Painting, interrupted

and for the 5th time i rejected my Tree of Life project. the reason: not being able to achieve the desired transparency. i am not feeling secure with acrylics. i am picky, perfectionist. i cannot lift the damn paint off the board. i have to cover it every time I make a mistake, because it dries so fast. after 3 or 4 layers, you have a thick thing that cannot be redone. it creates disharmony with the rest of the painting that came out fine. and there you go try to find a solution for it. and then you have a snowball of problems. and all your vision goes down the drain. is that the end of my love affair with the acrylics?

guess it is time to hold my ambition and experiment more before going for huge 20 x 30 paintings.

my plan: come back to my old technique with watercolors and using acrylics for glazing and highlights.

now a little thing I made yesterday:

Sunflower and Moon

Watercolor and graphite on paper,

5 x 9.5

Sunflower and Moon was created to be the symbol of the Artessence project. The idea was to represent the  inner world, emotions and the feminine polarity (Moon) interacting with the Spirit, expression and masculine polarity (Sun). The sunflower represents creativity blossoming.

a new hope

have not heard from the cafe people in a while, so I'm assuming that the show is not going to happen - or it's not going to happen so soon. to tell he truth I am a little alleviated since I'm in a middle of an artistic crisis and feeling nauseous every time I look to one of my pieces. pieces I loved so much and had so much pleasure doing. I don't know what happens to me from times to times, really. my husband says that I am too much of a perfectionist, and he is not wrong. what I know is that I feel this urge of taking my work to a next level, of doing different things and doing it now. this is not a negative thing per se, but when you look at most of your old work with a certain despise something is not ok. I feel so lost and suffer to a point of losing my sleep at night trying to find solutions, looking for answers in other artists' artworks and all sort of inspiring images, until eyes and back cry for rest. seriously.

I have an artistic ideal very clear in my mind. the problem is to achieve this ideal when you hand simply doesn't obey your mind. well, I am passionate about Japanese/Chinese art, and my goal is to get the closest possible to its elegance and simplicity. I love the empty spaces, the limited palette, the sensation of calm and peace. but when my hands touch the brushes, dude... it's like a volcano of color erupting from inside myself spilling its vibrant lava all over the board. I cannot help it. I get crazy with the paints before me. so many colors - why to save them? I don't know if this has something to do with my Brazilian cultural background, all that sun and heat and colors ingrained in my DNA. and I thought I was not a typical Latin American girl.

but anyway... today I decided to calm down and experiment. I used a small piece of board and drew the profile of my friend and honorary model Iara, and working with watercolors in an aleatory manner.

I totally liked the result, and could have stopped if I had not thought that something was missing at the top. I also missed my usual abstracts filling up the hair. in the end I thought that a butterfly would make a charming addition, but the watercolor effect at the top didn't really match the one I did. I messed up the job. but nothing that an exacto knife couldn't fix.

I've been trying to work more on my pencil drawing, to make it more realistic. I love the combination colors/monochrome and really want to continue in this path. this little work ended up cheering me up and making me think that nothing is lost... I now have the spark I needed to keep creating.