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I love working abstractly. I hate working abstractly. I have been working in abstraction for almost as long as I’ve been painting at this point. And the process goes something like this:     I’m drawn to something. Some instinct. (Sandra Duran WIlson calls it a First Thought...I love that.) And I follow it. And at some point I find myself lost in a painting. But not the good kind of lost. What started as so incredibly fun has turned into only questions I don’t know how to answer. So I put the painting away. For days. For weeks. For...

One of the things the last two daily painters I talked with on the podcast (episodes coming out later in the spring) made really clear is that daily painting as a concept is limited in its scope.  I don’t mean that pejoratively. I don’t mean it’s less than other work. But it’s part of a practice. It’s not necessarily the whole practice. And that's an important distinction.   My daily work from this week   This was very clear talking with Lisa Daria Kennedy. She does several different types of work and she sets very different parameters for each of...

I paint in acrylic. I grew up with watercolorists and got the first pieces of my art education through editing watercolor videos. I eventually discovered acrylic artists but many of them weren’t talking about art in the way that I had come to expect from watercolorists. There was so little color theory and conversations about shapes and process. It was all fairly beginning level stuff.  But watercolor, while it can teach you about color theory and value and shape, it cannot help at all when it comes to dealing with an opaque medium. And so recently, I've turned to oil...

  While my brain tries to figure out what to do with itself (and me!)... it's aaall the value studies.   I used to hate value studies. Now I find them very very calming. Like little curiosity puzzles. A whole conversation that starts with "What happens if.."    These specific thumbnails helped me realize that I am not confident painting with light colors. I know that feels a bit tangential, but all of my favorite studies have have the lightest lights be the flowers and I could feel myself panicking. So I followed the panic and realized that that's an area...

Even though we're not quite into February, this week marks the beginning of a new set of schedule trials.

2018 is all about systems. Creating systems that reflect my priorities and the varying demands on a day. I want them to push me but be flexible enough to adjust as life adjusts.

January's experiment feels like a success: I figure out my non-art evenings.

"Wait," you say. "This  your ART blog. What does this have to do with art?"

Everything.