintbrush with squirrel hair. So I took up some paint and rolled it on the paper in a horizontal line rather than a regular brush stroke.

Gotta go. Meeting friends for dinner.

-Eileen

you will not believe this..... (or maybe you're the only one that will)

eileen,

thanks for your words, glad i could shake you out of something, though i didn't deliberately set out to do that when i wrote my post :-)
this conversation is so inspiring, i think it is laying bare all kinds of new veins of inspiration and creativity. i feel like there are fragile tendrils reaching across the ocean, connecting and infusing you and your art and your creative process with mine and vice versa....

today i sat in a hospital waiting room and let my eyes wander up one of its high walls, and.......

ha! remember the red mouth/boat/fish in your abstract painting? i almost fell out of my chair...!
the mouth kept beckoning me to get closer, so after my visit to the surgeon i took the elevator up in order to get better acquainted with this dramatic portrait.

interesting to see how this was done. a photograph, printed on a panel, then covered with some light gesso or other medium, white texture applied with stencil on the left, structure added with a palette knife on the right, and the mouth painted over and accentuated with iridescent red hues.....
it immediately gave me some new ideas about what to do with a couple of my images i that i have recently had printed on canvas, i was really disappointed about how bland and fake they feel and have hidden them somewhere in the back of a closet lol! can't wait to get my hands on them now, but will have to, because my new studio will not be ready until august.

as soon as i got home i transferred the shots to my ipad. as you know i am taking Vivienne McMaster's self portraiture class, Be Your Own Beloved and today she encouraged us to have fun and be playful with our self portraits. so i went and did just that.....

you probably won't believe it, but this is me...... i blended in a portrait taken 3 years ago, chosen from a series taken early in the morning when i had just woken up.  my hair was weirdly spiky and i looked incredibly puffy and sleepy. i remember browsing the whole lot and thinking: okay, so this is what i really look like....mwah...well.....
and just look at me now...! i feel like i've turned into my all time favourite artist and singer Laurie Anderson..... (and lo! more synchronicity, only yesterday i posted a link to a live performance of her 'expert' song in my flick'r group....)

so i definitely had great fun today. hope you did too!

btw i have added a new page/tab to our blog for us to share links to anything and everything that inspires or enchants us

Helga, (sorry about auto mis-spelling)

Hellas, I am humbled by the depths you go to gather feedback about my artwork. Your adjustments to my work, especially the 'background', and the feedback you got from your friends about the before, after, and my 'solution' were powerful. I had to digest what you were saying for a few days, not because I was offended; more that what you said and how you said it made so much sense. I could SEE your points about each painting. Digesting the feedback drove me to thinking about what I wanted to do about it after I first entertained that I should quit painting, which was a brief and ridiculous reaction. I paged through Pinterest to Pin artwork I like and think about why I found each piece appealing. I watched how-to videos to see what I was doing wrong. But I kept coming back to your post where you wrote that one of your friends said that, to work abstractly, I should keep visual references to recognizable things to a minimum.

I went to my home library in my studio and picked up a book I've had for awhile but hadn't got past the first exercise in painting abstractly. Dean Nimmer is the author. The first exercise is to make eleven dots on a blank sheet of paper and connect them in anyway you want. I tried that yesterday morning before work. I came home from work and tried it again and again and again using a wide variety of marking tools in B&W and in color. As Nimmer coached me on the page, I did find it freeing. It was freeing in the same way it is when I deposit leftover paint on a page in my art journal, without thinking about a subject. Like the yellow and deep dark blue green abstract painting I post and you reposted that had similarities to one of your works of art. It is there in me. I just have to trust it.

Nimmer quotes Kandinsky in his book "Creating abstract art: Ideas and inspiration for passionate art making" who said after seeing one of his paintings turned on its side and attempting to recreate the abstraction in a new painting and 'failing', "I knew then precisely that objects were harming my painting." Nimmer writes that Kandinsky stood up (figuratively I'm guessing) and, instead of facing outward from himself, turned and looked into himself." That struck a cord and I knew I was not approaching my most recent paintings with passion and from within myself.

So, Helga, thanks for shaking me out of ... What? Dullness? Whatever. I feel awake now.

Eileen
P.S. I really like your photo collage with the black bag slung around the light cloth. It is so intimate with the manikin looking out from behind the vail of thin fabric. Thank you for making the comparison to my strong colored abstract painting.

stop the buff! i love all three of your paintings, you should not call them backgrounds! they are what they are, in themselves. 

for you the cat is already in the painting. it is your cat! as is the woman. if you want to reveal them to your audience, do it subtly, painting in just a few hints.

i immediately tried to put this to the test by blending only the red mouth of your woman into the abstract original. 

then i asked two of my friends to look at the image and tell me what they thought it represents.

the first one, an art therapist, said it made her think of Monet's waterlilies, and the red 'mouth' made her think of a boat....!  she told me that people generally need more cues if you want them to actually see something specific; for a face you would need to add some idea of a nose and two eyes, that always does the trick.

the second friend, a physiotherapist with no specific interest in or knowledge about art, also thought of water, a lake and some wild flowers, with a red fish swimming around....

so fascinating...! you will have to consider how much freedom you want to give your viewers to create their own stories. 

both of my friends found the 'translations' in the cat and the woman a lot less interesting and appealing than the abstracts. 

your new aqua-magenta painting is awesome, and needs nothing more. i have taken some time to consider the blue rectangle on the left, and i understand why you would want to change that, but i wouldn't tone it down. i like how it reflects the other 'windmill'-like shape in the middle and how the gradient kind of grounds it in the horizontal line you created. i think the main problem is that it feels a bit unbalanced because the shape is so big, it pulls the image (and your eye) to the left. 

i copied the image to my ipad and tried out different crops to correct this. here's my best proposal:

if you put a rule-of-thirds grid over the image, you can see that now the black figure is exactly on the right vertical line, reaching up to the top horizontal line, and the bottom of the blue rectangle is now smaller than that of the 'windmill' in the middle. i als like that the black figure seems to rise up from below the canvas, suggesting a world outside of the frame.

i love the upward curve of the different sized circles, from the bottom left towards the top right but not yet there, also leading my eye upwards and suggesting 'life'  beyond the top edge of the canvas.

about 'patterns' see in your work: the image above immediately reminded me of another one you posted a couple of days ago and you didn't (yet?) follow up on

see the connection? i love those dark vertical shapes! and love the color-palette as well, gorgeous!

this one in turn reminded me of one of my own images

apron strings