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This last week has had some issues – but we won’t go there – except to say that letting loose and having some fun with paint seemed like a great idea. With that in mind, I have done more of the wee 4×6″ (approx) abstracts in black, white and red. It feels so good to be making stronger marks and letting my hand show in the final pieces. I just know there are more to come yet…

Over at the GPP Street Team site Michelle asked us to play some mind games this month. First come up with some words, then make colors to suit them. The news here in New Zealand is dominated by the weather at the moment. Last year late winter / early spring storms killed 3 million lambs; the downturn in numbers for the meat processing plants has seen 100s lose their job, with more redundancies expected in the coming weeks. Last month a huge storm hit – we had snow here, at sea level, for the first time in over 30 years. An even bigger, colder storm is on the way today, just as newborn lambs fill the paddocks. So how could I not choose related words to come up with colors for?

My words for the challenge are Lambing, Night sky, Spring Growth and Storm Approaching. Lambing turned out a cold grey because the piles of dead lambs always look a horrible dirty gray color. Sorry, I know that is not very cheery, but it is the reality of a farming area. The Night Sky, on the other hand, is often a glorious pinky lavender color as a storm heads our way. Despite the weather, I know Spring Growth will arrive, bringing with it renewal. Storm Approaching turned out a pretty blue because so far, despite the predictions, our day has had some decent patches of clear blue sky. Mind you, apparently it’s already -1 C (30F ) just south of our southernmost island and heading our way fast!

Those of you who visit my blog from time to time will have read that I’m exploring mark making once again, and working on getting back to the confident colors and marks I was producing while studying at TLC. I’ve been concentrating on black, white and red in a variety of media. It feels good to limit my color choices, but expand the tools I have in my hands – oil pastels, water-soluble crayons, acrylics, watercolor, charcoal…

I’ve made some fairly big works and have been playing round with them in Photoshop, seeing what they’d look like cropped down, as thin slivers, as squares etc. What happens when I get right down to the small details so the overall image is lost and only the mark remains? These and many other possibilities! Apart from the learning that comes from that kind of exploration, which is useful in itself, I’m also keeping an eye out for ideas that can translate into greeting cards etc as there are one or two new outlets that have expressed interest in my work.

I’ve also been wandering round the Internet looking at some of my favorite artist’s work, and exploring some new ones too. I always come back to Pollock, Rauschenberg, Rothko, de Kooning and Twombly. I suspect my interest in their work partly stems from the fact that we studied them at TLC so that I got very familiar with their work and feel ‘comfortable’ with it. But it’s more than that too – it’s a deep sense of connection with the way they made marks and with the way in which the hand of the maker could, or couldn’t, be seen in their work. Contemporary artists whose work I follow include Tina Mammoser, Vivien Blackburn, Martha Marshall, and Rebecca Crowell. Although all quite different, I think it is their interest in mark making that keeps me going back to their blogs or websites year after year after year. I have a small collection of small works by Tina Mammoser and Martha Marshall and adore them, and add to the collection when I can. Sure, I love the images they produce, the colors they use, or the way they tell their stories- but underpinning all that is a backbone of mark making.

So, here’s a taste of this week’s art: I hope you enjoy.

This month Michelle, over at the GPP Street Team site, asked us to mix our own colours and name them. How could I resist?

As I’ve said before, when I get new paints I always play round with them in my journals, recording the new colour and mixing them quite randomly to see what happens. It’s amazing what you find. Yesterday I had some new Golden acrylics arrive in the courier: light violet, light turquoise (phthalo), light magenta, light ultramarine and Smalt hue.  I love the Golden light paints; I find they’re much more intense and less chalky than mixing my own lights. I quite like some of these mixes. Three rows down in the centre on the right hand page is now officially called Mana Bay Blue after our local beach. Bottom right is a mix of Cadmium Red medium and Smalt Hue. This is now Vampire Blood because it has a slightly metallic look to it, it reminds me of all the vampire books my library customer’s read!

More experiments to come yet; I like to mix most or all of the new colours with each other, just to see what happens. Some of it will be ugly, some will be great…