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Mister Black & Ivy with Turq Tablecloth
12 x 12"
oil on textured canvas board
WIP & NFS

Yesterday my Dad agreed to join my blog! He is pretty cool. I bet there are not too many octogenarians out there who know how to blog! So, Dad, welcome to my blog. [If this sounds like a goofy talk-show, sorry, I love my Dad]

I was hoping to post a nice new painting in honor of Dad but it just didn't work out. Sigh, you can never schedule good art. Well except in Harry's case but I will tell you about that after I tell you about this painting. After all, you all want to hear about ME more than Hare, right? Haha. I heard that.

OK so I have always experimented with different textures in my paintings. The coolest texture was for Dawn & Roy on their walls. So I tried some texturing on this canvas. However it kept soaking up the oil paint so that I could not squish the paint around before it dried. Bummer. But I am trying other solutions.

The next thing I wanted to show you in this photo is that the painting itself was just not finished even tho I was done adding things to it. But the photo here presents some ideas. Again the idea of the repetition of Mr. B. as a photo of himself. And something about that door opening into the scene. I love these colors but as you can tell the light from the window in the photo has much more to it that I failed to capture.

Dad, I hope you are still with us, after that artsy stuff. You will like this part. Dad recently returned from France where he visited Giverny, Monet's Garden. He brought back some photos and began his own Monet collection which I can't wait to see. So I Googled Monet's garden and found these awesome flower photos. I am working on one now, thank you, Dad for the inspiration! "Monseur Black with Sunflower", I suppose.

The final topic for today is Harry. He has just cracked it wide open. No really, he did. Checked my voice mail after church & there was this message from Harry. As I listened... "You have one new message..." I was worried because church is just two minutes from home & thinking he knows my cell is off at church so why would he call unless it was a bad emergency? Well I hear Harry in his most victorious voice saying, "Dear! I cracked it WIDE open!" If you don't know what I am talking about refer to the Blog Post from June 2nd entitled "Mister Black takes a Nap". Whew!

So I get home and what do you know, Harry really did crack it wide open. He has entered this whole new phase of his art. And what is so cool about it is that the Lowe is having a grand opening of its new Atlanta gallery in less than a month and will show his new pieces. This is where the paintings cooperated with the schedule for once!

He did some writing about it and you, my Dear Loyal Blogees, get to be the first to read it:
[I know, the honor is more than you can bear! Haha]

"The findings of my research were unexpected. The works of art produced shifted directions from representational to completely non-representational and abstract. The one aspect that continued to evolve is my interest in the spiritual and the primal, but even that bordered on the idea of "nothingness". Originally I began my research by investigating the art of the Ukraine and Burma expecting to find some link with my cultural past, but surprisingly that never happened. Instead an interest in the Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8th & 9th century developed from the Eastern Orthodox Church. "Iconoclastic Controversy" means "the image breaker" and I became fascinated by the destruction and the shrouding of the representational images during that time. Ironically I feel that the attempts to destroy and cover up those representational images only made the images more effective, more powerful, and stronger through their incompletenesses, hidden meanings, and their overall sense of mystery. The approach to content through evocation and gestalt rather than through representation has now become a major influence in my work."

I will post an image of his paintings when he is ready to "unveil" them. He is a Scorpio with a strong dose of Leo - secretive, but dramatic about it.

So that's the blog for today! Again so happy to have you "here", Dad!
Now go shopping @Etsy!