Layered Acrylic Painting: Innocence Blooms and Flutters
Layered Acrylic Painting
I made this painting over many weeks. I worked on it several times a week, and I changed the overall message, theme, color choices, shapes, and tone many times with each new layer. I am enamored with nature. I hold the utmost reverence for nature, for birds, for blooming flowers, for the shapes and colors, the scents and tactile experience of just touching leaves and flowers, fallen feathers, seeds, bark, cotton, and so much else. When I paint, I paint to music. I play everything from Alison Krauss to Louis Armstrong to ELO to Tom Petty or Johnny Cash. The music is what really brings forth the marks and brush strokes– the tone and colors and overall flow. I just lose most desire to “think” and just move and make whatever mark happens.
Recently, I moved about 20 paintings that range in size from 3′ X 3′ to 12″ X 14″ — from a yoga studio in a very posh side of the city that I grew up in- to a medical school’s gallery. I gave a brief 10 minute talk there to about 30 medical professors, students, and administrative staff. I keep my story light and about the work as much as possible. Here is what I said (although I am editing it here because I write under a pen name here):
I am the youngest of seven children. My dad was an engineer, and my mother was a trained singer. I began my lifelong commitment to the arts through piano, flute, and voice lessons and competitions. After I graduated from high school, I left to study Art History. Over the course of time, I changed my major, and I decided to study Human Development and Family Life and English. In college, I worked in the Arts Department for many years where I spent hours in the private studios of professors, their classrooms, and the private studios of Fine Arts majors, and with that exposure, I began drawing and painting with my roommates and friends who were studying Fine Arts. I began to take drawing and mixed media art classes in my late teens and early twenties as a result of their encouragement. I am blind in one eye from birth, and I somehow felt inhibited about pursuing visual arts, but I love color so much, I have decided to just let it flow.
I continue to aspire to use these degrees through the process of writing children’s stories and sending them off to publishers. I also grade online as a TA for a university, and I also work with my husband for our business, helping to design and market sculptures and hand-forged ironwork.
In my spare time, I am usually working on my artistic pursuits or hiking with our dogs. I also enjoy singing, making jewelry, and photographing natural settings. I have also been working on stories about my travels across the U.S. and Europe, and I have been encouraged to submit my writing for publication by a respected author. I will continue to pursue writing stories for picture books–and submit them for publication. I would love to both write and illustrate picture books and to be a humorous but educational voice for children.
Much of my inspiration over the years has come from my daily walks. Walking and hiking have been a part of my daily life for over thirty years. Walking outside allows me to connect with the natural world—and birds, plants, and animals. These walks give me a chance to slow down and see the subtle beauty of the world with a fresh perspective through all of my senses.
When I go to the studio to paint, I use acrylic paint, different tools and my fingers to create works that are evocative of the beauty and wonder of the natural world. While painting, I listen to a broad spectrum of music—from classical to soul to Latin and Bluegrass songs. I often dance and physically move the canvases in a free-flow form. The whole process is based on exploration, discovery, and intuition. I learned this process in an online course: Bloom True the e-course with Flora Bowley in conjunction with Beth Nichols of Do What You Love. It changed my life.
Each layer of paint, of the 10 to 20 layers, reveals something unexpected and unique. Both the blank canvas and the in-process canvas—give intuition and deeper emotions a place to reveal themselves and breathe. I just listen to what is emerging and remain open in the process of responding in a fully expressive way. The process of layering paint, wiping away areas that don’t work, and working with what is working—is truly forgiving and liberating. It allows me to break through perfectionistic tendencies and get into a state of flow and relaxation—where I both lose and find myself with more ease.
All of the images that emerge, in a seemingly magical way, highlight their meaning for me and their natural beauty in literal and abstract forms. Each painting is a synthesis of emotions, music, movement, love of color, love of the natural world, and the various cultural influences that have shaped my consciousness and visual consciousness. When all of these elements come together in a painting, the spontaneous expression that results is intended to convey a simple message: reverence for life.
