New painting

2013 has been a slow painting year for me. I’m not even sure where to begin with excuses…we listed our house last month, so we were trying to keep it spotless for awhile, and my art table became our office, so I’ve been relegated to painting on the kitchen table. I’ve been busier than usual with work, and our kids are staying up later as they grow older. My daughter who is just finishing Kindergarten is reading now, which adds a bit of time to bedtime.
And then, I have a little four-year-old as well who likes to venture downstairs after bedtime, foraging for something to eat. Tonight, he got to watch me work on a new painting. I let him, because I so seldom paint that he just discovered that I’ve painted most of the art on our walls last week. He had forgotten. He is also left-handed like me, and has a creative approach to the way he makes things and colours that makes me think he could also become a painter, so I thought he should watch.

So I was inspired to do a new painting for our living room, now that I am free of my previous creative obsession. As close friends will attest, I have been shopping for an overdyed Persian rug. I finally settled on one in my price range, that ships to Canada, that is made of wool, that has a medallion pattern. I’m so looking forward to having the furniture grounded and not shuffling around on the bare wooden floor. But part of the features of an overdyed rug that does not cost a fortune is that it is not my first choice of colour (which would have been some shade of blue or turquoise). It is green…think ferns, forest floor.

My husband and I love the woods, and we want our kids to be raised with a peaceful outlook on life and appreciating God’s creation, so I wanted to paint a forest scene. Here is the basic composition painted using gesso, coffee grinds, acrylic gel medium and dry wall filler. It will be a day or two before I get back to it, but I hope I can finish painting the background, which I intend to do with paint, pastels, paint pigment from Roussillon, collage, and gel medium. The trees in the foreground will be high contrast.