Weekend Walkabout: It's So Hot!!

It's too hot for a Weekend Walkabout anywhere but in the house. Summers keep getting hotter and hotter. We have less of our old, daily, polite rains. Now we get nothing for weeks at a time, then a monsoon that causes floods. It doesn't cool off at night anymore, and we are literally dependent on our air conditioners. Scary. Our Avian Cooling Station is running full tilt-- here are our Fish Crow Fledglings, cooling their toes....

Hoppin and Pippin are amazing. They've learned to take frequent showers at the cooling station. They bring little shells from the beach to float and play with in the Avian Cooling Pool. Corvids are remarkable and charming creatures.
Since I'm kind of stuck inside with the A/C, I've been painting. My Nebula 3 is getting there....

Here is Nebula 2, the Gold One....

And for all my American Readers, Happy 4th of July! Here is Dahlia, celebrating....

Wishing you all happy Weekend Walkabouts!

More Soul Windows

Here are a few more:

Soul Window: Blue Crystal, MRobb, 2016

Soul Window: Forest, MRobb, 2016

Soul Window: BlueGreen, MRobb, 2016

And some that aren't based on tiles, but gardens!

Soul Garden, MRobb, 2016

These last two are tiny, just a few cm square:

TinyArt, Gardeners' Hands, MRobb, 2016

Paint a Window: Soul Windows

I haven't done a painting post for nearly a year, I think. If I weren't too lazy to look this up in my blog archive, I would know for sure, but my sandy memory tells me it's been about a year.

My new series has been going on for several months, and I call them Soul Windows. I suppose they could just as easily be called Soul Tiles, since they are based on tiles, but never mind that. They are designed to be portable and used for meditation. Here are a few:

Soul Window Purple, MRobb, 2016

Soul Window Yellow and Blue, MRobb, 2016

Soul Window Magenta, MRobb, 2016

Sometimes, I don't go with tiles, but with flowers or feathers:

Pink Feather, MRobb, 2016

They are painted on wood, Aquabord or Gessobord (though any gesso'd Masonite would work well) with layers of crackle paste, various glitters and pigments, watercolors, and acrylic interference paints. Pouring medium is used at the end to give a smooth, shiny, "surfboard finish". I learned this surfboard finish from the amazing acrylic artist Nancy Reyner (do give her a Google).

The tiles are usually studded with tiny Swarovski crystals or bits of gemstone. The end result is glowing color and toughness so they can be lugged around in...luggage. I've always liked portable shrines that are used in many religions, so I may try enclosing these in wooden boxes than can be opened and shut. Maybe I'll use old cigar boxes. Right now they are housed in silk bags. We'll see where it all goes!

Have a creative weekend!

Weekly Plant Portrait: A Natural Orchid

I couldn't help doing another plant portrait of the undyed, natural Phals that are blooming all over the house. This one is posed with my new "Wall Fragments" paintings. They seem to go well together:

Orchids and Wall Fragments, MR, 2015

Hope everyone is having a wonderful week with spring (or autumn for the southern group) gardening!

My Acrylic Painting Process, Sometimes

I've received several qusetions via email this week on how I paint. Acrylics are my sole paint medium; their versatility and extreme weirdness appeal to me tremendously. My paintings usually take a month to a year to complete. This is because they can have up to 35 layers! Some only have 10 or so. Why so many layers? I like my paintings to change with the light, and with the position of the sun and the viewer. If I've done one right, the viewer bobs and weaves to be able to see all the different angles. So it's very hard to photograph them- only one view can be shown on the screen, while in IRL, there's a lot more going on, and they shimmer and shake. So keep that in mind as you read.

Here's the first layer of a new painting I call "Oshun and Yemaja":

The first 3 to four layers are usually monochrome, either black, white, or grey. Then I move on to color:

Here's the next stage:

The middle stage is the ugly, gawky, "adolescent" stage where conflicting elements are just right up front. Nothing ever seems to work during this period. Many layers. This is normal.

A landscape is starting to come together here by layer 20. There's clearly a dialogue between the ocean layer and the earth/air layer. It moves on into further abstraction:

The final layers here are metal leaf (copper, in this case), and interference tones in rainbow hues. The bright copper layer has only a hint of the underlying mountainscape. It changes drastically according to the light, and the "ocean" layer  gives an optical illusion of swirling, moving color and depth as the light changes. It's about 32 layers here. I'm sorry I can't show it IRL, as the effect is intended to be either meditative or mesmerizing, but you get a general sort of idea.

More Orchids and Acrylics

I couldn't resist adding one more photo to the group. Pretty much all my Phals are in bloom now, and I have a couple of paintings-in-process that make great backgrounds for them. This pretty, speckled white Phal gets an oceanic background for her portrait:

Phal With Ocean Acrylics, M Robb, 2015

Hope your weekend is going well and growing well!

Orchids and Acrylics

Just another beautiful Phal bloom and a garden painting for the start of the weekend:

Phal in Bloom, MR, March 2015

Sun Garden, MRobb, 2014

This weekend I'll be posting about a wonderful new South African plant; I've never grown one before, so I was very happy to find one this month. It's a beaut!

Painting Over Plants

It's been miserable, wet and cold here for days, so I've been doing more painting than gardening.

Peacock, detail, M Robb, 2015, watercolor

Paintings are funny things. Sometimes, one is just ready to be born, and it's finished in a matter of hours, or days:

Hot Spot, M Robb, 2015, acrylic and metal leaf

Sometimes, one can take years. It gets put away in some dark corner, or the garage, only to be pulled out and finished when a certain problem is solved or new technique is mastered:

Windsurfers, M Robb, 2013-15, acrylic mixed media, 3x4ft

A wonderful biography of Marc Chagall by his second (common-law) wife, Virginia Haggard, explained that the painter never threw away a single painting. He might re-paint, or completely paint over a canvas, but could never bear to just chuck it out. Some painters are chuckers and some are hoarders, I guess! I've done both, but tend toward the latter. Have a great weekend!