Wink

I am gearing up for summer festivals and my open studio so I'm cranking on lots of work. Frustratingly, I have multiple works of all sizes in various stages of completion (a lot of initiative energy there with much less sustained follow-through). So it's nice to just go in and complete something in one go. I work best when I am "just playing around". This is painted on a piece of cheap canvas covered 12 x 12 board. No pressure filling it. It could end up garbage. From blank white to this took about 3 hours. I really get off on just messing around with a multicolored patina and then letting an image emerge from that with some white paint and a small brush. The strokes came out almost calligraphic- short and succinct. I just let it become how it wants to, an approach that's been exciting since it offers the chance for surprising odd bits to surface (like that eye fish and that splash-like shape around her breast). As I've said before, I am enamored of shapes that "flip", embodying more than one thing at a time so it seems to have something to say. I liked how her tail looks also like a fish, and her scales become moons in phase and those little star darts remind me of the movement of the silver sardines we saw in the ocean on Moorea (Tahiti). All connotations of the ocean, the feminine moon, waves and dissolution. The happenstance wink sort of made me think of the fickle movement of water and the changing tides.

I recently had a realization that I have worked hard these past 7 years expressing some (for me) pretty potent imagery about power, potential, emotion, essential truths... I used do deep intentional imagining and lucid dream capture toward masterminding some of my images. Now I want there to be less head and more hand and feeling movement in my work. I don't need to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, every single time I sit down to paint. I'm more into fooling around with different expressions on one narrative that holds a lot of juice. So, more like this to come.