Check out my Paintings & Poetry Blog.
February, 5, 2011. Sorting out all the paintings for my solo exhibition. I have a great idea how to present the poems. The theme of the exhibition will be: Hot versus Cold. Both in colour as well as in subject. Again, the main piece will be "In Limbo" because it is this time again: no idea where we are going...
January, 31, 2011. Suddenly I know how to finish "Cracking up II" The earth needs to be darker and the hot lava lighter, hotter. It works!
December 22, 2010 Got the Batiks "Sunburst" and "Energy" back from the framer. They look great. Worked on another Batik that I'm going to call "There's a time and a space..." I think.
November 18, 2010
Worked on the 3rd stage of "cracking-up", an oil painting I started on October 15th. It starts to look like cracked soil floating on hot lava. It symbolises the feeling that I always have when we are on the move again. It fits in with the other soil and mudpictures. Trying to surpress this boiling stuff inside me.
Finished the oil painting Crushing Power 02 and did a Batik, Sunburst. I burst with energy.
October 24, 2010
Well, summer is over, winter is here, so time to update this artlog. Since May I worked on several paintings. The paiting with the hole is now officially called "Instant reflection" and there is a mirror attached to the back of the hole. There a few paintings still in progress with the subject "Rocks and things", some oil and some acrylic. "Mother nature" is finished too. Finally! I got stuck but in the end instinctively I painted something and I realised that I've done a similar thing in watercolour a long way back (I checked, it was in june 1987 and it was called guess what: "reflection"). It showed a nude's reflection in the water. Strange how this creativity process works. I wrote a poem about it.
Edited the video of the Exhibition The Power of the Brush. Hans did a fantastic job to get everything on tape. I spent a day almost to cut and paste, put music on etc. It's been fun to learn the editing program! It's now available for watching on Youtube. 01-May-2010
Added one coat of damar varnish to 3 oil paintings done in Sakhalin. By now more than dry. The smell brought back memories of Viktor's studio in Yuzhno. Have to do a second coat. 25-Apr-2010
Finished two paintings. "Love the earth you're on" and the triptich "Under the surface (Icefloat)". I also managed to complete a poem that I had left for a while, being stuck. But suddenly I could cross out the excess words and found better ones at ease. Sometimes you just have to be in the mood. Read the poem. 24-Apr-2010
So exited about the exhibtion The Power of the Brush! We had a meeting today with Fred McDonald who is going to open the exhibition. He had such great comments how to make it look even better! And he wanted to see more paintings. So I am going to show my experimental River Break paintings too. Mixed media on old battered board that came from the crate that contained my paintings from Russia to Canada. That wood has travelled quite a bit. It came from Brazil originally, made into a crate for other people who moved to Russia. By re-using old material I hope to add my little bit to the environment. I really hope generations after me are still able to see crushed ice meters high. 9-apr-10
I finished my largest painting ever yesterday. It only has to be varnished. It's called: Feeling small. 29-mar-10
When I saw the frozen waterfall in Maligne Canyon, I knew I had to make a painting of it. I got a huge canvas streched 1.22 x 1.72 m (higher than myself) and the first stage is put on in glazes of acrylic. To be continued. 5-mar-10
I wrote a new poem today. Crystal genius. About the snowflakes and their instant reflection for only a splitsecond. The theme is still very much in me. I have been priming 3 wooden square boards consising of loose planks. Should be interesting. Nice for a threesome snowflake painting. 22-feb-10
Why on earth do I paint on old multiplex? First of all I recycle and hate to throw pieces of nice wood away. Secondly this wood had an interesting life of its own. It came from Brazil, and served as a crate for household goods of a colleage of Hans who moved to Sakhalin, Russia. It was in a storage facility in Korsakov (Sakhalin) for 1 year before it was made to measure as a crate for my paintings for our own move to Canada. On the back it has writings about the owners and destinations. I took the crate apart. The multiplex chipped here and there like Ice in the river. And the idea was born. I made 4 Breaking Ice paintings on this wood. It has literately floated all over the world, back and forth, to and from the America's. 10-feb-10
I finished 3 paintings today. The Fragile one. I gave a bit more definition to some distant snowflakes and signed it. I signed River Break V and Crushing power. I am hopelessly inconsistent with signing the date. Sometimes it's the complete date of finishing (dd/mm/yy), sometimes month and year and sometimes just a year. Sigh... thats the inner conflict of the documentalist and the artist in me. 23-jan-10
I did a watercolour with two snowflakes in different blues and greens. It could be the start of a new acrylic or oil painting. I still have this huge white canvas of 122 cm x 173 cm staring at me..... 18-jan-10
Fragile. The title of one of the paintings I am working on. I started with thin layers of paint in colours resembling the dark snowy sky, sunset above the land and snow on the ground. I used viridium, cerulean, cobalt violet, cadmium red, olive green, lemon yellow and titanium white. After several layers I scraped the snowflakes out, with my fingers and a piece of cloth. Instantly they looked fragile. Here and there I outlined the shape and used viridian and cobalt blue to create depth in the crystals. To do something different with the reflection idea (the eyes in previous snowflake paintings) I smashed a mirror and I am going to see if I can stick it on in small pieces onto the snowflakes. Experiment. Will be continued. 16-jan-10
On a big piece of wood I added a texture with an acrylic wall texturiser on top of Gesso. Covered it with Gesso again and a very thin turqoise acrylic (mural paint). Then I sketched the shapes of the crushed Ice (enlarged it from another sketch in my sketchbook) with the Athabasca River Bank in the back ground. With thin layers of viridian and raw and burnt umber (oil) the trees emerged. To created depth in the ice I used a palet knife and added Viridian, Cobalt, Naples Yellow Red, Umber, Ultramarine, Paynes Gray and White. Thin layer of Paynes Grey in the sky on top of the turqoise underpaint gave a lilac glow. Somehow. This painting is called River Break V (for now). 16-jan-10
I can't stop being in awe about the crushing power of Ice. So I painted another one (Crushing Power) on a long oblong canvas used horizontally. I liked the Paynes Grey for the sky, worked with the pallet knife like crazy in colours viridian, ultramarine, naples yellow red, magenta, yellow ocre, burnt umber and titanium of course. I wanted this painting to be light with just some dark areas between the floes of ice. 16-jan-10
A painting with a hole. I bought this canvas in the Netherlands. So far I just threw some left over colours on it with the palet knife in a diagional movement. I have to work on a new snowflake around the hole. I might stick a mirror at the back so that the spectator sees his/her reflection. To be continued. 16-jan-10
And this is where I work.
Worked on the 3rd stage of "cracking-up", an oil painting I started on October 15th. It starts to look like cracked soil floating on hot lava. It symbolises the feeling that I always have when we are on the move again. It fits in with the other soil and mudpictures. Trying to surpress this boiling stuff inside me.
Finished the oil painting Crushing Power 02 and did a Batik, Sunburst. I burst with energy.
Well, summer is over, winter is here, so time to update this artlog. Since May I worked on several paintings. The paiting with the hole is now officially called "Instant reflection" and there is a mirror attached to the back of the hole. There a few paintings still in progress with the subject "Rocks and things", some oil and some acrylic. "Mother nature" is finished too. Finally! I got stuck but in the end instinctively I painted something and I realised that I've done a similar thing in watercolour a long way back (I checked, it was in june 1987 and it was called guess what: "reflection"). It showed a nude's reflection in the water. Strange how this creativity process works. I wrote a poem about it.