New Website Launched!

Well, it's been wild and wooly getting my new website up! Brenda Thebeau Abstracts is up and running, just click on the button on my toolbar to the left.

The course I've been taking with Leslie Saeta, has been very helpful, there's a lot to learn.  WebInArts is just what I needed to discover what some of my next steps should be.  Old hat to many of you, but what a learning curve for me!

Working on some smaller pieces this week which I really enjoyed, not sure that these will be the final embellishments that I'll use but I like how this little version of "Ignited" turned out.

Do you know if you had told me that my life would be altered so much when I began painting I never would have believed you!  The artistic process is an amazing thing that brings with it inner transformations that, well, you just might not come up with in your wildest dreams.  I know I sure didn't!

Here's a nugget from Life, Paint & Passion by M. Cassou

"To discover that you can paint without special talent is a great revelation. An endless stream runs through you, enough to paint for lifetimes.  Talent is universal. You can dip into that source to your heart's content.  Everyone is good at what comes to them spontaneously."

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!

Abstract Distraction

It's been a full week of painting, really happy with the pieces I'm working on, which is always a good thing.

The large teal piece is going well and I'm close to being done, here's a detailed shot of one of my fav parts of the painting.  Also love the vintage look to this 20 x 24".

I should have a good representation of what I do for the Dooryard Art Festival Market, that my sister, Kellie and I are participating in.  We are excited and nervous all at the same time as neither one of us have been in an art fair.  It's a collaboration, which began with her offering me moral support by coming to help me with the fair, and then kind of grew into putting some of her photographs on display as well.  I love having sisters!

This last photo is a mixed-media piece using my blogging friend's photo, Frances Robinson. She has been kind enough to permit me to use some of her photos in my work, her images really speak to me.

I also plan on creating a mixed-media piece using some of Kellie's photos, why I never thought of it sooner I'll never know! But if I can manage it time wise there will be some pieces at the fair :-)

"...as strange as it seems, when artists paint, they tend to forget that life cannot be infused into the canvas by manipulating colors and shapes. They forget that the breath of life arises spontaneously only when the work is done from the heart and soul, in humility and surrender." Michele Cassou

Flat Surfaces Pitfall

If you could see my loft studio right now, you'd wonder what blew through here!  Every available flat surface has stuff strung all over it!  Canvases drying, canvases partly finished, those finished and awaiting being safely packed away until the art fair or shipping, and mixed-media painting supplies everywhere.  I know what I'll be doing in the next little while.

It's funny, my husband and I joke about his problem with flat surfaces, if it's flat he will set something down on it then wonder where he left it :-)  Here I am with every flat surface obscured by art related stuff.  Not enough hours, and in my case not enough health to keep it cleared, until today I just can't create in the chaos anymore.  That's another interesting thing about we humans. Some of us need things very clean in order to feel right in our own skin, not me by the way.  Others require a little more lived in and then there are those that can thrive when everything is out and in sight around them.  Quirks, you got to love them, it's what makes life interesting.

Read this at random in a book I'm thinking of reading, (bought it second hand)


"...a deep, inner yearning to express themselves, plus persistence!  Without persistence, they could never have overcome their inhibitions, their doubts and fears, long enough to permit their true inner selves to function...a matter of patient, quiet, firm, dogged work.  Please believe me when I say that your success depends not so much upon technical training, as upon your personal growth, your adaption to the learning process and your ability to let yourself go!" The Creative Way To Paint by David Friend

Having trouble getting a photo that shows the colours accurately but this gives you an idea.  6 more little pieces to add to my mountain theme, plus a larger mixed-media piece and more being prepped but not shown.

Hope you are having a great weekend!

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! 

A Little Foiling

Took time out from practicing my brush strokes on the door casings and painted this small abstract.  I had prepped it last week and finally got around to working some paint onto the foiled surface.  I'm down to the finish and find it helps to snap a picture or two as it gives me a better perspective on it overall.

"To create from intuition, you need to free yourself from the demands and expectations of product. These pressures strangle your potential to create and prevent true enjoyment and passion. Inside you lives the worst judge and the most tyrannical ideas of what you should do and how your finished product should look. The amount of freedom you experience is always a function of how much permission you give yourself."   Michele Cassou, Point Zero

Gone a Little Pollock In The Studio

Okay I confess to having gone off the grid on this one.  The trouble began when I went to the studio with a plan in mind.  You'd think I'd know by now that plans seldom work out for me, not in the studio.  Of course you know that artist/teacher Michele Cassou would have something to say about it...

