scoring a humongous bargoon on canvases

My 61^st acrylic is another in my projected No Idea series.

( the 'story' behind it )

My 59^th acrylic is another in my projected No Idea series.

( the story behind it )

I am calling this my eleventh gouache painting, even though technically that isn't correct: this was done on a 4-by-6 canvas board and all my other gouaches were on paper, and the paint calls itself acrylic paint rather than gouache. Bear with me while I explain:






This was my first time trying Deco Earth brand “reclaimed acrylic” paint — claims to be more opaque and more matte finish than regular acrylic. The opaque is maybe a bit true, but the matte finish is way true. It's a lot like working with acrylic gouache IMHO — hence my labelling it such. Handles nice and I look forward to working with it again. (Even though the range of pigments available to work with leaves a little to be desired, I think.) 

My 52^nd and 53^rd acrylics are, as you can see, both pups. One is a gift, one is for putting up at the cafe and [hopefully] selling. I've already realized that my animal paintings are the closest I get to “crowd-pleasers”. So, when it comes time to make a gift, that's what I fall back on. But I've also already begun to wonder how much these paintings actually qualify as fine art. Like, do they say anything? Do they express anything about me? Maybe they're just an expression of “my love of animals”, and maybe that's enough, I dunno....

On the other hand, I can think of an artist I see on Instagram who only ever paints horses, and she quite cheerfully admits that's all she ever has any intention of painting, because that's what she loves most. And I've never questioned her legitimacy as An Artist®, so why do I need to question my own?

On the third hand, lately I've gotten more of an urge to spend at least some of my easel time working on less accessible pieces — I can feel things in me wanting to get out. I've already resigned myself to those new pieces not being understood or enjoyed, but I still feel like they'll be worth trying anyway.

My 48^th acrylic painting is supposed to be a corgi. This one was also a gift, so once again I found myself fussing with it a bit more than the loose, expressionist-slash-fauvist look I hope to cultivate someday. And again, I find myself doing a lot of drybrush work when painting an animal, even though I can't remember drybrush ever being discussed as a typical acrylic technique. For me, it just feels like the right thing to do here.

My 47^th acrylic is [clearly] an abstract — black border added digitally to brighten the look of the warm colours on-screen. This piece feels like an important lesson/step forward for me... in that I can be reasonably sure that no one else will like it [so far, no one has], but I am confident in it anyway. I had a clear idea what I wanted to do, and I can see that I did it. So for the first time with an abstract, I feel like I don't need external validation to make it feel worth doing. P.S.: photos really don't do justice to these colours, but I have to make do.

My 46^th acrylic is a cat. [Like the chihuahua earlier, it was done from a photo in an old calendar.] I don't love this one but I'm done with it — not my best, not my worst. I feel like any further fussing with it will just make it tighter, and I also feel like tighter wouldn't necessarily make this one better. The looseness of suggesting the floral print on the duvet was my fave part to do, as it happens. Onward.

My latest paintings were both Christmas presents so I had to wait til their recipients got them before making them public, so here we go now:



My eighth gouache is supposedly a chipmunk. I still struggle with getting my paint to a good working consistency — straight from the tube it's too thick to spread easily, but it feels like when I add any water it instantly goes as thin as watercolour. There's a sweet spot in between that I keep missing.



My 43^rd acrylic is my house, as seen from across the street. You can't see much of the actual house frontage and porch from here, so it looks like mostly garage, but there is enough house back there to live in. Any other angle would be mostly tree, so if I wanted to get the whole building in, this was the best I could do.

My 41^st acrylic painting is... well I was going to say my first acrylic abstract, but it's actually my first successful one. [I tried once before, very early on, but was so dissatisfied with it that I painted over it... with something that was only marginally better, frankly.] At least, to me this one is a success: it turned out pretty much how I had in mind, from a visual idea that came to me back in the spring. But it took some reading about Abstract Expressionism over the past few days to give me the impetus to give this one a shot.

It's also my first painting to be given a formal title. I believe that a title can potentially contribute a lot to an abstract. And it's the first time I managed to get a bit of impasto work into one of my paintings — not sure how well that shows here, but IRL you can see it.