A Farmhouse In Need of Paint

Reaching back in time to my childhood, old weathered farmhouses and outbuildings appear on my canvases and panels as I bring them to life again. A modern police station has replaced one fond memory, while a strip mall another. The child in me recalls the rusted farm equipment I played on visiting my aunts and uncles farms. Winter evenings kicking up fresh snow tracking animals from building to building. A fox, maybe looking for a sleeping hen, or a rabbit looking for a warm place to spend the night. The warm light calling to my frozen toes from my aunt's kitchen.

I could see my grand mother sitting at the kitchen table working on one of her thousand-piece puzzles. Grandma liked working on puzzles and my aunt let her keep one under the table cloth in her kitchen. At grandma's house there were several completed puzzles under her own table cloth.

On my canvas a farmhouse, in direr need of paint, begins to take shape as more childhood memories push their way forward in my head. I remember stacking firewood in the summer for warming feet in the winter. My dad appears on the porch with an old blanket, he and my uncle head for my uncle's Ford to tinker a bit on the transmission. Granddad will advise from the porch. I get orders to move fresh firewood to the porch for drying. The rabbit dashes to a new hiding place as I load my arms up with the wood. Each brush stroke brings a new memory, and memories hold my interest in the painting. Most paintings I do are ways of reliving fond moments in my life, keeping me upbeat.     

A Mosaic of Colorful Strokes

Every painting deserves the “full treatment” if it's really worth doing. That “full treatment” includes the care each brush stroke requires to add to the feelings we want to express through our art. No matter what style we use to express ourselves how we apply the paint is important. Understanding how each stroke can add or diminish our feelings while painting will determine the success of the piece. Boredom comes through when our goal is only to finish a painting and move onto the next one. We tend to repeat paintings with no other purpose than to cover as much canvas as possible in a life time. Vermeer covered very little canvas, what canvas he did cover added to the world's treasures. Experts cannot decide whether Vermeer did 21 paintings or 33. 33 is not many paintings. 

Jackson Pollock dripped paint onto his canvas with great care. These days many artists simply want to crank out a canvas in hopes of having a buyer find it suitable to hang on a wall somewhere. This blog is in response to people asking how to stave off boredom.

I find every aspect of creating art exciting: the brush work, the laying-on of paint, laying-on of color, to be the most exciting part of the process of creating art. I love a mosaic of colorful strokes. Sitting in church one day in Chicago I got lost in the mosaic behind the alter. All those pieces of glass and porcelain laid out creating a beautiful work of art. Back in painting class I tried to duplicate that mosaic look with my brush. Brushwork has interested me ever since. Using a variety of brushwork plays in my work in that it adds interest beyond the subject I use to express myself. Some artists use a palette knife while others use paint scrapings or one simple scrape-off of paint in areas, leaving those places for the viewer to enjoy. Really, anything goes if used right.