Heather Syren, Artist of Sorts

Touhy Ave Two Step was my first painting done from a photograph. I’m not a good model director (well… not YET anyway) and Ben was my first. He wasn’t sure what to do and neither was I. I told him to sit, stand, go over there, hold this, ok that’s it. Then I saw his shoes…

"Your shoes are so gross they've crossed into awesome."

They were grungy, to put it politely, but with use. I hate all the crap in the stores with the holes, tears, fake stains. Those are synthetic representations of what should be naturally occurring: Love with a capital L. Ben’s shoes are not gross. You can see the smudge from the hiking trip last spring, the tear from the side of the mountain. You can see the funny stain from where some food was spilled onto the left foot that one time he was making dinner for that big thing, the one on the right from when he dumped a bunch of soup at work. These shoes are infused with Ben’s history and the love that goes with that. No machine should ever be created that fakes these things. Ben’s shoes are heart achingly beautiful to me because he is completely unaware of their beauty. They are simply his shoes, quietly gathering history one nick, mark, smudge, and stain at a time.

So once again, I don’t have every step of this painting available because I wasn’t tracking things as I should. The line painting was never photographed and neither was the jean painting process. I do remember being nervous about creating a denim jean color that also reflected the grungy nature of personal history I was going for. (Side thought: I know how pretentious and arty I sound right now. I usually dislike when other people go off like this but now I see it was because I didn’t understand. Lyrics can explain themselves sometimes, paintings are wordless. I apologize to every painter I snickered at, to their face or otherwise, when they talked about making a color reflect an emotion or thought they were having at the time. I get it now, I truly do. I am humbled by your ability to articulate it better than I through so much practice and exposure to others who do the same. I am honored by your explanations. I will listen better next time.) I was afraid the blue would appear too county kitsch powdered blue so I dragged a bit of brown through it.

Bleeding is the new shading.

You can see here that I also was a bit impatient, as per my usual, and only waited for the outside edges to dry before adding more colors. (Missed the boat on the orange shoes though… bummer. I really wanted to smudge the crap out of the saddle part of the shoe) This worked to my advantage as I used the same brown to shade the shoes. Now, I had no intention of there being any color but brown. However, life has a way of changing plans without telling you it’s going to. Especially if you have no idea what’s going on to begin with.

So apparently colors can separate when they feel like it...

Here is where the photos stop for a bit. I had my good friend Kalee over for tea and conversation while my husband had his head shaved for the first time in 20 years by another dear friend, Matthias, in the kitchen downstairs. I was excited to have someone to show the whole process to AND super curious to see what hubby dear would look like. With all the happy chatter, excitement, and bouncing between floors I didn’t take any pictures at all! Kalee, however, did and she has promised to sent them as soon as she remembers. I think she took a few of me painting and a few of the studio at night as well. We’ll see.

I can explain what went on. I painted the background a nice yellow with a touch of green and a little extra water. The whole thing. Then after a little bit I drizzled a pale leaf green all around. Since I couldn’t decide if it was done I ascertained it wasn’t. I didn’t want to mix up any more colors (I did have company after all) so I just grabbed the school size bottle of Elmer’s Glue All from the stand and drew light little lines all about. I turned on the fan straight away and went downstairs to make another cup of tea.

The next morning I learned a few things.

Wiggle room...

First thing I learned was that when you set a fan and leave it on a background it creates ripples around the dried objects that look like motion lines. Second thing was straight glue from the bottle makes ‘cracks’ that can be controlled, sort of, that spread depending on how thick the line of glue is. Both good to know.

Touhy Ave Two Step on a cloudy, cloudy day...

Update: Sorry I’ve been gone a week. Life has it’s own ideas of daily agenda sometimes. Should be back to the first week furor now!

I did not post this yesterday. I should have. I am sorry. My Great-Grandmother, Lily, is turning 100 on Monday. We’ve all taken a bit of a trip for her party. I am busier than expected. I will have posts on Monday, bright and early.

So one of the things I am afraid of losing is the impromptu nature of the backgrounds and the haphazard way a lot of these seem to come together. I like not having complete control. There is a teaching in Buddhism that relates to not fixing mistakes but incorporating them. I like that idea. How often can you actually fix mistakes in real life? You can’t really. You can alter future decisions but you can’t truly undo anything. With this next painting I was going to try and use that to my advantage.

One of the brilliant things to come out of Pooled was the idea that the background doesn’t have to have anything to do with the contour painting. They can be completely separate works with nothing in common except the piece of glass that separates them. Chaos mating with control. I also love the idea of people being the focus of such paintings. We all have this static appearance, shell, body, whatever that represents ourselves to the outside world. The truth is we are made up of intangible thoughts, opinions, ideas, and desires. Desire is one of my favorite things too…

Woman, Desire is the name of the sketch

Woman on Fire began when I was 19 years old. I was going to school at UNO for a semester while I lived in Iowa. It was a two hour drive every morning and when winter came with its own ideas for my future I was stranded at home a lot so that’s how that ended. It was wonderful at the beginning. I hung out at MoJo’s Coffee and I hopelessly crushed on the barista, a fellow artist named Filipe Ramos. Well I had been doing this sketch of a nude woman stretched out on a bed and I couldn’t get some of the lines to lay how it was in my head. Filipe actually just started drawing where he thought lines should go. At first, I was mortified. How in the hell do you just start drawing on someone else’s work? But I watched his hands, let it go, and started drawing on it at the same time. It was kind of akin to jamming with other musicians but much more intimate. I have moved more than a dozen times and the poor drawing has nicks from every residence but I still treasure it. I have long since lost track of him although I know that he’s a tattoo artist somewhere in or around Omaha. If you know him please send him here. I want to see if he remembers…

I love how it looks like she's in a dream in this photo.

