A question often asked of me and probably of all artists is: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ Especially over these past few months I have had plenty of time and space to create a piece of artwork per day – many days I produce more depending upon what classes/lessons/free offerings I am pursuing online. My daily art journal usually has a prompt I receive online or think about as I arise in the wee hours of the morning to feed my pesky kitties looking for their ‘first breakfast’ at 3 a.m. I have the pages already prepped with Gesso and sometimes an acrylic color so I can begin straightaway. Here’s an example:
Often I sit in front of an empty, white canvas propped on my small step ladder which has become the perfect easel for me to either stand at or sit in front of. On a small table nearby I have various acrylic paints, swatches of fabric and lace, pieces of paper, ribbons, feathers, magazine pictures, pages ripped from old dictionaries and books and a mason jar filled with brushes. The plain, white canvas is daunting so I start to glue on pieces of paper, music, lace and whatever strikes my fancy in the moment. I add whatever colors appeal to me and things start to take shape. In this particular painting I wasn’t thinking about a person but suddenly I saw her chin and the outline of a nose and realized she was looking up not out at me like my other Goddesses. I kept layering and redoing her facial features until this Goddess of the Waterfall appeared.
This next painting is a perfect example of how an outside influence changes everything I thought I was going to create on the canvas. I started with stencils normally used for quilting and added colors and textures around them. I was listening to Peter, Paul and Mary on my phone and the song The Great Mandala (the Wheel of Life) came on and I said out loud ‘Aha! these are mandalas!’ Peter Yarrow wrote it back in the ’60s in protest of the Vietnam War, but when you listen to the words they ring true in today’s world. So, I offer this artwork as a representation of how the cogs of my ‘wheel’ and spaces in your ‘wheel’ fit together to mesh and turn and move forward as One.
Poetry, Prose, and Painting 