More Juicy Abstracts!

I love painting these expressionist abstracts, they mean so much to me! You can see it here on my Etsy store; it's tiny and a blast to paint like this with a tiny painting knife. Thanks, Shannon, for the inspiration with all those knifey materials.

I guess if you look at the etsy listing you'll see some more of the explanation behind this little one, but it's one of dozens of similar landscapes that keep coming out of my head! They're always about journey, and bravery, and acceptance, and God. Not even sure in what way, but that is what makes me look at them and think, even though I'm the one who painted them!

A landscape is best, to me, when it implies a traveler, and the cool thing about abstracted landscapes is that there is no detail to shout for attention. No reference photo to look for, no map to look at. Only the impressions of motion, change, and the humanness of our trek through these colorful places. I hope you feel the sense of joy, acceptance, love of God, and love of beauty that I mean for these to convey!

You can see all of my current work at susankennedy.etsy.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Winter Watercolor!

Image
Winter Watercolor Session is coming up!! I can't wait, and I've written a doc which has the landscapes we'll be using  which you can find here. I find that things work out best if we focus on some small "mini exercises" in the first hour of class: a piece of fruit, a wood texture, a tree, a mountain ridge...something simple which gives us the steam to do a small landscape painting in the second hour. A mini exercise is like this: or this: And a typical painting which we'll do in the second hour of class is like this: A little more involved: maybe some trees, some sky, some water, a few landscape elements which exist together on a page. We work on concepts like wet-into-wet vs. wet-on-dry, and we practice color mixing, how to handle your brushes, how to use enough paint and enough pigment in your paint, all of the basics. And, it's a blast! Come join us! You can call 770 781-2215 to sign up, and you can even just show up and pay $20...
Read more

New Upcoming Book on Painting Landscapes with Light and Depth (for Oil and Acrylic Painters)

Image
Painting Landscapes with Light and Depth I'm so happy to be nearing the end of my new larger eBook on painting landscapes in oil and acrylic! It's a summation of more than 10 years as a fine art instructor and 40 years as an artist. The focus of the book is sharing my ideas about conveying realism through lighting and depicting spatial depth. I illustrate the book with hundreds of photos of paintings, as well as photos of materials, and a number of illustrations about perspective technique.  Here is an excerpt for my blog readers: If you would like to preorder this book which will be available on May 28, click here .  Excerpt  -  Chapter 5: Conveying Depth Creating a painting which inspires a viewer to remember the feeling of a place or a time in their memory is probably the unstated aim of many landscape painters. If the art is realistic in style, all sorts of unspoken rules are consulted in judging it: is there an impression of distance? Do the colors look real? Ar...
Read more

Paper Mache Cow Head

Image
I don't know why why why working on this cow head has been inspiring, but it has been. A drama friend got a dried, bleached skull to me, and I gooped it up and started layering paper mache on top...mesmerizing! The cardboard and chopsticks won't stay in Milky White's ears, but they are keeping the ears from curling inward. As you might guess, this is for a "Milky White" puppet for Into the Woods, which is what our local troupe is doing. : ) But seriously, falling in love with the paper as a medium, and thinking all kinds of strange thoughts like maybe I should sculpt. And it's funny, building a cow head on the real skull makes me feel so much sympathy for the gentle animal that was using that skull! It does make me happy that she has another life on the stage now. Have to finish her up with some toilet paper cellulose clay and figure out in puppet terms how to make her jaw OPEN only when a mechanism is triggered. I think I have noodled it out, but it s...
Read more