Oil Be Seeing You

For the past couple of months I have been working in the 2 dimensional realm. Everything is flat, but sometimes you try and make it seem as though it is not.

It is all about seeing. You can't really touch an oil painting and understand it in the way you can a 3 dimensional object.

These are 3 paintings photographed earlier in their development when I thought they were, or could be done. I looked at them for awhile, and decided they were not. An art school graduate friend made a comment about the painting on the right. She said, "It doesn't look as though you know where you are going with this one," which engendered a total make over.









Here they are as they look now:

I used tiny rectangles, no bigger than 2x3 inches, cut from larger black and white photos as my source. These were torn from a book of photographs of textures, mostly of natural objects i.e. butterfly wings, shells, minerals. I don't even know what the details I chose were originally - I can only guess now. I just chose fragments that were interesting texturally and compositionally. The color is completely my own.

The colors of this painting did not reproduce well. Color is subtle and very important here. To me it is a primordial view of my ancestral northern lands and waters - an ancient memory. I know the original source was not a landscape, but that is what it has become.

This is much altered from the earlier photograph, and is the only one yet with a title, Quarter Mile. It has little resemblance now to the original source.


Two of these three (but I'm not sure which) will be submitted for display this summer at the Creative Collective show at Triumph Brewery here in Princeton. They were made with this show in mind. Now they are drying, then they will be varnished and framed. Meanwhile, the scent of oil paint lingers in the air.













The studio is cleared for proceeding at last with clay work. It seems so long since I have worked in clay, but it is spring, and the time is right. No more ice, no more freezing cold water and finger-numbing clay. I can work comfortably and I hope creatively with this fascinating, challenging three dimensional material again.

A Hellebore in my garden