living room

Trace Elements

Flower Wall (Birds and Flowers), acrylic 48 inches square, in a lovely setting

I place my paintings in beautiful settings through the magic of photographic editing, getting them ready for their natural migration into other settings far beyond the studio. Paintings are ideas — they are ideas about how the world looks. And ideas have their own migrations. Like the migrations of birds or butterflies, ideas like to fly. They move when they are ready.

Until that apt moment, it’s fun to imagine the future places where the pictures will live — once they are released into the wild — into the wide world. Their internet travels are just one fluttering of wings.

Perhaps we learned to think of art as inhabiting museums. Museums are wonderful. But most art lives somewhere else. The great art of the past lives on museum walls, but much of the wonderful art of our…

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Monet on my mind

Trace Elements

experimental image for learning complex technique using acrylic

Willie Nelson had Georgia on his mind. Monet has been on mine. The image above is a further development of the image I posted yesterday. I added more color, more lines, all rather capriciously — though with yet a bit of method to my madness. After I had made these additions rather randomly, I began recognizing that some of the effects resemble passages in Monet paintings when their surfaces are seen very close. That realization in turn caused me to think that these lively marks might be the next technique I need to use in order to have my Meadow come alive. (I have a large meadow painting in the works.)

These were good discoveries because, as so often happens, while trying out these new-to-me methods I began wondering if my efforts were too much of just “fiddling around.” I spent a…

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