did I mention I’m on Twitter?

If you’re a Twitterer, you can follow me here:

http://www.twitter.com/AKuschan

I post some of my art there and I retweet some amazing art too!

a sky inside

The color blue lights up the still life table.  It used to be yellow.  Now it’s blue.  It’s good to change things around.  It feels like new beginnings. It alters the whole mood of the room.

I love being able to move things around, to change all the colors, to seem to invent moods just by shifting some colors around.  I brought the sky inside.

adjacent things

I love the intersections in my studio.  The corner of a still life painting abuts the flower power fabric background of the still life table, and both adjoin the little drawing of a lotus that hangs on the side of the book cabinet just because.

There are all these natural abstractions lying about.  Like the parts of the unfinished paintings that wait in the queue.

the greening of my studio

I’ve assembled some of the landscapes in the studio to see how they look together and to decide what work remains.  As a consequence there’s a definite “greening” to the decor.  It’s still wintry enough outside this mid-February to find the green quite comforting — very comforting indeed.

My winter pond painting has a frame now.  It’s there on the lower right.

picturing the pictures on the wall

I have some pictures available in reproductions at Fine Art America.  And the Fine Art America website has introduced a feature that makes it easier to imagine the image hanging in a room.  With their new feature, you can get a sense of how the image size you’ve chosen might look in an actual room.   All that’s left is to imagine how it will look in your room and in your life.

You can find my stuff here:

https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/aletha-kuschan.html

the flowers are resting

I put flowers into the bouquet last week.  I think it has enough flowers now.  I put flowers into the decoration behind the bouquet too.  I worked some on every inch of the painting making little alterations in this and that.

Now everything is in the painting, but everything still needs tweaking.  This large still life — it measures 48 x 36 inches, is “resting” while the paint dries.  And I’m working on something else in the interim.  Then it will get its tweaking.  And then …

when you need flowers …

When you need flowers, remember that you can find reproductions of my pictures on Fine Art America.  (Got to plug my own site — this is an advertisement!)

I have put many of the flower pictures there, some koi, some landscapes.  And there’ll be more coming.

So if you need something red, please think of me.  And when you need flowers.  And koi.  And so on.   Think of me!

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/bright-carnations-aletha-kuschan.html

dreaming the rooms of a house

Of the pictures I posted of my studio, I find that I love this one the most.  So I come back to it.  While I am reorganizing the house, I sometimes feel overwhelmed.  There’s much work to do — in all the rooms, and I have so many chores indoors and outdoors.  It’s spring.  Plants outdoors are growing like mad. Of course I’d like to be focused exclusively on drawing and painting.

I am often wishing my work were done, but wishing doesn’t walk the dog.  However wishing is not without effect.  I have gone through various phases of wishing, and I have imagined the rooms being completed each a certain way.  The sensation of entering each imagined room has a poignancy that real action lacks.  I walk into dream rooms. The visual thoughts associated with the dream rooms give me ideas for actual things.  But an imaginary completed room takes different forms inside different moments of wishfulness. It’s never just one way.  The actual room will at last have furniture arranged in one pattern and not another.  The dream rooms are more flexible.

I want to see the finished product, but the episodes of imagining the task one way verses another are fairly interesting.  I pause to consider them.

The whole house has become the motif and I arrange it like a still life table.

I change my mind periodically. I am wondering what do I want? And when will it be complete?

The picture above has something in it that I love.  I strive to tease out that something. Just looking at the picture brings a glad feeling I cannot quite describe.  Something about the light, the colors. I see freedom of motion in it.  A room is not just a room, it’s a puzzle.  It’s a message in code.  It’s telling me something about directions I might take.  I’m deciphering it.

Indeed, I may get the project finished faster than I think but decoding and reading the message may take much longer.  Deciphering is a very complex task.

on the easel

I started with the red.  Because — red!  Just putting the paint down straight from the tube, I enjoy seeing it so beautiful, luminous.  This is why I love painting — because color transmits wonder just in itself, even before you do anything.

I’m making a painted version of the pastel still life with flowers, the one with the red cloth.  It’s one of my favorites from among the group of pastel still lifes that I did in the fall.  I’m thinking that I may do painted versions of my three favorites.  Time will tell.  Certainly I had to paint the ruby red one.

art marketing workout

We took a walk, a companion and I, through part of Capitol Hill in Washington on route to one of our favorite eateries because you must eat and you must get exercise.  Spring’s first flowers and lovely city architecture are fine things to behold along the way.  (Ah, there’s the house with the cobalt blue shutters!) And then too it’s beneficial to do a little marketing.

I used today’s journey to leave some of my cards along our path.  Some of the cards are expressly designed to direct people HERE to this blog.  And if you’re finding this post now because you got one of those cards, I welcome you!  I hope that you’ll find ideas and pictures that bring you joy.

It’s really important for artists to share art. I’m marketing beauty.  While I offer my paintings for sale, I’m also marketing beauty itself.  Part of my aim is to persuade whoever will listen that we are surrounded by beauty.  The sky alone has tons of beauty in it.  Don’t even get me started talking about the earth.  Beauty is everywhere.

I am continually searching for beauty in my art — in shapes, lines, textures, colors, and in patterns of darkness and light.  I look for it in ideas, too, but that gets a little tricky.  I don’t know how to define what beauty is.  I do recognize it when I see it.  And I see it often.  And I’m always striving to imitate its appearances in pictures.

So welcome visitor.  Welcome long time reader.  Welcome silent guest. Welcome to whoever you are.