transforming skies

Core Samples 01 — What is it that you must do? What is your work about? What are the roots of the things that feed you? What are the common threads, those things that have been in you all along? What is it you care about? What are your values? What are you manifesting in your work? The first impulse often is the choice that our intuition is instructing you to do. You have to trust what you live, and stand in your center. Trust your own inclinations and develop them. Find your vocabulary and find your own voice.

I need to explore painting and get back into doing creative things with my hands. I want to mix architectural concepts with graphic forms in visceral mediums. I want to allow myself to explore and play. To investigate rather than to problem solve. To take a road that leads into unknown. To start something without knowing how it will end. To start and see what happens.

For our first project, I became interested in capturing an almost “non place” place—the sky—through my paintings. The sky is an object which thrills me. The sky is a place that is constantly changing and is never the same color or form twice. It is a place of constant transition. I am drawn to the colors that are constantly changing and shifting, especially at sunset and sunrise. I wanted to capture the sky as a dreamscape and to create a piece that blended skyscapes as landscapes.

I wanted to start painting and see what would happen. I had not painted in a few years and my hands were quite rusty, but I enjoyed the experience of painting, layering and wiping off, adding pigment and covering up layers underneath. The process of covering and uncovering is a process which I worked through in different mediums, but it was especially rewarding to play with it with the very tactile and malleable oil paints. I enjoyed brushing the canvas with a rag, while responding to the shapes and colors which appeared or disappeared.

The two paintings I did for this project attempted to capture the dynamic symphony of color. They translated the two extremes of dawn: the fuchsia of daybreak and the periwinkle of daylight. They represented the gradual evolution of the sky simultaneously, and only while painting the panels did I experience the blending and transformation of the sky as I had experienced that August morning.