Me the artist

December 23, 2023

Me the artist

My mother was the type to stop for art she saw from the road. She had purchased some old print on board, something made to look painted with the wood grain frame popular last century, sometime around when my brother was born, and from an old thrift book shop. You can find the artist in a Google search. She also bought me a Picasso from a parking lot, and she had a large Matisse, Goldfish, on the wall behind our couch. It inspired me to paint.

When I was young, I told everyone I was going to be a famous artist. I thought I had a good hand and eye for composition, and I was cocky.

So here it is, many years later. I'm not famous but I've painted this whole time. My husband used to like to paint too, and when we were young he took some of my paints and brushes and I stopped painting for a while.

I started blogging in 2007 and won an award for writing that year, so I decided I was a writer at that point. But last year I painted a considerable amount and started doing these digital pieces on my phone. They have been extraordinary in the last few months, lending themselves to my scientific thinking.

When I was 33 I decided I wasn't a writer but a scholar. And I blogged a lot about philosophy and science and had this wonderful blog, buried right here, well now it's disappeared, but I erased it. I lost so many links!

Anyway, this digital art, I got hit in the head the day I started doing it. My cat jumped on my head and I heard a crunch and began taking photos, which turned into digital art.

I had made pictures like this before. But I made more dramatic pieces this time, and produced many and had them printed as posters. It was an enormous accomplishment for me because I had been wanting to do 2 things, artistically, from when I was younger and I knocked them both out last year.

First, I had wanted from the time I was very young to have prints like the ones on the wall at my Dad's friend's house. His girlfriend sold prints of George Rodrigue's and they were matted and framed and signed in metallic paint pen. I am going to Google search this item right now.

The signature is the most important part. I wanted to make prints and sign them. I had a show in a gallery when I was 24 and had been hoping to and said I planned to make digital and paint, mixed-media pieces, but they never materialized.

The first is from that show, the other two are the digital work I did at that time.

Anyway, so last year I did the mixed media work I wanted to try and I printed more than a hundred digital images and some were put into paintings and some are embellished posters. I sold about 4 of them and one painting downtown last year. I made $80.

But the more amazing part was that through the use of photoshop for my pictures, and I like to think of it as modern and I can do whatever I want, artistic license, but I began to use the different templates to create shapes and this was very educational. Collage had been such a favorite from college, I even made some with my daughter Sarah, and I tried to incorporate them into the paintings, but in online art and with my husband's love of abstract art,

it evolved into these really abstracted digital collages. With Gestalt and my teacher's collage method of shape and color blending into each other, I experimented with what I knew and liked to do. And they became fairly interesting.

Everything is supposed to be original art and photography.

The ones without all original material are earlier.

So that my body of work was bigger and my plans came to fruition, very cool.

But the rewards multiplied. Because as I have studied art and history and philosophy, the use of shapes in collage created a kind of illusion of three dimensional space, though only obviously constructed by reducing and multiplying these simple shapes, proved the divinity of the shapes from the Greek viewpoint.

The work made universes, strange lands and mirages.