Gouaches

Despite doing pretty good for a while (art-wise), I’m starting to run into a wall of fatigue. I usually work through plenty of fatigue on a regular basis, so I’m not sure why I’m complaining about it now.

I’ve been standing over my drafting table the last few days. I’m not using my stool because 1. I’m working on two pieces at once and B. They’re both a little too large to sit in one place. I have to move around the paper, which is 22 x 30 inches.

I’m doing these pieces to add to a mini-series I started last year. They have nothing to do with my upcoming show. They are abstract gouaches on dark-colored BFK paper—something I got into while working with Niki Ford on a few collaborations. They turned me on to both the paper and the media, and I purchased a huge gouache set. I’ve been having fun with them ever since.

Another reason I’m doing them now is to enter a few of them into a competition. I already have three on this paper, but I’d like to have a couple more so I can choose four “good” ones.

Other than the first one, they are based on garment pattern shapes. The first didn’t turn out as interesting as the next two. I felt better once I started the compositions with a main pattern and branched out from there. It almost became a puzzle I had to solve. My mind felt challenged, anyway. So that’s good, right? Maybe that will keep me from getting dementia.

The deadline for the competition isn’t until June, and I haven’t gotten very far yet. Here are the two I just started, and like the last two, I doing them at the same time. One is landscape format and the other is portrait (horizontal/vertical).

I’ll just have to decide if these are strong enough to enter. If not, I’ll have to think of something else. No one ever knows what the “magic bullet” is for these things. The juror, in this case, is an important art critic. His likes range all over the place. It’s really impossible to guess what he’ll respond to. I’d use my Discarded Snapshots series if it didn’t already win last year. Heh. I got lucky once!

One thought on “Gouaches

  1. Hannah Phillips May 21, 2024 / 2:18 pm

    > I got lucky once!

    Luck had nothing to do with it.

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