art in the process ....

i painted today .... with my two girls .... since they didn't have school today ... it was lovely! 

all my rhetorical questions, asked aloud, to myself ... were all answered by them .... or ... answered with another question .... it was nice .... 

so ... scroll down to a few posts back ... and you'll see that  i had a large orange canvas .... that had an unsure future .... well... i'm working towards something now .... 

let's review first ... last year my new year's resolution was 100 canvases .... and i did well over that ... went for quantity --> rah! success ... so this year, the new year's resolution? quality ...i'm looking for new and different .... specifically, 20 pieces that are something different ...  thematically or technically new .... and here it is, mid february --> no movement in that directions ... eek! 

luckily for me, my deadline painting group on flickr has an interesting challenge this month .... we are supposed to choose another artist from the group and emulate them ... or take a piece of their style and use it .... so ... i have chosen shakespeare monkey .... (great name... i know his real name, but shan't tell you) .... shakespeare monkey does mysterious paintings .... full of puzzles and enigmas and raised questions .... i pick that ! ... easier said than done though ... i'm a pretty straight forward girl ... a what you see is what you get sort ... apple, pear, mona, heart .... but ... i'm up for the challenge ... i'm changing up some stuff ... and we'll see how it goes .... if you never hear about it again? it was a failed challenge! .... but ... i've begun it ... on that orange canvas ....

here is the orange canvas ... i've added two headless figures made from maps ... they shan't remain headless .... i wrote out some words ( cause i think i'm doing this piece for my very own house ) ..... and in the bottom rightish, is the sketch of my notion ....

here's a close up of the sketch ...not sure all the bits will make it into the painting .... we'll see ... 

and then ... i kind of went to town ... i painted the bodies yellow ... now they barely show up ... quite mysterious, eh? i'm sure they'll be outlined or made darker or something ..... they might be so mysterious they are invisible now .... i also glued down the sketch .... it was there ... i liked it ... i considered gluing it on the back ... and then decided there was no reason for that .... so ... the anti-mysterious move, showing the process on the front ... later, if i don't like it, i can paint over it all together ... and then last, i did a bunch of stamping and stenciling with a nice mix of orange and raw umber .... rendering those map folks even more virtually invisible ... we'll see if i can dig them out again! 
so that's my story, morning glory .... some painting joy this morning, some tennis joy this afternoon,  some not so joyful science study sessions with a sixth grader , and then a joyful dinner where my littlest said "i LOVE this soup" about 30 times ..... 

any small joys in your life today?