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.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 3:52 pm. It is filed under Blog and tagged with art-o-mat, painting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.