Making meaningful art

Have you ever watched as you back up your IPad photos?  I just saw my life over the last four  years flash before my eyes.  My IPad 2 turns 4 in nine days.  It just won't hold its charge any more.  I see parallels with my own life especially with art production.  I am all intention and I quickly dwindle.

But back to the photos.  There were a lot of photos of my work and vacation pics.   As they flitted onto the computer I understood why there is so much blue in my recent work, and why water and sky have begun to dominate my imagery.  Many of the pics were of a Mediterranean cruise out of Venice and various shots from the south of England = sky and water.

Minack Gardens, Cornwall

View from Doc Martin's House, Port Issac, Cornwall

Grand Canal, Venice 

And of course my summer place is always about the scene in front of me, sky and water.


And from those experiences work springs forth.  Some make it to the Leyton Gallery and others are experiments....

 Above and Below 10 x 12 in. 2012 encaustic and paper on cradled panel

Lost fishing nets floating in the vast ocean under a moonlit sky

Experiment...  Water on sun lit pebbles in a shallow pond, encaustic monotype, later chopped into squares and rearranged into a grid

 Experiment (Gulch Duntara), encaustic, just to the left of my house looking down from the road into the water

On the bay, 2012 encaustic monotype applied to hardboard

This work is a direct response to sitting  in my rocking chair looking out the bay for hours over many days.  An artist friend now has it on his wall.  That makes me very happy.  Of course having his work on my wall makes me even happier.  

So my work is becoming more landscape oriented.  I didn't plan this; it just happened. 

Some artists are  very focused and develop a "look" that is recognizable. They strive to achieve this and many buyers like this predictability.   My work is not like that;  I am an intuitive responder to all that is around me.  One of my friends often points out  (not in a negative way) how different my work looks from year to year, but I admit, it makes me feel like a bit of an artistic fraud at times.

 While these land and sea pieces have a coherency, they are very different from my  Remnant series and my Reading a Garden work. But, when I stand back and consider this I realize that to the untrained eye it might appear that way, but woven into everything I do is my response to the passage of time, and no where is it more obvious than in nature.

How about you?  Is there a tight coherency in your art making or does the work evolve without your planned consent?

In process

I'm still thinking about a new work I began during my encaustic marathon last weekend. I am pleased with many parts of it but it won't declare itself finished. It was begun with great enthusiasm but waned as I proceeded. Sometimes the work that is fully conceived before you begin, peters out as you work. This is such a work.

If you follow my blog you know that I've returned repeatedly to the poppy in many of my explorations. It is loaded with symbolism and beauty. They have long been used as a symbol of sleep and death. The opium extracted from poppies has a sedative effect on the body and their red colour is connected to blood and death. It is difficult to image medicine with codeine or morphine. In many Greco - Roman myths, poppies were a favourite offering to the dead. If you are an explorer of cemeteries you will find poppies adorning tombstones to symbolize eternal sleep.

Ancient Greeks thought that poppies were a sign of fertility. Poppy seeds were thought to bring health and strength so Greek athletes were given mixtures of poppy seeds, honey, and wine.

Poppies.ws describes the use of Godfrey's Cordial during the Industrial Revolution. It was cheaper than food and kept hungry children quiet. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the tincture of opium called laudanum was as casually bought and used as aspirin is today. A large number of poets and writers of this era were opium addicts. It is hard to believe that these concoction were still in use in 1910 and it took food and drug laws to remove this dangerous narcotic from patent medicines.

In more recent times we use the The red Corn Poppy (Papaver rhoeas), a common weed in Europe, to commemorate the war dead.

The poppy in this work is dreamlike and emerges from a pattern of past centuries.

The beginning stage of "Rising"

The design at the bottom is created using a sheer and flocked fabric fused into encaustic and then brushed with more red encaustic to pick up the highs and lows of the material.

After several layers of cadmium red encaustic is added and fused I applied a layer of Egyptian purple...

and then Iridescent gold metallic - all R and F Paints

Then the hard work began as I used a large blade to scrape back all the excess encaustic colours to reveal the highs and lows of the original pattern.

The shadow of the poppy in the upper right is an image transfer of a drawing I created this summer. I'm still trying to integrate the dream like quality of the poppy with the heavy patterning at the bottom. No solutions are occurring yet. I always seem to set up these dichotomies that are difficult to marry.