The Villa La Contessina Series

The Villa La Contessina Series

Sometimes I feel the work I create is random and doesn’t have a cohesive style.  But then, sometimes, when I look back after several months connective tissue appears.

Years ago I moved away from Atlanta and my art teacher before I completed my “final project” in composition.  I never intended to paint.  It was a composition course.  But the last assignment was 10 paintings in a series.  I was drawn to a color palette I later realized was inspired by a villa in Sorrento Italy I have visited several times, the Villa La Contessina series.

That color palette turned up in a collage series I recently completed too.

Here’s a little show of all of them together

Working toward Resolution

Working toward Resolution

So I made a little reel and posted it on Instagram, showing the lead up to a series of 10 paintings I working on right now – six out of ten finished, I think.  The project started  years ago as the last assignment in my Composition class, just before I moved from Atlanta to Chicago, and languished for quite some time
 
 
I joined the Creative Strength Training this year, and also one of the focus groups focused on creating in a series, and it finally pushed me to get the original sketches transferred to paper and then to get to painting.
 
They won’t be perfect, of course, but working through the puzzle that is resolving a painting is a frustrating joy, and since “resolve” was my word of the year, it’s appropriate that they will finally, literally, come out of the closet.
 
Here, take a look, I start with the “still life”, which I made 30 drawings of , each 20 x 30, from different angles.  Those were layered over one another, three at a time, rotated and flipped until I got a composition I liked.  Then, I was inspired by the color palette of our favorite Italian villa, which led to the mess of paint tubes and pots full of mixtures – now I’m fully in to the mixed media layers of it all!
 
 

 
The Sun Sets on the Series

The Sun Sets on the Series

The series of 10 collages based on views through various windows that have been meaningful to me is finished – pretty fast for me considering I began it during a class in June and there has been a lot of away time since then.  On the left, what I see everyday from my window high up in a Chicago lakefront studio.  On the right, seems appropirate to close the series out with a sunset scene, again from the beachfront window along Route 30A in the Florida Panhandle.