Enforced Silence Leads to Art

Rex Amoris. Fri, 23 July 2010.
"Energy lines" sketch.

I had a great art day today. Periods of silence - or at least when I'm silent - do that to me, and I know I should seek out the opportunity more often. That said, today was a great day for art.

I ended up having worked on three projects today, which started out as two, the first being a painting and a study for an idea which I have code named Rex Amoris (more on that later) and a leaded-glass window project for the house.

Two Paintings

Although I started out the day with my visit to Rainbow Glass, I stopped by the Levittown Wal*Mart and bought some materials for painting, especially some nice, acrylic gesso to give me a fresh start on some stagnant work. When I got home, I took my sacred cow of a blue canvas (with which I was supposed to do some dark-to-light thing) and gave it a fresh coat of white gesso. Today was a hot day - especially in my atico - so it dried quickly enough for me to use the carbon paper I had got for stained glass to transfer the enlarged image to the gessoed masonite.

Upon looking at the gessoed masonite image, however, I think I'm going to have to give the figure wings and turn him into an angel. The figure is just too small against the ground, and a pair of large, pigeon-like wings (or even raven-like) would fill up the space and give the composition more energy.

I like the "energy lines" I mapped out. Basically, these are going to dictate the directions of the brush-strokes. The primary energy is going to be straight vertical up-and-down with this counterpart of swirling. I don't intend on a realistic background - or even a figurative background at all. I think it's all going to be color play for me. Playing with paint.

Leaded Glass

Midway through the leaded glass project.
Before I realized the horror!

The stained glass window project led me to head over to Rainbow Glass on Rt. 13 in Bristol, Pa. I picked out some lovely shades of glass to replace the bathroom basement windows. I had planned to use them to learn how to do lead came work, but I thought I  got talked out of it by the owner of the shop. When I got home, though, I realized I did want to practice lead came work.

Unfortunately, the measurements given me by the owner of the shop for lead came were waaay too small. I think I will keep the pretty shards of glass for a complex work with lots of little pieces and re-cut the glass to fit better what I need to do to work with what I have.