The month of May, the garden is in and sprouting, trees are budding, flowers are pushing forward, and I guess I'm doing the same with my art!
 |
| A Inks on small tiles |
Working on bringing some variety into my art shows for this summer, Door yard Art Festival, last weekend of July I believe, Golden Unicorn Art Festival August 16 and we will see what else before the season is done.
Through the winter I've worked on larger pieces, and have really been enjoying both working large and texturing with the palette knife and Diatomaceous Earth mixed into texture paste and paint. In fact I'm so enthralled I'm finding it hard to shift gears and create some pieces that customers have come to enjoy and expect in my work. All my work has my familiar stamp to it, deeply textured and saturated colour even when I'm working with black and white and all the shades of grey, but the techniques vary widely.
 |
| Detail of Palette Knife work |
 |
| 24x12" Palette Knife Painting |
Still I find myself wondering what other artist do when they discover some new avenues in technique and find themselves challenged to move away from the new explorations to continue to create and develop previous stylings for lack of a better word. And what about clients and people who follow an artist work, are they disappointed by or intrigued by the new things they are seeing?
It's a touchy balancing act I'm finding, the danger being that when I push too hard to continue with a certain type of work I loose the ability to do it well, I'm never happy with the end results and I can't accept offering up less than my best. Sadly, I've had to drop doing a specific type of work for just that reason, I am hopeful that given some time away from it I might one day return to it and find my groove again. Which gets me to wondering, again, have other artists gone through the same thing?
 |
| Detail of Inked tile |
 |
| Detail of 48x48" Palette Knife Painting "Primal" (photo by Kellie Graham) |
