Red, Like Love

My love is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June :

My love is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.

-Robert Burns

I don't know if it was the deep red long stem roses I got from my sweetie, or the memory of us celebrating a yummy Valentine's Day dinner with our daughter, all in our red shirts or dresses, but I woke up this morning thinking about red art, and I just thought I'd share a few images.

When We Did Not Sleep
Acrylic on canvas 14x11x1.5'

Red Mosaic...Stained glass, vitreous glass tiles, glass gems, tempered glass over acrylic wash and one unglazed ceramic tile on plywood....still not titled.

On the Eve of St. Agnes young girls would look into the village well hoping to see their future husbands.

With its rich colors of ruby and garnet, this mirror gleams with its own romantic spirit. The iridescent pink petals of a flower bloom in the bottom left corner, and a strand of deep red faceted beads runs down the right. This piece was designed to be slightly asymmetrical; the angle of the mirror reflects the slant of the left side of the wood base.
(Description, and also available, from my etsy site.)


Photographing mirrors and shiny iridescent things can be difficult, so here's a bit of a better idea of the glass:

In counterpoint to all that red:

Edward and I just happened to get each other green M&M's..."Green, the new color of LOVE"...and it happens to be Edward's favorite color too.

(When I searched for this picture, I found that there are websites still pondering the question of whether green M&M's are aphrodisiacs...just like we said in high school. ;-) )

Happy Belated V'day!

her heart was otherwhere:
She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year. from The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats

Mom and Daughter Painting Time on the Deck

Last week I spent a warm day out on the deck painting. This canvas is 28x20. I haven't been able to come up with a title yet.

After school R had no homework and spent some time with me, painting these 3 canvas boards. The one on the left is a conservatory with telescope looking out into space, inspired by the lecture we attended a week ago by astrophysicist, Neil Tyson. It was fun, interesting, thought-provoking. During the walk to school the next morning, R was planning the colonization of Mars.

New Little Painting Video

Painting Angst: Process of a Work in Progress

Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to decide I would chronicle the progress of 2 paintings I was starting simultaneously Friday. Maybe it made me a little self-conscious and stilted, maybe a little bit more critical as I was painting.

Friday was an absolutely gorgeous day to be outside painting. It was 80 degrees, and I was on the deck barefoot and in a tank top, having shed my oversize paint shirt. (As a follow-up to my last post about Texas winter weather, I want to add that Saturday was a windy 31.)

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to track the stages of the two canvases. Here's what I got:

Making early color choices, starting to define areas with blocks of color

This is the beginning of the "Ahgg, I don't know if this is working" stage.

My little helper in right top corner, usually a skittish, fairly wary cat, was fascinated by the movement of the paint brush. Later she came up onto the canvas to play.

Well into the "I think I hate this painting, what can I do to fix it" stage.

I can see now that by this time, things had started to get better, forms had taken shape, I'd made some good changes, but I think at the time I felt like the painting, as Edward put it, "was kicking your butt."
You can see that between this photo and the previous one, the kitten had been replaced by a glass of wine.

I had to walk away for a couple of hours, then I finally decided that this one is finished.

This one is close, but the amount of yellow at the very top near the left still bugs me and will probably be messed with some more. When I get out the paintbrush, who knows what else I may tweak...

It's almost 4 am (still kind of Saturday to me, since I only slept a few hours), and Edward leaves noon Sunday for a week in Iowa, so I am going to try to sleep some more now and be awake for his last few hours at home.

First Painting of 2009

R says it goes the other way, horizontal. Of course she had a whole story about a house by the beach, or maybe on an island, with lots of detail about what all the elements are. I always enjoy her interpretations of art and her great imagination. My own thoughts on the different bits in the paintings and usually of the meaning or subject of the painting itself are almost always a lot more vague, more open ended.

New Abstract Painting: Which Way Is Up?

Have you ever looked at an abstract piece of art and not been sure which side was supposed to be the top?

I painted this painting that I finished today with a definite opinion about what the top was, but when I looked at it finished, I thought, Hmmm, that could work another way.

I thought this way looked ok too. And then...

I asked my oldest son which side he thought was the top, and he turned it around this last way. When my 11 year old daughter came home from school, I asked her, and she said that it definitely was supposed to go the way I had painted it in the first place.

What do you think??

By the way, we discovered that a painting by Matisse was hung upside down in the Museum of Modern art in New York, for 47 days...or about 116,000 views. !

More Paintings and Mutant Peppers

I haven't yet titled this painting I did a couple of weeks ago, but I'm thinking about giving it the name of an imaginary city from a series of books. I wonder if that would be okay?

The painting is 8x10, small enough that I could lay it on the scanner and not have to deal with the issues of lighting, digital photography settings and learning the new camera. Unfortunately, I can't do that with every painting, and I think I am going be experimenting with taking pictures of a larger diptych later today.



Two posts ago, there was a picture of my jalapeno plant with little red and green peppers. The little peppers are shorter, smaller, more rounded than the usual jalapeno. That's because the plant is one of the hybrids developed by Texas A&M University that is supposed to have the same taste but half the heat of the traditional jalapeno. I planted one of these and one regular jalapeno, in large pots about 8 feet apart. Which was evidently too close. Both plants have little rounded hot peppers. The other day I came in from the yard and put these 2 peppers in Edward's hand. He came down the hall a few hours later with watering eyes to report on the heat of the "mild" pepper he had just taken a bite out of.

In the garden on Friday, I planted a row of mixed "Gourmet blend" beets, the picture on the seed packet is very pretty, and some more arugula. I noticed that several almost thread thin fennel seedlings had cropped up. I'm hoping the cats don't stroll across them until they are a bit sturdier.

What I learned

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto


Today I learned how to use the layers dialog in GIMP (kinda like Photoshop) and apply a watermark to images of artwork or photos. I felt intimidated at first, but it wasn't too difficult, and easy as pie the second time. I learned from the tutorial at eHow.

The image of this painting was then posted at my new esty shop for fine art.

Trade Winds

I painted this one last week...evidently while I was time traveling. Think anyone will notice?