Pool Envy, a new painting style.

Above is the new painting style I'm trying out. Like Daisuke's Gyro-Ball* or Zoolander's Magnum, I feel like I've been promoting the "I've got a new paint style coming up!" for quite some time and I'm happy to finally be revealing a finished product. What do you think?
The picture doesn't do it too much justice, to be honest. I'm really a fan of this style and those that have seen it in person seem to like it a lot too. Well, everyone but my mom. She doesn't like it much at all. Oh well. You can't please everyone.
I'm tentatively calling the new style "pool envy" because it reflects a few facets of my life. One, I recently had surgery and wasn't supposed to go swimming so as I painted each little blue circle, in my mind I was splashing around in some perfectly situated pool, with tin bucket of girly tropical drinks right next to the stack of plush, soft beach towels. Two, I live in an apartment building that doesn't come complete with a pool. So I suffer from a bit of pool envy, even when I'm given doc's clearance to splish splash to my heart's content. Thankfully casa de mom y dad offers me a lovely place to swim and reconnect with their gaggle of pets (conveniently located just across the Park Cities from my apartment). And three, there's a point in the Texas summer when even the pool water gets too hot to really cool you down. At that point, your mental vision of a refreshing dip in the cool waters is, in reality, a chance to wade around in tepid water. As Dallas has experienced quite a few days in the 100s, I expect that this "pool too hot" syndrome will set in very soon, if it hasn't already. At the very least, I can look at this painting and dream about the refreshment that a chilly dip would bring about. And that's the inspiration behind these pools of blue.

I wanted to include a few pictures of the process by which this piece was created. Above is the picture of the painting with all the blue bubbles filled in but without the shimmering silver background color applied. Obviously, the piece of glass is resting on a work towel, which looks pretty dirty. Hope you can get past that. Below is the original sketch for the painting. I planned to make a few "colonies" of circles and then add in a few "families" in the white space. I really like the shapes that can be created from the little circles, especially the biggest "colony" of circles. I thought that one turned out particularly well.

* I've been kinda aching for a few days to throw in some Red Sox references when I post stuff. I mean, it's a pivotal point in the AL East and then there's all the Manny drama. But alas, I am not writing a baseball blog. But I don't see why I can't occasionally add a Sox reference. Right?

Lion Swirl

I'm a little pretentious in comparing my glass art paintings to those by the, as some critics would argue, father of the 19th century Romanticism movement, Eugene Delacroix. Yet that's just what I'm about to do! As I started to sketch this design and choose the colors I would use to color the glass, I was immediately reminded of the Delacroix painting, Arab Attacked By Lion. I've copied a picture of the work (below this paragraph) for those who don't remember Art History 201: 19th century European Art, though honestly I don't know how you could forget it, the effects of those genius artists still resound throughout modern design and shape much of what we envision when we think of museum art. Anyhow, I never start writing these things with the intention of sounding like a huge art history snob, but I think my affection for the subject can come across as a bit snooty. Sorry folks. I'll give that subject a break, but not before I tell you why I think that my glass painting, which I've named Lion Swirl, recalls the aforementioned Delacroix piece. One of the tenants of Romanticism is the movement captured by the artist. The piece is a shot of action, and a dramatic moment in the action, at that. In its own time, it was revolutionary to convey so much energy, dynamic movement--even the weather in the background calls to mind a turbulent storm at its breaking point. The eye is guided through the painting in a circular motion. One glances from the fierce lion to the Arab with his sword ready to strike and continues back around the canvas in a swirl. And in my painting, the colors and the shapes cause the eye to follow a similar swirl. The red and gold pallet is broken up with a smattering of purple and white dots.
I hope you like it. It's the last of this type of painting that I will be presenting for a while. I've run out of glass!

At the top is a shot of the whole piece. Again, as with all the glass paintings, it's really hard to take a good picture without the flash on the camera messing the whole thing up. One of these days I'll figure out a good way of taking pictures of these paintings. And below, I show you a close up of the picture so that you can see it from a different angle. Perhaps with this picture below you get a better idea of the swirly nature of the lines. I don't really know because, of course, I know what the real thing looks like. And finally, I unveil a silly picture of the painting propped up against a zebra print cloth (that's my shower curtain to be exact!). I just wanted to show how transparent the glass is. Sometimes you see the various backgrounds and start to think that the painting isn't see through, but it is.

Banks of the Guadalupe

So this is my second painted glass work of art (well, that I'm posting on my craft blog). This time the lines, colors, texture reminded me of my childhood summer camp days on the Guadalupe River. Specifically, for those Camp Mystic readers out there, I am reminded of the way the river seemed when you arrived for first period classes, early in the morning, before hours of splashing and kicking had driven all the river muck far from eyesight. This reminds me of the way the river looks first thing in the morning, undisturbed, peaceful, completely natural.

Below you'll see the same work as it is leaned in my new West Elm chair. I purposefully gave you a chance to see how dramatically different the work looks when it has differently colored backgrounds. It's much busier with the brown, but the colors seem to come alive. However, I like it better with the turquoise behind it. For now though I'm leaving the glass alone.

I really welcome any feedback regarding my painted plates of glass.... Let me know what you think!

Turkish Delight 2

Alas, a masterpiece! Enjoy a pair of pictures of my latest work of art, Turkish Delight 2. I'm still waiting on someone (who lives in Nashville, Tennessee and whose name rhymes with Pason Juccio...) to send me pictures of Turkish Delight 1. And now I'm going to wax art history on you, so watch out... This work is an exploration of shape, negative space and the delightful interplay of color. The shapes are inspired by patterns, lines, and figurative shapes that appear frequently in Islamic or Mediterranean art. The bright and fresh blue recalls the sea and the acorn and sunflower yellow-orange colors echo the warmth of the summer sun, the richness of earthy dirt, brick, grains.

Below you can see the piece as it leans on my kitchen counter next to some painted Diet Dr Pepper bottles. It is acrylic on glass. I'm in the process of painting two more slabs of glass. One is a swirly (this one is a spikier one than the next piece will be) blue/green piece that is, at the moment, reminding me of summers spent on the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country. The second picture is a circular work rendered in pink, red and gold. It is distinctively more girly than the first two glass paintings I have worked on.

Jarring Pointillism

I found the perfect place to display my collection of assorted painted glass bottles--atop the glass shelf in my bathroom! To most of my readers, these glass bottles are not a new craft, I've been painting jars like this for years, but I decided I'd write about them anyway, just in case someone out there has never seen them. This is the greatest TV-watching craft I've got. Just rinse a glass jar (or buy one at the dollar store if you see a great shape) and start dabbing dots of paint all over the thing until it's thoroughly covered. The only tip--don't paint yourself into a proverbial corner, always make sure you can set the jar down if you need to. Walking around with a wet-paint-covered jar that you can't set down on any of its sides is truly annoying. As you can see, you can do themetic collections of dots or group dots by color or really play up the paint's textures by putting lots of paint per dot on the jar (as demonstrated by the pickle-jar piece). I love these jars, not only because they are so interesting to look at and are made from completely free materials, but also because they have the most wonderful texture to the touch.

Upon occasion someone will ask me to make them a jar and I'm more than happy so to do. For now, I think my apartment has its maximum saturation of painted jars.