Altered Environments, 10/11-11/4/2012 Szozda Gallery, Syracuse NY

Crescent Moon, 9/23/2012, acrylic wash, monotype and rice paper on canvas, 5 x 5 inches

I've been invited to be in another exhibition at Szozda Gallery and have been finishing up my work in progress...last weekend was perhaps my most productive in quite awhile...and it felt good to splash around a bit...resolving a few things that have been lingering on my work table or propped in various propping places...these two little moon paintings have been a study of patience...they've been chronic "do overs" for over a year...you'd never think something so small would be so complicated! I've painted over them, I've peeled rice paper off, I've glued mat board to them, and then ripped that off...applied more rice paper, painted and painted and painted over that and then more rice paper...then a wash and then suddenly I have a pair of paintings that I'm very much in love with hanging on the wall side by side...

Full Moon, 9/21/2012, acrylic wash, monotype and rice paper on canvas, 5 x 5 inches

Where water meets sky...9/23/2012, acrylic wash, monotype and rice paper on canvas, 30 x 12 inches

 Sometimes a painting happens with little effort...Where water meets sky... came into being with less fuss...it's so delicate and lovely, the children's moon floating in the sky pulled perfectly the first time without more than a dab or two with my pinky finger to touch up where it needed a little help...

Blue Moon, 8/31/2012, acrylic wash, monotype and rice paper on canvas, 39 x 12 inches

 This Blue Moon was one that I had a bit of a time with...a wash of Prussian blue made it glow...

Late Summer Dawn, 8/21/2012, acrylic wash, monotype and rice paper on canvas, 18 x 6 inches

This little one was pale green once...but hung around looking unfinished...it has a nice distressed look to it that I was going for...and that red-gold wash made everything so stunning in the end...

Midnight, 9/21/2012, acrylic wash, monotype and rice paper on canvas, 12 x 12 inches

I should never try to repeat a painting that I've sold...it never works out...I fussed around and fussed around with layers and layer...I nearly scraped the whole thing down while I scratched away at the layers I had built up, thinking I'd go black with it, but not really wanting to use black...then I did a wash of Prussian blue...this made it as near black as I wanted to get with it...

An Autumn Morning, 9/21/2012, acrylic wash, monotype and rice paper on canvas, 12 x 12 inches

This last one was a problem child from way back...some of the gold is showing through from previous layers...I had a pale blue over a dark blue scumble layer over it that wasn't quite behaving itself...so I went after it last Friday on my day off...and made it misty like that morning...pulling random marks with cut-out shapes and edges...

In the midst of all of this industrious creativity, I have been nursing two of my elder cats, Tiggy-Pooh got biffed in the eye by one of his buddies while playing and had to be run off to the vet for that, so I'm juggling his attitude about being medicated...and our oldest kitty, Fatty Woo Hobbes, the one and only button-eyed schmoo, slipped away in his sleep on Wednesday night (9/26).

Fatty Woo Hobbes 1997-2012, soaking up the sunshine 9/16/2012

It's been a trying few days...needless to say, I'm feeling a little frazzled and sad...on top of it all, I also have the usual FMS flare-up symptoms making life interesting (I won't go into the gory details of those, the timing is as always "fantastic.") So this weekend I'm going to be good to myself...if I paint, I paint, if I don't, I don't...that's okay. The sun is shining...I'm going to head out to the porch and soak it up while I can (just like my little old kitty did, he had such a good day that day.)