Paintings Collage October 2013

This is what I've been working on this year. Seeing the pieces finished or nearly completed is a good feeling. Now they will speak to me. Or maybe those are the voices inside my head. Don't know. Don't care.

It has been another fulfilling year. Another one I thought I might not have. Another one to be grateful for. Still painting without a plan and without a concept. I just begin and let the paint tell me where it wants to go. Once it has settled in nicely, I don't move it anymore. 

I'm still working on studies for the nine birds mini canvases and still have some watercolor/gouache and charcoals to do but everything is moving right along.

It takes a year to get this all done but by the end of the year, it feels like I've been some where, done some thing that at least to me, is some how meaningful.
I've been working on the book. It's coming along slowly but this is the last of my art season and soon I'll be focused on writing again. I was hoping this book would be ready by now and I'd be working on designing the cover but looks like things are going to take a bit longer than I thought they would. That's usually the way with most of us I'm guessin.

It snowed today. Just for awhile. But it was the first snow and the dogs and I were out in it.
I've been listening to this CD a lot while working on the paintings and writing this year.  It's so good.

Now

Today I looked through the saved color of a few cans of paint and hoped what I needed to finish the bathroom ceiling was good and it was. I put the first coat on and found 2/3rds of a roller and then found a small roller and the right saw and cut it to size. After it dries I'll give it probably just the one finishing coat and finally be finished with the bathroom ceiling.

Black beans, multicolored peppers and carrots with fresh sage from the garden fill the house. When it is time for lunch, I will enjoy it.

I had checked out a documentary from the library, "David Hockney A Bigger Picture." Maybe I knew about him and it struck me because of this or maybe I never knew of him and thought, ah an artist to interrupt my solitude and inspired me. It was brilliant. I could relate so much with the spirit of the man. I enjoyed watching it and was glad to know him. Now.  

And I wondered what it would be like to have a large space to spread out and work on large canvases and clusters of canvases all at one time and a bucket filled with tubes of oil and brushes waiting to do move the paint along wherever my heart felt it belonged.  And how delightful it would be to have someone who was there to help me.  I'm feeling my age and thinking, I wonder if this time will ever come?  Will my strength hold out?  

I have a great desire to work with paper and pigment and water color and gouache and egg tempera.  And once this session of oils is finished that is what I'm going to do.  I'll use up the last of my colors on whatever canvas I have left and that will be that.  A turning of the page to something lighter.  Not in substance, just in materials.

These are what I've been working on.

These first three are finished.  The first one is Out of the Ashes. 

 

This one is The Root.

Patagonia it the last Life Story painting I'm creating.

This is Two Birds, a work in progress.
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And this is The Tree, also a work in progress.

Still quite a bit of work to do on The Tree and and Two Birds. Then working on several watercolor/gouache and inks.