Speaking Abstractly.....

Genesis

Lately I have been drawn to abstracts, the freedom, the color and the movement of the art is exciting.
When I did the painting above I started with modeling paste as the base for texture &  my limited color palette of blue and brown. As the painting progressed, I got a feel of where it was going.  I kept thinking, " In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"  adding a bit metallic gold to represent the Divine touch or spark of God.  It's a small 6x6.

My husband left a note on the kitchen counter before he left for work saying he really liked this one. Encouraged by that I decided to make  a series like this only in a larger size. Sounds easy right?  well not really.  I made four attempts on 2 canvases during 3 days and was unable to recreate it. It seemed the harder i tried the more awful the results!

So I washed off as much paint as I could with the kitchen sprayer and resigned myself to the fact that i couldn't duplicate it.. at least not for the time being.

I painted glazes over the much abused canvas and came up with this

Taking a break from abstracts  I painted one of my favorite subjects, fiddleheads. But this time instead of the tiny 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches format in water colors, I did it in acrylics on 5x7 aquaboard. I had lots of fun with this one with it's warm & happy  color palette and it took away that sense of failure from the "Genesis" series I had wanted to do.

Celebrating FiddleHeads

Not wanting to give up entirely I yet again took the other abused canvas re-gessoed, added a bit more modeling paste, and began again with a much warmer color palette.... and this is the result

Bursting

Is there a lesson in this for me? I'm not sure but I think it's that I can't paint an abstract when I'm all tense, my better abstracts happen when I'm relaxed and just play with the colors. Perhaps one day I'll be good enough at this to the point that the paint will be subject to me and not vice  versa!