Messing About With Color

I’m playing around with painting, trying new things, like color and style and all that sort of thing. Not really sure what I’m doing, but it’s fun. Besides Gabrielle Munter, I also like Emily Carr, a Canadian expressionist painter who lived in the late 19^th, early 20^th century and did wonderful landscapes in the Pacific Northwest. She is credited with saving the Native American totem poles by calling attention to their artistic merit. People had been chopping them up for wood!! She also did some really fantastic landscapes, similar to Charles Burchfield’s, a superb painter form Salem, Ohio. She, in particular, used color in the same way as Munter, bright and unexpected.

I have always been too literal, and still am, so I am trying to break loose and experiment. So far, it is still tame and I don’t always get the balance right. I am not planning to break into the world of art, just having fun and making messes.

I have to work bigger than I used to because of m eye sight. I can’t do those detailed little illustrations I used to be able to do, like the ones in the book about my mother. My hand is not so steady either for fine line work. I remember reading about James Thurber, who was legally blind because of an early eye injury -   his brother shot him in the eye with a bow and arrow. Not on purpose of course. As he grew older both eyes because impaired, so he did his cartoons on huge sheets of paper. I’ll have to keep that in mind.

These are a couplet if things based on a photo I took of the yard across the street one foggy morning a few years ago. They still need work, which I have to figure out.

But they’re bright.

The links to the artists in this post are from me, and not from that "text enhance" bug that hs been driving me nuts.