When we got home I painted this small picture. In the mornings I cut up fruit for myself and always leave some for Susan, who hates fruit. She feels guilty if she doesn't eat what I fix for her but she often forgets to look for it in the refrigerator (or that's what she claims anyway) when she comes back from her walk or swim. Now I put this picture right on the counter by the front door - no more excuses!

She took the same watercolor class I did. Here are two of the pages from her watercolor journal. She did two leaves on every page and then the flower and then asked Gina for more images to copy and did the bird and some other stuff.  She is very "wiggly" in classes (her word, other people might call it Attention Deficit Disorder) and works fast - she says if she works fast she doesn't have time to wiggle and think about what her work looks like and fuss about it.



The other day I did a long bike ride and put another little Give-Away (a bird) in place.  This is Jennifer's Garden wall in a front yard where I'd previously put a smaller bird down low - both show in the top picture. This week-end I'll check to see if they are still there.

The class was Gina's The Watercolor Artist's Notebook and the first night we just learned about colors and how watercolor paints act, which is usually well-behaved except for when their parents aren't looking.


Gina has a lot of stuff going on and she thinks there are No Excuses for slacking off on your art. Well, maybe she'd allow Happy Hour but she'd probably want you to paint your hangover the next morning.  Her classes are incredibly informative, lots of demos and handouts, and she moves around the room all the time while you are working so she can help if needed.  There's a lot of structure in the class but that meant we accomplished a LOT in just 9 total hours of class.


We all got the same leaf pictures to copy. I thought that would be boring at first but then I became One with My Leaf.  First we just did a careful line drawing, then we starting doing paintings of it, each time getting more and more individualized.



Finally we got to the last exercise, a picture of a big flower.  Well, maybe mine looks like an exploding asteroid but I learned to really like watercolors in this class. 


This is by a fellow classmate, Elaine. She was very talented. She made it look like the flower instead of an asteroid.

We were at The Metropolitan Museum at Thanksgiving. Everytime we go there we spend time wandering around into different areas that we don't plan on. This time it was the Hall of Armor that was a surprise. What the heck were they thinking when they put that doodad on his guy-parts? How in the heck is he going to get on a horse with that? OK, I definitely understand protecting the guy-parts but what the....?

These guys (from Germany, in 1525) look like they could be coming from the future instead of the past. Way cool.


We saw a Balthus exhibit - the guy was a little weird with the girls and cats so I wonder if he got all his fame from his subject matter rather than his painting skills. We also wandered through a textile exhibit where we learned enough history to make our heads explode.

As for my art, here is a rerun of what I was previously starting to paint (very small canvases):



 And here is what I wound up with, all sold at our Student Art sale:

The school semester is almost over and we've had to quit doing "wet" work and the kilns are crowded with last-minute work. Last week I had some birds with some fantastic glazes on them fired. But that day the Kiln Goddess was not smiling at me. Another student's piece blew up in the kiln and that ruined my work. I can't get mad about it because we've all had our problems and it was just my turn to get the hickey.

Susan reminded me that I could use acrylic paints on my bisque fired pieces and they would still be interesting. I fought the idea - they are ceramics and have to be glazed! She ignored me and reminded me we had painted the little ceramic books we made a few years back and they looked great. I fought the idea.

I was testing out color combinations and had a lot of paints on the table. She went into my studio, got a bird, brought him back out, and grabbed my brush and slapped acid yellow paint on him before I could stop her. Damn, why is she always right!?!?


Next time I'll also put gloves on when I paint because she is right when she says the piece has to be worked around in my hand while I add colors to it. Otherwise, it won't look like patina.

The question from Robyn at ArtPropelled was about the little paintings I'm making:  They are small canvases from Michaels, very cheap on sale. The previous ones were about 2x3 inches, the ones above are 4x4, below are 5x7, the last ones are 4x4 but only a half inch thick, not one inch like the ones above.  I like painting around the edges so I'll probably always look for the fatter canvases in the future, regardless of cost.



The middle photo shows how I've used painters' blue tape to mark off the white squares. The ones in the first photo wound up having blue painted on in some areas just because I liked the way the blue of the tape looked. The next step will be to add lots of details -- dots, lines, marks, etc. I'll know when I've added enough when Susan says "You had better quit that now because you are one paint stroke away from Wretched Excess." I should listen to her because I'm in her space but I probably won't.


By the way, if you've never seen ArtPropelled, go there now and prepare to spend a lot of time in awe of the great blog Robyn has created.

The blue tape is painters' tape.


This is just the first phase, I'll get into my painting groove and they'll get more paint applied to them. These guys are real small but I'll soon be moving up to larger sizes.

So said Seth Apter at ArtUnraveled. Seth and I are quite sure we are identical twins, separated at birth. People who know me think they know me and if they know me they know that I'm pretty much a loner. Seth knows how to get into me. He can even make me talk to him. We have similar souls and karma, except that he is a really talented artist and I just pretend. 


 



These are really small pieces, 6x6" and 4x4". And no clay involved!  Go here to see more of the classes Seth offered.  Not only did Seth encourage me to paint with wild colors, he put me on a panel with other real artists. I tried to hold my own by keeping my personal mantra in mind:

I went to ArtUnraveled. I took classes and not a one of them had anything to do with clay. I had a great time. I got out of my comfort zone and did different things. It was comforting to be (sometimes) the only guy in a class. When you are the only guy in the class you seldom lack for positive reinforcement from your classmates.


One of my favorite instructors is Mary Beth Shaw.  I made these two paintings in one of her classes. I'm probably going to do something different with the doodads that stick out - the photo makes them look more dominant than they really are - but they aren't speaking to me anymore. (obviously they spoke to me in class).

Susan also makes art. She relishes the challenge of taking the paints that no one else uses/wants and works with them. When the instructor says "Come up and get some paint I've brought" she just sits back until the feeding frenzy is over. She did this piece in a different class with Mary Beth. It's on plain copier paper but since it's acrylic paint it stiffens the paper.


Susan speaks: If you notice odd happenings on this blog .... There is no reason why Blogger will sometimes delete the Profile photo or refuse to resize images or put random multipe blank lines in the middle of text or just plain misbehave.  Oh yeah, there is a reason: Because they can.

They are small, 5x7" canvas panels.
I like painting. These aren't quite finished yet.

When I was at ArtUnraveled in Phoenix I took a class from Mary Beth Shaw where I learned to use Wood Icing and scratch into it, and using Ampersand Claybord, and all about colors and mixing them. This was in early August. Who would have thought that September would bring fires all around us in Austin?

The class was supposed to be focused on depicting layers, like strata in rocks, but I sort of fell off in a different direction, although I did manage to maintain the 2-panel idea. Mary Beth is totally cool with people who fall off her planned route so I want to take more classes with her in the future.

I've been practicing my color mixing stuff by using her methods of painting your own style of color charts. It's more interesting than I thought it would be.

 I can't seem to get that painting urge out of my system so Susan decided to have me channel it in another direction - on to canvas. Yikes! I've never done that. What the hell do you do with a blank canvas? She found me four very small canvases and told me that it would be very simple. I was to paint four new "faces", just like the ones I've already done in clay.  Stay tuned because it might just happen.

In the meantime, another reject ceramic piece might need painting.