Miles of Paintings

Ah, the sense of satisfaction of completing another batch of paintings for Art-o-mat! Miles and miles of cheerful little paintings just make me happy, no two ways about it.

For this batch, I did 100 paintings instead of my usual 50, and I tried some new colors.

I’m happy on both counts. Doing 100 paintings was much more manageable than I’d expected. The new colors, especially the purple, look wonderful.

I also found some new origami paper that I just love.

The process of making these blocks is pretty simple: the wooden block arrive bare, so I give them a coat of gesso. They they get a coat of background color on the top and the 4 sides.

Then I splash on the middle colors – first by pouring on puddles of color. When that’s dry, I drop and spray on bits of contrasting colors.

The paper cutouts come next: fish, flowers, birds.

Next, a coat of clear to protect them.

I glue labels on the back, and wrap the whole block in a sheet of clear acetate.

All of that for these tiny paintings! But they’re worth it.

The paintings are a bit of a homage to Henri Matisse. Late in life, he began making collages of shapes cut from colorful paper. I’ve loved them since the moment I first saw them. My little paintings use bright colors and simple shapes cut from paper. The paper I use is printed Japanese origami paper, a nod to influence that Japanese art had on the Impressionists. A quick search will turn up lots of sites, such as this one: http://www.henri-matisse.net/cut_outs.html, that talk about Matisse’s cutouts.

The flower shapes are cut using the same technique you used when you were a kid and cut snowflakes out of paper – fold the paper again and again, cut out little bits, then open and see how it came out.

The fish shapes are derived from a mobile made of little wooden fish that I have hanging in my sunroom.

And, the bird shapes are from a story I wrote a while back called “Forgetting to Call You Back“, for the Sketchbook Project.

Here are some individual examples of the paintings in this batch.