ART PAGE

One of my newest adventures is art.  Back in June, 2010, I took my courage in both  hands and asked someone if they would give me art lessons.  Bonnie Luckie, at the Cottage Gallery in Alexander City, Alabama was brave enough to take on the challenge.  Art is simply wonderful!  When I am working on my projects, everything else fades away.  At that instant, the only thing that matters is giving 100% of my attention to the details of the project at hand.  It also is very therapeutic; not only does it give me a 1 to 2 hour span of time that I simply have no room in my head to spend worrying, it also gives me an outlet to express emotions when I can’t contain them.  I came in one day very angry about something, and I took a break from my current project to paint my anger.  I am not planning on displaying the anger picture, but it did give me a means of expression and made me feel good.  Here are the projects I have completed so far:

I drew this using a picture in a magazine as a model to go by.  Our teacher has permission from this magazine to do so for teaching purposes.

This is a pastel portrait of Tyra I did from a picture that we had taken in Gatlinburg.  I gave it to Mark for his birthday and am very proud of it.  (On May 1, 2011 it won Honorable Mention in the Pastel category of the Alexander City Board of Education Art Show.)

This picture I designed myself; I had a flag to use as a model, and then put in the sky and background greenery out of my own imagination.   I also did almost all of the work by myself outside of class.  It is in pastel, also.   This was a birthday present for Dad.

This picture also was mainly from my own head; I did have a model of a cardinal to work with from a photograph, but the background and placing of the bird are mine.  I gave this picture to Mom for her birthday.

The next project was to do a pastel portrait of Mandy, for Kayla, since I had done one of Tyra for Mark.  She got this as her birthday present.

I then got brave, and decided to try water color.  I painted two water color paintings from photographs from Kayla’s recital last year.  They both are now framed and hanging in my office.  The bottom picture won third place for watercolors at the Alexander City Board of Education Art Show on May 1, 2011!

The next project was a graphite pencil drawing (with a little charcoal and white pastel) of the following photograph that I took of some Lantana last summer.

Using this photograph for the basis of a black and write drawing presented several challenges, and was a good study in how to achieve intensity and contrast between elements in the picture without color.  Because there is no color in the drawing, I had to pay close attention to the different values of the various colors.  Although I had some difficulty with the camera, here are the two best pictures I could take of the drawing (one with lots of light and one without lots of light):

Next is my first acrylic painting, completed on May 19, 2011.

My next foray was into oils.  I tried to take an old black and white photograph of my grandparents and paint it in oil color.

After that, I rotated back to pastels, where I did the following portrait of a sooty tern, an amazing bird that nests in the Dry Tortugas.

I next did a water color of a view from Cades Cove in the Smoky Moutain National Park.

After that, I began the following study in graphite, in preparation for an oil painting I am going to do one day for my mom.  It ended up taking about six months (at two hours a week, plus I took a break once or twice), but here is the following result, which I am very proud of:

Finally, somewhere in the middle of the graphite drawing, I got the chance to paint my first abstract painting, in acrylic.  It is called “Fibonacci Zero:  The Beginning” and is based on a portion of Genesis:  “In the beginning, the Earth was without form, and void, and the Spirit of God moved over the waters.  It is the first painting in what will be a total of six pictures that ultimately I will connect together as a sextet and through which I also will demonstrate at least the first nine numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.  (The Fibonacci sequence runs as follows:  0, 1, 1, 2,3, 5, 8, 13, 21……).  This particular picture needs three photos because it looks different depending on where the light hits.

First view:

Second View:

Final View:

My current project is a painting of dogwood blossoms in oil.  I don’t have any pictures of it yet, since I have just finished blocking in the basic colors.  Once I finish it, though, I’ll be sure and post it here!

Any comments or questions about my Art Page can be sent to workmomad@gmail.com.