Art du Jour 92

Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs. (Fay Weldon)

It has been over six months since my last art du jour post. I’ve missed that drug.  See, I would add Netflix and Making Stuff to that list.  I admit my addiction to all of the above.

These are the coffee pictures for my daughter.  Her colours are grey and turquoise.  There is a lot of black and white in her kitchen and I know she likes purple, so fingers crossed she will be happy with these.  I am trying to be less chaotic with my creations but maybe it’s just not in me to make something calm and normal.

It’s a lazy Sunday here, perfectly gorgeous fall weather.  We went for a stroll down to the mall and back in search of rimmer spices for Caesars.  Do we have our priorities straight or what?

When we started this ‘update the look of your ’70’s house’ project I professed to not like grey.  Then I said I didn’t like turquoise and I was really done with purple.  Then I chose pelican grey for the master bedroom and both bathrooms and NOW I’m thinking turquoise and purple are really nice and maybe those should be my colour splashes in the bedroom and forget royal blue or red.

So I guess my point here is you can believe what I say today but don’t assume it will be equally true tomorrow.  I’ve made up my mind to never make up my mind.  Or some such nonsense.  Posting this now before I rethink the whole thing.

Happy autumn Sunday.

Art du Jour 91

It’s the Fish Picture!  Or the Fishing Collage!  Or Angling in Hell!  I haven’t made a final decision on the title.

Normally I do ink spritzes to finish but W was so happy identifying fish species I decided not to obliterate them with colour.  There are no purple pickerel in the real world.

But there could be rainbow cats.

I got a how-to art book from Amazon and the first exercise is to draw a bunch of cats.  HAHA!  I am obviously SO ready to move on.

Hope your weekend was happy and fun!

Keys

I have one set of keys. Car, remote car starter, house and mailbox on two key chains hooked together.  That’s it. I like to hang them up at the door so I will remember to never leave home without them.

All the rest of the keys and other hanging things belong to W. Except for my spare set of car keys, but he uses them and I never do, so they don’t count as being mine.

This is what our mess of keys looked like before I got all ambitious this weekend and made new key holders.

The bottom board is something I put together years ago when I first started painting. It is made from a drawer front, weighs a ton, and was hung up on one center nail. If you didn’t hang your keys just right it went off-balance and either hung crookedly or fell off the wall. Once it went down the basement steps. Funny how you put up with annoying things for a ridiculously long time and then one day just decide to do something about them.

My daughter has offered to paint our house interior, and although I was contemplating updating the guest room/library first, now I think we should start with the back door entrance.  Taking these three junky things off the wall was a start.  Putting up NEW junky things will probably get me in trouble.

W thinks it’s funny that there are so many hooks.  So I asked him to identify all the important hanging things we’ve been looking at every day for a dog’s age if not longer.  We have handcuff keys!  No handcuffs anywhere, but we are prepared if they suddenly turn up.  He used to be a wildlife enforcement officer, in case you’re thinking the handcuff thing might have a slightly more kinky explanation.  There are several key chains with no keys on them, keys we believe might be for one of the filing cabinets, some which could be for padlocks, and several about which we do not have a flying clue.

One of these key holders will go in our garage sale, probably with miscellaneous mystery keys included. I only did the second one because the first one didn’t have room for everything.  Keys are like plastic containers with no lids, or lids that don’t fit on anything.  The day after you throw them out you discover you need them for something.

So they get to hang there for a while and I will tackle another junk corner somewhere else. In other exciting news, our dishwasher door has a broken spring and falls like a lead weight if we let it go, so we went searching for the appliance book to see if parts are still available for it and threw out a dozen booklets for things we no longer have.  The dishwasher is 18 years old!  Today is my son’s birthday and he is 40!  Reverse those two statements in order of importance.

My point is, what is the point?  Okay, I admit I don’t really have a point today.  Except maybe to advise you to take stock of all your keys.  Make the mystery ones into a decorative wall hanging.  Give your grown children something to roll their eyes at.  Then if anyone wants to know how you spent your weekend you can make them sorry they asked.

Art du Jour 90

What do you think? Too wild? Would you want to live in this chaotic little city?

I don’t know whether or not this is finished yet. It’s one of the biggest canvases I’ve ever worked on so all that work makes me feel like I should be done.

And then I frown at it for a while trying to decide what’s missing.  But whatever is missing, there’s no room for it!  So I’m finished, right?

Anyway, letting it hang for a bit.  I used up a LOT of paper scraps creating my little village on crack.

Art du Jour 89

Even though this is not my art, it is the product of my art class, so it qualifies for the art du jour category.  My two amazing students (granddaughters O and M) when given free rein in the art corner always come up with some creative, artistic and interesting results.

They have done a lot of stickers and stamps and drawing and painting on paper, but this weekend graduated to mixed media on canvas.  I think I’ve got them hooked.

They had some help with the ink splashes (it’s pretty messy) and the addition of texture, but the rest – collage and colour choices – it’s all theirs.  I got to hang them on my wall for a day, but now the art and the artists are headed home.

I hope whenever they look at them they remember what fun we had putting them together.

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This canvas sat on my easel for weeks, faceless lady in monster hat, making me sad and wanting to watch murder mysteries rather than finish what I started.  Then I chucked her in with a stack of other stuff I still don’t know what to do with, except to keep it all in a stack under my paint shelves.

