Hello and Happy New Year!
I know it's half-way through February, but I haven't been here at the blog so far this year, so this is my first chance to say that I hope your new year is going well. Believe it or not, I am enjoying winter, because it hasn't been bad where we are, and because I don't have to get up at 5am to go to work in bad winter weather anymore! It's easier to like winter when you are able to stay inside with the fireplace going while it snows, and also know that it's not up to you to shovel it!
I may not have been writing my blog as regularly as I would like, but I have been painting regularly - pretty much every day that I don't have some kind of appointment. At my age, those are mostly doctor or healthcare related appointments! But I don't have that many of those, so the bottom line is that I paint almost every day.
It's kind of amazing to me that at 83 and with my Parkinson's, I still feel like I am growing and expanding as an artist. Fortunately, the Parkinson's does not bother me that much when I'm painting. In fact, it's the one time when it almost seems to disappear! The people researching it should look into that...
Here's a short clip of me painting today. You can see I have no tremor or shaking at all in this video. But it is tiring to paint with the brush, as I have to concentrate so hard to control my movement. So I use palette knife more often than the brush nowadays. I also have to sit to paint now - that's been the case for a couple of years already. You might remember when Melissa put together that chair for me during the pandemic.
Melissa says she thinks I'm doing some of my best work ever, and I have to agree. I'm not sure it's a case of painting "better," just differently, with different results that I very much like. As I mentioned, I use palette knife most of the time now, because those are easier to hold and control. They result in a whole different effect though. I've been trying new techniques, which are evident in the new works I'm showing you below. It mostly has to do with texture and the way I'm blending colors.
Anyway, how anyone feels about my current work is in the eye of the beholder, so you are the beholders and you can decide for yourselves!
I'm thinking of putting the painting on the bottom right in the first photo in the next Falmouth Art Center show, which has the theme of Blink. The idea is that the artistic creation - painting, photograph, sculpture or whatever it is, will depict something that will be fleeting - gone in the blink of an eye. The painting is called Cascading Moonlight, and it captures a moment when the light is just such that it looks like the moon is dripping, and a moment later, you know the light will change and that will be gone.
