Cat Head FP

My new felted cat head made the FP of Etsy last night- yeah!

Ambera Wellmann

After 9/11 I could not paint for a while because i just felt nervous and unsettled so when i did begin to work again I painted clouds, and nothing but. This went on for a few years until i transitioned to other things. I never felt entirely satisfied with my cloud paintings because they often ended up looking like floating rocks to me- very frustrating overall but still the clouds becond to me to paint them mainly because i had so many partial successes.
So whenever I discover a painter who can capture the essence of a cloud I am impressed and Ambera Wellmann is one such painter. This artist is new at oil painting (how annoying) and so very talented for her years. She has such a natural and intuitive understanding of color- placing a gorgeous Alizarin crimson in a sliced suggestion of a landscape with a contrasting greenish neutral for the turbulent sky above. The vapor and twisting clouds all move organically with such passion too, much like a Turner...but with the intellegence of a Gerhard Richter. I wish I had been able to comprehend (and execute) such intelligent painting when i was that age. Lucky duck.

Ambera Wellmann

il_fullxfull.85660484.jpg (JPEG Image, 3070x2279 pixels) - Scaled (35%)

il_fullxfull.85660484.jpg (JPEG Image, 3070x2279 pixels) - Scaled (35%)

il_fullxfull.85660484.jpg (JPEG Image, 3070x2279 pixels) - Scaled (35%)

Little Orange

Every so often the urge strikes me to paint traditional still life subjects. I have to be in the mood because for me it is so much harder to paint something that is in front of me than making something up on the fly....this is because there are rules about what can and cant be put down...and i dont like rules (typical artist...sigh) I started this painting,however, by using first a blood orange for a subject. I didn't like what was coming out at first and so time past by and i kept working on it...and my blood orange still life started to shrink...and shrink....and then before it petrified, (well, no really it did petrify first) i threw it out and painted completely over the original with a "regular" orange. There are so many many layers on this little (5" square) painting. So, I did end up making it up after all. Heh, heh. And i liked it way better too. I just listed this today on Etsy.

Jen Shifflet at Chandra Cerito Contemporary

I kept hearing about this fantastic painter named Jen Shifflet and how much our paintings were similar to each others. Around the fifth time that I heard this coincided with an exhibition of her work at Chandra Cerito Contemporary, so I decided I must check her paintings out. Although her work is organic abstraction and I only sometimes work in that vein, there was surely a synchronicity to how we both paint... layers of juicy oil, a commitment to technique, depth of composition and richness of color. Even some of the flourishes and calligraphic linear elements that Shifflet uses are reminiscent of components of my own paintings. As I gazed at her work I kept getting strange deja vu feelings like- "Have I painted this before"??? The nice part (however slightly disappointing)is that she a better painter in many ways ...sigh. But I am lucky to learn from her examples. Check it out yourself until the last week of August.

Here's to you Tripod

I love to create new things even if they dont come out the way i want them at first. I created this cat puppet after my own kitty, Sweet Pea (name for the flower and the pee "presents" she used to leave around the house) lost one of her legs. I guess i might call her tripod now. But she is A-okay- it was as though nothing happened to her at all and she can even run almost as well as she used to.
Anyway, I have had this loving cat for over 19 years so I thought I would make an honorary puppet of her because she is so special and reminds me of so many different times in my life just by looking at her. The puppet is made on museum quality board and painted with oil paint. I used metal brads so you can move the limbs around. Cheers Sweet Pea!