A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Abstract In Acrylic


This painting may not be finished yet, I'm not sure. The problem for me is that I'm on a limited budget and I can't yet afford to get a decent lighting system. Many of my artworks have been photographed poorly due to that and using a cheap camera. I have to make do for now. I am planning on getting a matt cutter, so that I can learn how to matt my gouache/watercolor paintings. Doing it myself should save me a lot of money IF I can master it and I'm not sure that I can at this point. I'm getting a beginners book on it soon.

I haven't worked in acrylic for several months, so this was a good temporary break from painting in gouache. Doing the abstract in gouache, which I enjoyed, requires more precision than working in the acrylic, at least for this painting. So this painting is more passionate/expressionistic I think. I think it's great that I can go from one medium and one style to another. It keeps the work challenging. Part of why I decided to do this painting was because I got a nice comment from another artist on Artid saying she really responded to my abstract paintings and thought I should do more of them. I loosely followed a painting style from several years ago when I was in college to give me some guidelines to work with. The main thing is to get something down and not be critical and then rework it. Gouache is more delicate and can't be reworked at much, but acrylic you can put layer after layer and keep changing it quickly. What I've been doing is taking my camera and photographing the work as it progresses. It helps to give me some perspective on it, helps me to see better.

This painting is very busy, maybe too busy and yet I respond to it. Anyway, I wanted to post it here to see if 1) it is in focus (because I've been having problems with that) and 2) to just see it and get yet another perspective on it. I also like just sharing it with the good people who follow some of this blog. I'm pleased to hear back from a couple of new voices out there. Thank you.

2 comments:

Culture Served Raw said...

I love your abstract pieces and the very fragmented colours and shapes. Also wondering if you're a Taoist, seeing the Ba gua symbol featured on your sit. If you are it would be very interesting to know whether this art reflects Taoist concepts. All the best

Culture Served Raw said...

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