Recently I have been working mostly in black and white. It started with my pen and ink pieces. For those small pieces, a bit of orange or red behind the trees or creature was enough. The ink work told the story.
Now I am painting humans using black and white gouache. With these paintings, I am finding creating a background color quite challenging. It sets the mood for the portrait. Is the face excited, or sad, or anxious, or happy, or . . . there is such a wide range of human emotions. I now look at a wide range of colors for the backgrounds trying to capture the emotion of the human.
Take these two reds for example. They are both reds, but one conveys many thoughts to me: excitement, high energy, fear, happiness. The darker one speaks of seriousness, intellect, age, sophistication.
Mixing colors can be a challenge. Some darker colors are harder to adjust to "just right," as the night blue I was looking for recently.
Colors are taking on a whole new meaning and importance for this new series. Now as I mix up colors, I am keeping them in old face cream jars and labeling them--they may be needed again.
I am not ready to put out my completed work right now. It seems like a wintery thing to just hole up in my studio and paint. I am not marketing much these days, but I am close to having a spruced up website so stay tuned for that announcement.
Although I will not put an entire painting here, I have a couple of teasers (not my favorite word) for you to see.