"To create you do not need to come up with a plan, but rather take away all plans to give natural originality, style, and wisdom a chance to manifest from intuition."  Point Zero

There came a point when what I had planned and was trying to make happen on the canvas was dead in the water, a wash of it!  Out came the squeegee, brayer, brushes, inks and one mass of clogged up paint.  (That's a whole other story, a brand of paint I'm going to have to give up on, it just keeps drying up in the tip of the bottle leading to endless stabbing with a needle to clear it again and again, sheesh)

It was crazy fun! There was paint splattered all over me, glasses, cloths anything exposed including the floor.  I kept thinking what on earth would my mother think of the mess I was making.  I grinned like a maniac and kept splatting and spraying.

So I have one wild background to work from, at this point I'm not making any plans as to what comes next!  Instead I'm asking myself what this painting is expressing, something Cassou encourages artist to do, ask questions.

"With questions, you can dig into your creative potential as far as you want. The questions gently knock at the door of your inspiration, or bang on it, or blast it open, or anything in between so that your heart and soul can be engaged." Point Zero by Michele Cassou

My creative door got blasted, how about yours?

The Start of a Series

I've got a new piece on the easel, one that I hope will be the first in a series called Essence of Opal.  Thanks to my Aussie friends I've been inspired by the raw opal being mined in their beautiful country.  In fact, Kel used the title of the series to describe a previous work I did, which got me to thinking... I've never done a series before and I'm hoping that I won't fall flat on my face with this proposed one :-)  I've a lot I want to experiment with on this piece, kind of feeling my way along, but it's a good start for now.

"Doing something more than once is often thought of as being uninventive and uninspired.  Repeats signal substance rather than dullness."  Michele Cassou

Oh I do love when those fun packages show up at the post office!  I'm drooling over all the possibilities these new papers will bring to my art. I can't create fast enough to fulfill the need to try them all out!

Stirring The Paint

#29 "Interference"  Acrylics on canvas

It's been a good week so far, sold two new paintings helping to keep me in paint supplies!  This is the newest completed piece.  Just a nice size 24 x 24" on Gallery Wrap Canvas.

A few more thoughts from another David DuChemin ebook, Vision Is Better
"So what do you do when the thing that sustains you begins to tire you? What do you do when the shelves are bare? Restock the shelves...I think the way we do that is a little counter-intuitive: we shoot more, write more (paint more) we go back to the well and fill it with the same bucket we use for drawing water in the first place.  We get intentional about the process and stop worrying about the product.  We stir the paint. We take more risks. We work more not less...you take the time to do more personal projects and create something for you and not your clients.  It is not just as important that you feed your own creative soul before you feed your market, it is more important...What do you do to stir the paint? Where do you go to fill your well?"

Without realizing it these last several pieces have been all about well filling for me.  Doing things that stimulate and entice me to risk new things.  It's been great.  Hope all of you are finding your own ways to 'stir the paint' this week!

Aussie Violet & Facebook

I've had a lot of fun with my Aussie Violet piece and like how it's turned out, although getting an accurate picture of it is near impossible for me! The red is a rose red and quite beautiful.  Not sure what to name it?  Since my last post I've made progress on the Triptych and have gotten another commission for a 3 piece that I am really excited to start work on it.

For the sake of making things easier for people to find and follow my artistic endeavours on Facebook, I've created a fan page.  I have a badge on my left sidebar that will take you to it and from there all you need do is click the 'Like' button for my artists page to show up in your news feed.  Although I've made my personal Facebook page open to the public they still had to go through the process of sending and waiting for approval of their friend requests, pain in the you know what!  Anyway, I've uploaded pictures of more recent works with details now co-ordinated with my 'Art Gallery' page here on my blog.

I don't know if you ever get use to the wonder of having people not just like your work, but who are willing to invest in it and in effect in me.  It's very humbling and gratifying and in truth I hope I never loose this sense of wonderment.

"The creative spirit demands persistence." S. McNiff

Following Our Own Style

"When the creative processes grind to a halt, we have that unbearable feeling of being totally clogged...Instead of experiencing relaxed, energetic concentration, we jump avidly towards any distraction, no matter how trivial or ridiculous; we become easily tired; when we look back at our work nothing seems good enough; our eyelids glaze over; our brain cells chug to a standstill."  Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovitch


As you can see I'm still making my way through the book Free Play, not because the books slow reading but it's been a difficult summer for me physically so my reading time has been hit and miss.  Anyway, this chapter is on the function of both the muse and editor in our creative process, something we all have our scuffles with, if not a down right brawl by times!

