Sending Me Angels

Sending Me Angels

Oil on canvas, 24x24

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The other day, I was putting the background on a dog portrait, and decided to use some left-over paint, in the warm brick/adobe sort of range. The paint was a mix of all my colors, and if you looked closely at the reddish piles of paint, you could see veins of yellow, green, blue, purple, and on and on. 

I covered the canvas with the color, but in the end, didn't like it, so I scraped it off. 

To my fascinated delight, the canvas had been stained by the paint. All the mixes and threads and streaks of paint had left marks on the once-white white canvas. It was a beautiful, strange, exciting trail of colors, more complex and random than I ever could have designed myself.

I had a 24x24 canvas (thin, not the thicker gallery wrap) and decided to experiment. I covered the canvas with my left-over paint and then scraped that paint off. As it had the first time, it left the interesting streaks and whirls of stain and color.

I painted over much of it, though it is still visible in parts of this painting, especially the upper-right corner (honestly, I got a little taken away with the delight of painting these flowers). But there's something between the play of thin, scraped-off paint and thick, piled-on paint that is fascinating me right now.

When events like this come my way, when ideas fly into my head, or I discover by accident something that delights and surprises me, it's like God or Nature or my higher power, or whatever you'd like to call it, is sending me angels.

I am learning to listen. And when I do, amazing things happen.

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Stuff I've Seen - and Dogs of the Day

Yup, it's a two-fer, in more ways than one. For Peter's birthday, I gave him a dog DNA 

kit. He tested Lulu, the flour-eater on the left (black and white, not the little bichon). 

Turns out, she and her twin, Dr. Cooper, are part Australian shepherd, 

part Australian cattle dog, part chihuahua and part Golden. 

Who knew? 

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A Final Thought

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art." 

- Susan Sontag