A 12 Piece Painting Exercise

Just beginning the 12 works on paper

Earlier this year, I began playing with 12 small pieces of watercolor paper (8” x 8”). I taped the group to the closet door in the studio and started with ink lines, scribbles, watercolor pencil and a bit of paint. I wrote a word at the top of each of them and added a related quote in pencil.

Last year, I did a series of 12 Meditations and wanted to create something similar this year.

Ready to take them down and work on them one by one.

I continued to work on them as a group, using charcoal and an orange water soluble Woodie. Then it was time to take them off the wall and complete them individually.

Although each piece began with a word and a quote, I had no intention for those words to influence the paintings. My expectation was for the words/quotes to partially or fully disappear under the paint.

The pieces developed individually based on their initial marks and lines. I played with layers of paint and colored pencils, and chose circles and shapes from a growing collection of pre-cut papers.

I’ve completed 9 of the 12 so far, with 3 more to go.

Wholeness - The 3rd one completed

These will each be matted and available for purchase on the website. Contact Me for more information.

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The 12 Painting Meditations

The Explorations Mini Series

“Explorations” mini series, paintings on paper.

I began a new mini series on the first day of April… the “Explorations series.” This group of small paintings was inspired because of spring cleaning. After spending time clearing out my parent’s home, I came back to my house and immediately began to clean out drawers and cabinets.

One cabinet was filled with magazines. I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out a magazine. There must have been somewhere around 70 magazines in that cabinet. Many of them had been cut up and used when my daughter was younger, for collages and creative projects. It was time for that pile to go. They’ve been taking up space for years. But first I wanted to flip through the pages of each magazine… and as I did so, I was inspired to create one more project with them.

“Explorations” series in process.

I began pulling out any page with an image or part of an image that I found interesting. The magazines went into the recycle bin and I ended up with a fairly good sized pile of pages to consider using in some way. Before I knew it, I had glued one or more pieces of an image onto eight 6” x 6” sheets of canvas paper. They were ready to be painted.

The Goal: for the attached magazine image to inspire and challenge me to create something new each day. The “Explorations” give me an opportunity to shake things up, experience a personal art exercise. and see where it might lead.

“Explorations #12” 6” x 6” mixed media on paper.

My original intention was to complete ten of these and then decide if I wanted to continue. But the day I posted the first one, I decided to join the 100 day project on Instagram and made a commitment to create 25 in the series.

Posts for the 100 day project and the “Explorations” can be found and followed on Instagram and on my Facebook artist page.

In the next blog-post, I will share more about the project.