Yesterday I decided to at least fill in her face, and the rest just flowed from there.  This no longer makes me sad and I don’t hate it.  Yay!  Mission accomplished.  I love the purple and the turquoise but I have no idea what that hat is supposed to be made of.  Let’s just chalk this one up to January boredom and blues, waiting for the sunshine.

Happy Sunday!

Art du Jour 86

This might win the prize for most minimalist thing I’ve ever done in mixed media, supposing I stop now and leave it alone.  There is no sealer on it yet.  Like that would stop me if I decided to go nuts with the ink sprayers.

Nope, gonna control myself and start something else instead.

The page a day calendars which were supposed to motivate the hell out of me in the form of inspirational blog fodder have been disappointing.  Or maybe I’m just unmotivatable and it’s not their fault.

Take these, for instance, and judge for yourself.

When a guest, don’t be the first to arrive or the last to leave.

Stupid advice if everybody invited takes it seriously.  No one will show up at your door until they see someone else go through it.  Or, towards the end of the evening there will be a mad rush for the exit with no one wanting to be the last one out.  This is why I don’t throw parties.

A little attitude goes a long way.

What does that even mean??  Attitude comes in different sizes?  And where is it headed?

Here’s another funny thing, or maybe I haven’t said anything funny yet, but here’s something else anyway.  I have been blogging for SO long that sometimes people will like an answer to a  Wordpress Prompt that I wrote two or three years ago, because the prompts are being recycled and my post somehow pops up in a search.  And nobody pays attention to dates.  Or however that works.  The more I write today the more confused I appear to be.

So I will leave this alone too and go finish the laundry.  One of these days I will have something astounding to say and something brilliant to show you.  You will just have to wait for it.

 

Art du Jour 85

A couple of days ago I made a coffee cup template and then spent half an afternoon going through my paper jumble cutting out the mug shapes with scissors and an exacto blade.  I also had these two little canvases started with cut up pages of print glued on to them and covered in inky dabs as an experiment with colour.  In a burst of maniacal creativity I decided to pair them up.

And thus we have the result of plan as you go.  Or don’t have any plan and then critique your colour choices after the fact.  These either go with anything, or (more likely) nothing at all.

The good news is, the next one will be better!  Because I have about a thousand paper cups needing a place to shine.  Yes, a thousand is a gross exaggeration.  I have maybe a dozen more, and an actual idea in my head.  And then I think I will be done with stacked coffee cups for a bit.

Art du Jour 84

This is me attempting to be more disciplined and methodical. Let it never be said there was no method to my madness. Well not within my hearing at least. Sometimes it’s good to be less random and impulsive and end up with a piece that’s not bordering on crazy. Although I’m sure I’ll get back to those soon enough.

It’s terrible trying to finish these things in the cold and dark of January. They have to be sprayed with an acrylic sealer that smells toxic so I don’t like to use it inside. And outside it would rather freeze than dry these days so I bring sprayed things inside before the odor has dissipated and then the basement smells like insect repellant. My son said that long after the smell should have gone away. Or maybe our basement just generally smells weird. That’s also possible.

I have more coffee themed creations in the works. Stay tuned.  And have a happy Sunday.

Art du Jur 83

Or maybe I should say “art du réveillon de Nouvel an,” which might mean New Year’s Eve art in French, but to be safe, don’t quote me.  These are footprint pictures I did for one of K and C’s bathrooms for Christmas, because my son admired the ones hanging in mine that I did for myself.  Don’t ever admire something in my house unless you really mean it.

The photo was taken at night in not very bright light, so the colours are a little weird, but there’s never a lot of natural light in bathrooms anyway so maybe this is what they’ll look like, except less blurry.  Also I think they would look better hung side by side.

Okay!  My year in review!

Ha ha, sorry to scare you, I’m just kidding.  I survived it and that’s what counts.  If I don’t feel like looking backwards at the things I lived through, I can’t imagine why anyone else would want to.  My life is just not that damned interesting.  Onward and upward to another new start on the road paved with good intentions.  That doesn’t always lead to hell, does it?

Whatever.  I have a plan.  It may sound as if it’s made up of very vague resolutions. Because it is.

1.  Try to blog something every day, even if it’s just a picture or a quote or a weather report.  And once you are disciplined enough to do that, hopefully some of your posts will turn into something better.
2. Share your world fifty-two times!
3. Use your page-a-day calendars for inspiration!
4. Answer some WordPress prompts!  Maybe lay off the exclamation marks!
5. Creating art every day is a pretty lofty goal, so try for twice a week.  And if there’s more than that, well yay!  I mean just yay, with less excitement.

Have you ever been so overwhelmed with all the things you want to do that you just sit down and don’t do anything?  Wow, I hope it’s not just me who does that.  And I hope I’ve gotten that bad habit out of my system for a while with such a slack assed December. Pardon my French.

January, my least favourite month ever, with 31 dreary days, is coming right up.  I would like to fill it with fun.  I have two half bottles of red wine in the fridge to finish up (in five ounce increments per day because that’s what diabetics are allowed) so I need to get right on that before it all goes bad.  I have several art projects on the go, and several more in my head.  Chapters had their calendars on for half price today so I walked down there and bought three of them.

PREPARED is what I am.  Bring it on, 2016, I’m ready for you.

Happy New Year everyone.