Which project gets my attention this week? A dear friend was asking how we’re meant to choose between many delightful options, and it’s a question I’ve been mulling over ever since. I think I just take turns, and try to get to the neglected ones. This round, here’s where I checked in.

Meetings & Making

During a couple of art calls this week, I tried again with the spelling book pages as layers, to see if last week’s work was a fluke.

My second attempt was a bust, as was another round to try and improve it. But round three looked good, and here’s round four. We’re on to something! At least, I have that sense of a bunch of possibility stretching out before me.

Reviewing

I think my new Aerials pieces have had a long enough rest. Anything bugging me there? Yep! I worked on three pieces in a row, to make one hue more dominant.

Changing the one on the left, the one most based on a physical version, now brings it in line with the others that are my favorites. But I found very little else to fix — so that’s something. Time to gather titles and a statement?

Learning

I took a week off from the Collage Makers Summit, and will get back to the second half of the projects next week. But it was time to check in on my almost-forgotten watercolor class.

Thankfully, this is an abstract class, and while she wanted us to paint trees, she was really just asking for shapes and values. Phew, that I can at least try!

Landscape value study it is! Here I was, NOT wanting to learn how to paint anything specific…

Applying

I’m working on some small mail-in collages, as I mentioned last time, for Kyla Bourgh’s Atelier 8.18 show, Place, Memory, and Distance. I happen to have some collage fodder from family ephemera, but am I brave enough to use images of myself as a kid? I don’t use figures, ever, or do self-portrats — this is uncomfortable, but maybe still the right approach. Here’s a series of value checks, looking for the balance between lights and darks.

The houses are snippets from a walk around Ottawa, which I think of as my origin city, even though I’ve never lived there. The narrow streets, the pointed rooflines, it all tracks with my abstraction of the childhood I remember.

Viewing

Gallery George is conveniently close to me, and just presented a new show, Spring Equinox. Here’s what caught my eye there: Patricia Sandberg‘s “Elements of a Living Sea” with its lovely palette and marks.

Then, a show I thought hard about applying for opened, and I just had to go see who did manage to apply, and be accepted. THIS Gallery in Chinatown asked for 6×6 panels, creatively rendered, but no wider than 6 inches.

Wow, did people come through on that call! Many pieces caught my eye, on my first pass, and completely different ones jumped out at me on the second pass.

I do like the ideas I played with, as I attempted a piece that would work, and I hope the threads of ideas I followed show up somewhere, eventually. That seems to be how art works, on a good day. Do you find that? Even the failures point in a direction. Experiments or triumphs, how was your creative week?

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