I've been hedging my way around the teal  piece that I'd begun, then painted myself into a situation I didn't know how to get out of.  My thoughts on how to continue were pushing me towards a realm that I've never been comfortable in, realism, not even abstract realism.  Then yesterday, with head pounding out the warning that a storm front was moving in, (yes my head has continued to be a weather gage!) I found a way to bring it back into my natural creative bent.  Something Zom wrote in Pt One of her blog series on 'Developing Your Style' made me laugh and then find a way to return to my natural voice.

Gears stencil by Mary Beth Shaw

"You don't get to choose your style anymore than you get to choose your height or your personality or your looks. I started realising this at a certain point in my development when no matter what I painted, it looked like something that I had painted. This used to frustrate me. I used to look at a piece I was working on and say with scorn "that looks like something I would do." Zom


That last line made me burst out laughing because I'd done the same thing.  Gosh we are funny creatures.   So I'm back on track for now, adding a collage element that spoke straight to the situation by Graham Cook:


"Failure is not so much falling down as it is refusing to get up after a fall..."

Blogging Spring Cleaning!

Doing a little blog housecleaning after reading Rice's great article at Creative Mixed Media.  She shoots straight from the hip and I so appreciate her candour.  My need for a good point and shoot digital camera just went to the top of the 'Need' list however.  Having good photos of your artwork is important if that's what you're blogging about!

I've finish up the large canvas I've been calling 'joyous' it's going to hang out on my wall for a time until I know that it's truly done.  Begun work on a new strata piece, love this part where I get to play with all these texturing tools and work on the basic design.  I've got a new stencil or two from Mary Beth's collection I intend to work into the pice as well.  If someone saw the array of items littering the big table in my loft, they'd wonder if I was into construction or art!  Think I'll start another piece for all the left over ideas and items I want to play with but can't include in the one I do have going.

Can't bring myself to publish the pictures of 'joyous' that my video camera took, especially in light of Rice's article :-)  Will have to wait until I either purchase that point and shoot or my daughter brings her big camera home with her!

Hope your having a creative week!

Young Artists

Just had to share this, my grand-daughter Grace took second place in 'Coloured Art,' for the Carleton County's Royal Canadian Legion Colouring & Essay contest.  It included entries from grade levels 4-6.  Her picture will be entered in the provincial and from there the national if she places and will be displayed in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.  She received a certificate, a print of her picture, ribbon & pin plus a cash prize.

She was thrilled as am I.  When I asked her if she felt like a real artist, she said yes! I also pointed out that at the age of 9 she received her first payment for her art :-)

Picture quality is poor, but that's my girl in the middle and the second in from the right in large group picture.

Fought Any Dragons Lately?

Ordered a couple of second hand books by Michele Cassou, Life, Paint and Passion and Point Zero-Creativity Without Limits.  Just got Point Zero and started reading it today.  She makes some great observations that cause you to think.  Things like:

"A creative block happens when you think you should do something while you are truly interested in doing something else.  The block is caused by looking in the wrong direction because of fear or prejudice, and by striving to reach an unwanted place."

She then explains that you need to ask yourself the right questions in order to break out of the creative rut you're in but that finding that question is not so easy.

"A good question must pull you out of the fascination of thinking that you know what needs to happen or what will make you happy..."

The right question is there within the block itself, it comes out of the judgement, the fear the whatever is preventing you from creating.  Although I've never put it in those terms I can certainly see that is was the essence of most stalled moments I've had creatively.  Some of them it took some time to finally come up with the right question that contained my answer at the same time.  Interesting reading so far, up next her discussion about 'dragons.'


"The Dragon of Product: he fights your spontaneity because it loves aesthetics. It wants you to plan exactly how your finished painting will look." Oh he has given me a tussle, I ran into him while working on Worlds Crumble and here!

"The Dragon of Control:  he guards the doors of the unknown by using fear to stop true exploration.  It feeds on your lack of trust in your spontaneity and fear of changes and try to convince you that you must be in control of your creation at all times."


The Dragon of Meaning: fights your intuition by demanding interpretation and resolution at every move. It wants you to analyze your creation and assign meaning/value to everything you paint."


A nasty bunch don't you think?

NOTE: This was a play session done on 18X24" water-colour paper and will be used as backgrounds in my art journal.