The Storm

When I blew up I had a watercolor abstract on my table. It was going nowhere. So I got out white acrylic paint and a bigger brush and whacked it. Then I finally threw paint around (literally) and tore at it with a piece of loose prismacolor pencil lead (neon orange), creating color in some places and sgraffito in others. Here's what it looked like after that - I didn't even recall taking a photo until I found this one this morning while downloading others.

During my Intensive Journaling, over the following week, I broke through into a different place with my painting, and tackled something different (for me). This is the result. The image emerged from the paint (you can see his arm in the photo above) and the emotions inside me. I threw more paint around, acrylic and watercolor, doing more gestural painting than usual and letting paint be paint. Then the refining took the last few evenings, pushing shapes and colors around to create a bit more depth, to concentrate the focus, and to coordinate the movement.

I intend my next pieces to push as far as I can reach. I want to paint my dreams.

And I need to tackle faces. They scare me, because I'm pretty sure the first ones won't come out. So what? As Bob Rankin would say, "You've got to get over that fear right now."