Sometimes, I move forward and grow in my art by coming in the back door, so to speak. On vacation I felt both eager to experiment and … stuck. Couldn’t come up with starting points.
To move past stuck, I took note of what was catching my eye and used those noticings as a back door to get paintings going. When MaryAnn Shupe’s watercolor circles caught my eye, I painted some circles of my own to see what might emerge.
When a painting in a Thomaston coffee shop caught my eye, I decided to use it as a reference—to “steal like an artist” and let that painting spark me to create an interpreted approximation with my own hand and eyes. I wanted to see if I could replicate certain effects.
Nope, I could not!
But what I could and did do was learn a bunch about how watercolor paints do and do not work; advance my color-mixing knowledge a smidgen; make discoveries about using watercolor, acrylic gesso, water-soluble pencil, and ink together on paper; and muck about with unexpected challenges when drawing buildings with intended imprecision.
I unstuck myself!
Not only that but also I was thoroughly contented and absorbed as I puttered in my makeshift seaside studio setting, and I now have another study/experiment in my journal!
8 x 8″; watercolor, acrylic gesso, water-soluble pencil, and ink
on journal page
2024
dottyseiter: now playing 
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