Recent Awards

I won 3 awards in recent local art shows so I thought I'd share them on my blog.

 

 

 "Gone Ashore"

 

This was in the Small World category where a painting must be no more than 24 inches square; so they are very small paintings, indeed. This painting was sold.

 

Happy Walk

 

I posted this one earlier on my blog. I'm very pleased with the 3rd place ribbon in the mixed media category. Both paintings were entered at the Pine Island Art Association.

 

 

Ghost Ships

 

I posted this one earlier, too. It won a 2nd place award in a show at Cape Coral Art League last week.

 

I was able to sell four paintings in all at the Pine Island show. It was a very good show for me this year. It was a good show for the Association, too. Many paintings were sold in the 2 day event.

Straight and Narrow

                        

                                                      Straight and Narrow 

                                          Acrylic on paper, 15 X 22

I've been working on several projects at once, this one is the first one that is finished. It is a multi-layered abstract on watercolor paper. I had several objectives when I started this painting. 

1. I wanted it to be a cruciform. 

2. I wanted a color other than blue to be dominant. 

3. I didn't want any recognizable form to show up in the painting, for example a flower, fish or face. 

The hardest part was not using blue, a lot of my paintings lately have been blue dominant and I tried to steer away from even using a  blue . I did sneak some in one of the under layers but reminded myself to get it covered up so it's just barely visible. 

Abstracts are fun but take a lot of thought. I do a lot of painting on and wiping off until I get the look I want. Fortunately, once the acrylic is on the paper you can get fairly rough with it without ruining the paper. Even after drying some rubbing alcohol will take a layer or more of paint off if you want to change something. I usually start with a couple layers of gesso on an old watercolor painting so I have a good base to start on. The Quinacridone gold was next followed by reds and purples. Each layer is stamped, scraped, or textured in some way. A little gold and thick drops of acrylic were my finishing touches.