"Come let us welcome the new year, full of things that never have been." Now midway through January, the new year as welcomed by Rilke, has begun to reveal some of its promise. These hellebores that bloomed so early in November and caught the first frosts in December are now solidly hibernating beneath three feet of snow dumped from the neighbours' tarp -- but they'll be back, ten months from now?
And "Hunker Down," the third in my Flash Mob series that was started just as I began my fall art class, finally came to completion just as 2017 rolled in. It started with my usual quick sketch and colour plan.
Once again, I worked over an old painting whose time had come. As I began to place the outlines, this took on an odd abstract quality.
Before very long, I felt I'd misplaced and/or mis-sized the sprawling figure in the upper left corner. But that's the wonder of acrylic paint -- you can usually paint over your mistakes --
and try again.
Once I finished my fall semester art class and art homework, I moved along pretty quickly in my morning studio hours, and finished it up. Well, not quite. One of the things I like about my flash mobs are the negative spaces of the background colour showing between curved or outstretched limbs -- and this just didn't have enough colour slices showing through.
Aha! Adding a simple sleeveless top to the guy in the lower right gave me another spot of colour vs. flesh -- and that's it. Here's the finale:--
For the whole work in progress, see here. And to view the two preceding flash mobs, check here and here.
In the back of my mind, I have plans for more in this series, drawn from sketches in my old Aquatic Sketchbooks. I'm thinking ten would be a good number for the series, and then I'll have mouse pads made from all the images. Ha, ha. That's a joke. The mouse pad part.
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