I never know where the inspiration for my paintings is going to come from. Most of the time it just sort of comes out of me as I paint but sometimes it comes from unexpected places. It could be from a dream I had or a story I read or something I saw outside or a picture a friend took on their phone and sent me. I've been taking pictures of beautiful skies for as long as I've been able to figure out how to work a camera. I've used entire rolls of film taking photos of sunsets and sunrises and only ever painted a few pictures based on them. Lately I've been looking at photos of even mundane things differently and it's not because of the subject matter but because of where the photos came from. I will be visually explaining in new paintings in the very near future ;)
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I still use that wooden case and palette to this day, in fact that palette had almost 20 years of old paint on it until last night when I decided to clean it off. Sometimes completing a painting takes longer than I expect so by the time I'm done some of the paint has dried pretty happily onto the palette. If it's a color I didn't use much of, the glob can be kind of big and lumpy and impossible to wipe off with just warm water. I had grown accustomed to my "messy" palette and even fond of the various colors but it had become just too hard to see what colors I was using anymore. I decided to scrape the old paint off with a razor blade and was rather surprised that it all just started peeling up off the wood once I got under a thick area of it. My oldest daughter enjoyed helping me peel a majority of the rubbery dried acrylic paint off and I thought what was removed almost resembled art. I say almost because it really wasn't and it went into the trash, but not before I took a commemorative photo...
My first set of real acrylic paints came from a fellow coworker at the mall pretzel place I worked at in high school. He was an older gentlemen who used to paint but didn't have the time anymore. He gave me his hinged wooden case complete with a palette and various colors of acrylic paint. I discovered that most of the paint tubes were too dried out to use so my mother took me to an art supply store. I spent most of my paycheck on tubes of colors with cool names like phthalocyanine blue and cadmium yellow and on long handled brushes of all shapes and bristle length. Most importantly I purchased some canvas boards so I had something to paint on. I was now armed with all sorts of artist supplies but I had no idea what exactly I was capable of creating...
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AuthorMy words are like my brush strokes, I'm never quite sure where they'll flow to and when they'll stop. Categories
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May 2013
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