ONE WOMAN PAINTS HER LIFE

One way to tell if you’re an artist is to ask yourself this: Do you actually make art or do you just buy art materials and wait until you find your quote painting voice? Do you start paintings and never finishing them? For instance, with six unfinished canvases leaning on each other in the corner, I started a trip-tick and splashed gaudy-colors on each large canvas, having decided that was my new style. Anyway, the instructor had said, Just cover the canvas quick, so you can get over the Blank Canvas Syndrome. After that workshop I added those unfinished paintings to the pile because I had discovered a new style that struck me as quote the one for me. Which required that I buy several palette knives and a trowel, and not those cheap plastic ones, either, because you can’t make good art with inferior materials. That was six years and eight painting styles ago.

To regain some self-respect, I scanned my years of sketches on flickr.com, only to later read a comment that said they were “tighty-assed,” if you can you believe that. So I started painting a giant ghost crab to show them, whoever it was, that I can too paint loose and fresh yet intriguing stuff, and there it sits in the corner -- the only readable thing being the creature’s eyestalks watching my back all the time as I sit at the computer studying the works of other artists and making lists of new materials to add to my collection of oil pastels, soft pastels, guoache, water colors, acrylics and every medium Golden promotes at those demonstrations, as well as glass for making monoprints on rice paper not to mention tools to carve images in linoleum to make one-of-a-kind linocuts in black and white, and new canvases of varying sizes, now that I own a new French easel. Then last fall my artist friend, Lorna Libert, suggested that I might like to paint with oil paints. So I showed up at one of her workshops in Bellingham, Washington, with a bag of oil paints and I’ll be darned if I didn’t complete three small paintings. Just like that. And I haven’t stopped painting since. No more excuses. 

To celebrate turning seventy, in 2015 I vow to paint seventy paintings of places I’ve been and things I’ve done. I will finally use up all those art materials. 

I'll be painting 70 images from the past 70 years (1945 - 2015), but they won't be done in
chronological order. My first posting is from a fave set of hoodoos out on the Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument, east of Escalante, UT, where I live. After loosely sketching the forms,
I used acrylic medium to adhere crumpled tissue to add texture.

The first colors were jarring and one of my artist friends suggested I tone things down a bit,
so I did that and added foreground interest.

The Doll Men, 18" x 24", Acrylic on Canvas

 In this photo of the finished project, the colors appear slightly duller than they actually are. My to-do list includes mastering the art of photographing my paintings.