"Essential Ingredients" (final)

($420.00.....cropped portion of ...18" x 24".......Mixed Media on Canvas with a 2"00 depth)

"Essential ingredients create growth." The key word in this quote is "essential". There are essential steps or ingredients that must be present to have growth. This was a piece created for the 30th Anniversary of Capital City Scribes. This organization has definitely been an essential ingredient for my growth in the lettering arts.

I don't often create a piece with quite this much texture, but this particular design element was my passion for this piece. What you saw in the previous posting was burlap fabric primed with gesso. It's hard to capture the richness of the texture in a photo or the richness of the color. My inspiration was a picture of an interior room with a view of the forest outside. The colors in the piece represent most of the color notes in the photograph.

One of the problems of creating a piece with horizontal (or vertical) bands is the straight and hard edges. For that reason, I took the bands of color that have "splotches" of paint outside and sanded between layers and ended up slinging paint onto these strips and adding water to some of the edges to give some vertical and erratic lines with some diffused edges. The dark green in the burlap carried over into this slinging process also creates an "echo" of that color.

Even though I like vertical and horizontal bands, I am now ready to do a piece where the fabric is placed very randomly and without a precise shape or pattern. By the time I finished this piece, I was feeling a bit confined. Never the less, I am glad I followed my vision because it will definitely inform the next piece I create with fabric collage on canvas.

The last element added was the kiln formed glass elements in the openings of the burlap. It does add a lot of reflective quality to the piece and I am glad I tried it, but today, my inner creative voice is screaming for asymmetrical. And so shall it be.....in the very next piece. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.