"Underbrush"

($60.00.....6" x 6"......Mixed Media on a 2" Depth Cradled Board)

This piece may or may not have a quote. It is acrylic paint so I could take that option tomorrow.....but probably not. Sometimes words are not needed. After taking a walk this morning and noticing a lot of underbrush around the fence line, I decided to come back to the studio and do a small abstract. Unbeknown to my conscious mind, the piece which was created very intuitively, ended up looking like the tangled "stuff" that was very impassable....just a different color. The solid yellow green that has no texture is a direct contrast to the underbrush. In case you want to go deeper in your thinking, this piece also represents the way our thoughts get tangled until we walk into a clearing where there is nothing to obstruct our path. Just chalk this soliloquy up to the meanderings of my mind today.

I began this piece by brushing on some gel matte medium over a 6" x 6" cradled gessobord, followed by the laying down of silver leaf. After I brayered over the leaf and dried it with a hair dryer, I mixed up my paint. Because it is acrylic I liberally added some retarder to the paint with a palette knife to have an open window of time before the paint dried.

After doing my first pass with all three colors of paint, I decided to start over, so swiped through the entire arrangement, knowing I wanted the yellow green to touch four sides of the design space to create a cruciform format. So I laid down the dark green first, follow by the yellow green and white. (only one pass of the knife with that untextured color.)    I then started laying in some line work with a bamboo pen to reveal the silver...swiping it out a few times before I was satisfied.

What is interesting is that I changed the orientation of the piece which revealed what looked like an open wire fence and the brush behind. It proves that we often end up with a piece that directly reflects what we are grappling with internally. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.

Please contact me personally to inquire about this piece.