Heart's Music

This is a custom piece I made for a young couple who just got married, I filled it with elements that would speak to their heart, it's called, Heart's Music.  It has its own story to tell, beginning with the phrase that came to me as I thought about this young couple. 'Love is the music of the heart.' 'Love is the heart's music.'

The abstract impression of a tree, the might oak, running up the side of the canvas branching out blending with the various symbols I chose.

The Celtic Knot (framing the Cross) is symbolic of the Oak tree's root system and is meant to remind us that beneath our surface we have divine inner resources to hold us steady and give us wisdom and strength through out life.  The Celtic Trinity Symbol (top left) represents Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It also represents, Past, Present and Future.  Who we are today, the relationships we build are the sum of those elements.

The compass conveys that 'Love should always be our 'True North' I wrote the phrases, "Love is the music of the heart and Love is the heart's music" repeatedly and wove it into the band going across the canvass along with music notes, painted, crackled and flooded with copper gold ink.  I love how it turned out!

Tumbling from the branches are clocks to serve as a reminder that time is fleeting and to savour the moments and the date of this young couples wedding floating across the canvass.

Along the bottom I used the words taken from 1 Corinthians 13:7 and typed them repeatedly representing the root system of the oak tree.  "Love, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never fails."

Like I said, this piece has a story to tell :-)

I managed to overcome the recent speed bump that had me slowed to a crawl and got the first layer of paint down on that big canvas. Now to figure out what comes next!

A Little Series

I do believe this might be my first successful series, I start out thinking I'll do more along a certain theme but the next one just doesn't seem to happen.  Go figure.  They are also the smallest thing I've ever painted.

These are a series of backgrounds done on watercolour paper, always love doing these because I just have at it with lush colour, various spray and texturing techniques.  While these dry, I lay out some wax-paper and rip up random pieces of tissue paper that I lay on the wax paper then out comes my watercolour and acrylic inks and my water bottle sprayer.  It's always a delight to see how the colours bloom and blend and bleed.  When everything is dry I can then take the painted tissue paper and begin to weave them onto my background paper creating the loose effect of mountain ranges in this case.  The most challenging part for me is to then get them cut and glued onto my canvases!  Straight lines and careful matches will always challenge me :-)

Today I start the painting process on a couple of mixed-media pieces that I have prepped this week.

Happy Canada Day celebrations to my fellow Canucks! 

Experimental Texturing

Remember that experiment with insolation foam I said I was going to try, well here is my first whack at texturing with the stuff.  I've learned a number of things with this first attempt.

1.  Towards the end I realized I could control the flow of the foam better keeping the textured bubbles smaller, good to know for future efforts.
2.  That spreading the foam out with a plastic palette knife makes for a great effect and I'd do a lot more of that next time.  Again doesn't help me with this first canvas...darn it!
3.  It would help if I had a better idea of what I wanted to achieve as far as design layout goes.  This I don't know if I'll ever pull off because most times I only have a vague idea at best of what I hope to accomplish.  For me it's more experimental in approach, trying out some ideas and see where the texture and paints take me.
4.  Be prepared to use up the whole can of foam on 3 or 4 canvases at one time as this stuff is impossible to clean up enough for reuse.  It's sticky as all get out until hardened and once it's hardened there is little you can do to get the spray nosile cleared out!

I expect to be adding to this 'learning list' once I begin painting this deeply textured canvas, again I'll keep you posted :-)  I wish I could say that the idea for using the foam was my own, but I got the idea from a wonderful abstract artist I came across recently, Jan Sitts, love her work, original and vibrant!  That's something I've learned about myself, I'm hesitant to try applying new techniques to a blank canvas for fear of totally ruining the valued canvas!  When it comes to trying out peoples ideas I have no problem, but working with some medium that I come up with, then I get concerned that what I'm using will either wreck the canvas or not work with the paints and be a complete waste.  See my rationalization is, I'll work with it until I get it to someplace I want to go, as opposed to doing something that you just can't fix because the canvas itself is ruined.  Go figure, it must be the very practical influence of being raised by two very practical people, who by the way would be appalled at the waste of a can of good insolation foam :-)