"A Gift"

($150.00....12" x 12" Experimental Piece....Water Soluble Oils on 300 lb. HP ...Mounted on a 1.50" depth Clayboard)

"Every day is a gift." It's short, it's sweet, and it's true. Enjoy each day and count it a blessing!

This is another gestural landscape, but this one is based on a reference photo taken from the second story porch of our house. Since I have been painting these types of landscapes, I have been noticing the sky a lot...like every day and even pulling off of the road to take pictures. It is utterly amazing how quickly the sky changes and how it reminds us of the expansiveness of the universe.

It is also a very natural and obvious way of learning how to divide your space. You can have the sky taking up most of the space or flip it and have the land taking up the space. Either way and all the ways in between are good lessons in space division. 

There are other ways to divide your space that every artist should be familiar with...especially if you're working in mixed media. The cruciform is the most versatile. It is nothing more than dividing the space into four quadrants. It amounts to touching the edges vertically and horizontally and unequally. In other words, you could have the vertical division line to the far left or far right and the horizontal division either very low or very high. Playing around with this format will give you all kinds of possibilities.

Whenever you find yourself in a confused and unorganized design space, thinking in terms of a particular format will go a long way in helping you out of your confusion. So just think about it. You could paint four unequal quadrants a different color if working with a cruciform format or you could have unequal horizontal bands (as in a landscape.) These are just two exciting formats that will give you a lot of mileage. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.