Trompe L'Oeil - Woodland Sketches

Woodland Sketches
acrylic on gesso board
20"x16"

I'm submitting this piece to a juried show tomorrow morning. I'm hoping it will get in so keep your fingers crossed for me.

I used a ribbon board collage as the still life reference for creating this trompe l'oeil painting. Edward Alexander MacDowell’s musical piece, Woodland Sketches, To a Wild Rose, No. 1, Op. 51 inspired the autumnal theme. The photographs were taken during trips to Alaska and North Carolina in the 1980s. The leaves were gathered on a Fall day and the arrow head was found in an eroding stream bed in Virginia.

Part of me wants to follow the trompe l'oeil direction a bit more. It is quite time consuming and methodical, but I learn so much in the process. I'd like to get a bit more playful with it, and perhaps even explore surrealism a bit more.

Ixmucane (Illustration)

Ixmucane is a jacket cover for a children's book The Journey Home -- the story of a Maya refugee girl's discovery of her community's history and heritage. I used the repeating circular motif of the Maya calendar for the composition. Painting this made me think of the many cycles the Maya documented in the heavens, the earth and in human beings themselves. The Maya cycle of sowing and dawning continues to inspire me and surprise me whenever I come upon a previously unnoticed example of it in life.

Day Lily at Night

(acrylic on canvas, 3' x 1.5') This is yet another flower motif. I orginally started using this motif simply as a way to experiment with the the acrylic glazing technique (see blow), but found myself more and more drawn into the subject. Flowers have long been associated with female sexuality. I wanted to push that idea a bit, beyond passive sensuality waiting-to-be-found, toward more agressive, overt seduction. When one begins to look at flowers in earnest they seem almost pornographic in their garishness. They are so eager to express their life force and extend their potency in the world. I'd like to continue this exploration of the agressiveness of the life force in its different forms and transformations.

Feminina Oscura

This painting is one of my first attempts at using acrylic glazes over underpainting. This is an old technique developed with the advent of oils. It allows the pigment to sit in the medium and the light to pass through it, bouncing back from the canvas to the eye. The technique creates a more luminous color and allows the artist to create sublte manipulations in tone without sacrificing the intensity of color.

Doing the underpainting helps the artist think through the composition and tone first, before developing the color scheme. In some ways it is less spontaneous and more analytical. In fact, this is why I am using it right now. It helps me to refine my understanding of the relationship between tone, color and form -- the age old puzzle pieces of the visual artist