Blue Wave Paintings

Blue Wave One

Another in my practice with newsprint.....liking that the newsprint shows through on the white spaces here. This group is about letting the really wet acrylic paint drip onto and runover the primed newsprint. Yes, using white paint primer for the undercoat and a big brush to slather it on. Let it dry a little and then with applicator bottles (saved from coloring hair) drip the thinned colors onto the primed newpaper. Let it run, pick it up, hold it sideways and rightways and any ways. Put it down and fold the wet paint into the dry parts of the newsprint. Just see what happens. Let it dry. Doesn't take long but I did hang a few pieces of painted newspaper on the clothes line to help them along. Then see what paintingsssss....big or small....show up in parts of the bigger painting.

Blue Wings

Vertical Blue Wave

Square Blue News
So...based on the idea of smaller from larger....each of these paintings were picked out of the bigger newsprint painting.

More People

More from the people series I did almost 20 years ago. Mostly working form photographs then and taking (small) steps away from the copy- copy -copy version of painting from photos. Still some of that going on here....


This is from that same time...working on some kind of reading theme...or a red book theme. These were on canvas painted in acrylic. Started with a pencil underpainting and then painted over with washes of acrylic. Probably the beginnings of how I got to my poured paintings of today ..some understanding from this that layers of paint could be used to create the color that the eye reads as blue or red or green. Nothing in nature is only one color....

Purple Trees

A watercolor from about five years ago. I was beginning to paint more with acrylics but was working with watercolor and trying to be looser with the paint. Using bigger brushes...although nowhere near as big as the two inch or bigger brushes I use now. Even more important to get the paint on the paper and let it be...or let it do what it's gong to do. No going back with watercolor...maybe just in to the garbage can.....or painted over with gesso to recycle the paper into an acrylic painting. No accidents...No mistakes....

Past Landscapes

Another acrylic on gessoed paper. From 2007. With a nod to Tracy Helgeson and an article in the Syracuse Post Standard showing me how she simplifies the landscape into its basic parts. Color is key. And...for me....texture. This one was before the heavy surface texture but it led to the place I'm painting today. For someone used to working and overworking a painting ......(to death)....... this was the start.