Saturday, January 25, 2014

2014 Series



2014 Series: 
Allowing, Cleaning and Weaving
Painting, Repainting and Children's work …. 

Each winter I start a new series of paintings. I find it helpful to give myself an assignment as a way to get work done amidst a very busy life. Previous series have been 36 Views of Mt. Tamalpais, 36 Birds in 36 Days, and 18 Landscapes, 18 Portraits and 18 Objects in 18 Weeks (see below). Posting the work online keeps me honest.

Welcome to the new year and a new series! In mulling over what the work was going to be, I was feeling the weight of old work that didn't succeed slowly stacking up in my studio. Every old painting that did not show or get thrown away holds back a small piece of my creative self and in the past it has been liberating to repaint an uncomfortable image and turn it into something that works. Some of my favorite paintings have come out of reworked images. 

However I don't want to just repaint, I also want to create new work, and it feels like time to allow myself to paint each week without the constraints of a single subject. 

While cataloging my student's work early this year, I realized how much we have done together over the years. A friend suggested I post my student's work with my own to see connections woven between the two.  

For this series each week I will be working on three projects: 
    • allowing myself to paint one work of whatever strikes my fancy, 
    • cleaning house by repainting one painting that feels unfinished, 
    • posting a student's work from my vast archives, curious to see connections between their work and my own and also perhaps to give inspiration to other teachers, since I have been inspired and learned so much from others myself.





You'll notice I work with many images of tea pots..... 
one of my excuses to collect them, such a beautiful form.

This assignment on board was partially inspired by Bryan Nash Gill's amazing 

 I played around with his printing techniques one summer with the kids but we never came close to his brilliant images. We settled for painting the wood grain on plywood before painting still lives of teapots. The image at the top is mine, a sample painting in tempera, 
the image on the bottom is a student's.

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