A Desert River

I've been thinking a lot about the desert lately...

I liked how this painting came out.
Color, color, color! Acrylics can be good for that.

I finally managed a painting without just black and a monotone... though I think that's an excellent choice for paintings. But all the other colors can be good too.

It's funny how my explanation for any painting goes through stages as I paint it.

Somehow the meanings and storyline reveal themselves bit by bit, until they finally make sense.



Anyhow, I'd been hoping to add in some figurative elements. So I'm lucky this one seemed to work out.

My unweariness of painting trees remains intact. And Waterfalls also are right up there in my iconic lexicon of favored themes.

The monotone piece below is the first step, where I figured out the basic shapes.

The mysterious world of paint

Here we have it... a little weekend getaway to the mysterious world of paint sloshed on canvas. Mostly I have to overcome a certain resistance to beginning... but I guess every artist does. I've been too busy with doing illustration work to really have much left over energy to paint.

What am I trying to paint? Depth... Mystery... Nature. Primeval places that are overlooked by the workaday world.

Why do I paint the same scenes over and over? It's interesting how one painting begets the next. Before long the artist has developed their own lexicon of imagery. I've got lots of things nagging to get painted. All in good time...

Does it matter what an artist paints? Sometimes it doesn't seem to matter at all. Anything is the perfect subject matter, but some are more perfect than others.

Anyhow, now I've started into my new shipment of BIG canvases... so maybe I'll make some headway to wherever it is I'm going... despite my contentious relationship with those new blank canvases.

Just as an addendum... having 'lived' with these paintings for a number of weeks now, I have to say I've grown to like them more and more. That's the final test of any painting I think... how well you can live with it.