After I did the line drawing it took me a long while to decide what to do next. I had left the edges of the bed out on purpose but for what purpose I hadn’t decided. I was torn between layers and color separation or experimenting with background technique. I decided I had enough control freak paintings going and I really needed to immerse myself in controlled chaos. The figure is so passionate and sexual so I knew from the get go that only fire would do.

Fire!

I started with the yellow and let it set for a little while. Then some orange holding it like a confident lover. After about 20 minutes of waiting I decided a little chaos was in order. I filled it up with red orange, dribbled some yellow that was swallowed up as quickly as I could lay it, then dripped straight red food coloring everywhere. I turned on my fan and went to bed.

Woman on Fire

When Woman on Fire dried it pulled away from and into itself. There wasn’t any wrinkles as I had expected from the fan but there were tears in the glue. It was another happy accident that I adored. Now my theory is that since I didn’t turn the fan off and allow the glue to rest it just kept drying at an accelerated rate. When there wasn’t enough glue to cover the surface area it tore in the process. We’ll see… it seems that the water/glue ration plays into this as well since the red orange was more diluted than the rest. Alas, I don’t really keep track of what went into where ad how much. This is all things I will do eventually. The important thing is to have a good time and right now I’m having too much of a blast to bother with notation.

It’s about this time when I started getting comfortable enough to do more than one painting at a time. There’s a lot of down time between layers if I need to wait for things to dry. If I had enough level painting space and a few clip fans I could do about 6-10 paintings at a time. This is good for me because i get bored easily with just about everything. It’s also good for you because it means I can keep my costs down. it’s bad for this blog because I have no idea what my time-line should be.

If you don’t know how I felt about Pooled, my first of the 15×15 paintings, I’ll tell you right now. Disappointed. I mean, yes, I learned stuff and yes, it looks good in it’s own right, but I had other plans and they didn’t pan out. It’s like planning a big vacation to Paris and looking forward to seeing the Eiffel Tower but running into your high school best friend and hanging out with him for three days instead. I mean, it’s good to see him again but it’s just not what you had in mind. So I set out to find my tower and started another painting based on the same sketch.

I wonder how many times I'll paint this one...

You can’t see it all that well here but I didn’t have the line painting centered this time. I am not a huge fan of the centered object within a frame thing unless that placement is saying something in and of itself. I also had this painting be the first one where I used the easel for the fist step. Yes, upright is much less painful…

Layer one dry, layer two with two colors

I really wanted the hair to remind me of the ocean I have yet to see. There’s something reminiscent of a landlocked mermaid in the drawing and I really wanted to express that. So I took some of what was left of the turquoise from Bubbles and filled in the hair. But that wasn’t going to be enough for me and I knew it. I mixed in a bit of green and lightly dragged my paintbrush across in a few places. I was super terrified of the green either taking over or being swallowed up so I just did a few drips.

Well, here's the background when wet...

Ok, now I’m going to prove my honesty to you. You see, the background actually took about eight hours and has eight steps to it. I think on this day the camera was downstairs and I wasn’t feeling like going all the way down there just to get it to take pictures I thought I would share with no one but myself. Yes, I am ok with admitting I can be that lazy.

So anyway, I started with a nice warm leaf green at the top and just added a little blue and red to it between stripes. I was a little worried about the purple not coming out or the whole background scheme clashing with the bright hair color.

Distant Shore

As you can see the way the green and purple melded to make some really warm earth tones just makes the figure pop out that much more. The plum drips look like some sort of celestial even erupting the sky behind her, like a bizarre Leonid shower on a foreign planet. It is this image that made me title it Distant Shore.

In my last post I told you about Dorothy, our goldfish who just passed away recently, and the first painting I did of her also called Dorothy. What I didn’t tell you was the crazy metamorphosis she went through in her life.

One Fish, Red Fish

This is Dorothy about a year after we had gotten her. She lived all alone in her ten gallon tank. The black moor, SoulFish, didn’t take the transfer from pet shop to house very well and like a lot of fish he only lasted about a week. Dorothy on the other hand seemed happy here. She was small and pure red…

Soon the ten gallon was obviously too small for even just this one fish. Then the filter died. Kaput. Luckily it was just about my birthday and my hubby, our friend Aaron, and I put together the 100 gallon tank Aaron had given me. Not only that but Dorothy had begun to change…

Dorothy began losing her red...

Now I can’t seem to find the name for it but it seems that there is a something in some goldfish (especially the ornamental ones) that causes them to lose their color. Black fish turn orange or red, red fish turn palest pink or white. I think it’s a rarity as I can’t find a ton of information about it and we here we are living in the age of TMI. You can read more about it here on my favorite goldfish board.

So yes, Dorothy ended up losing all of her color and was that rare fantasy color of pink reserved for angels and luck dragons named Falcor…

Dorothy weeks before her passing...

She would take food from my hand and while in the ten gallon she’d come and peck the side of the tank when called which is how I got her to “pose” for the sketch I did. One painting is not enough for this fish.

In this one I really wanted to paint two things: Dorothy with her pond cow spots and bubbles which she had loved to swim through. I hadn’t tried to paint with straight glue as of yet so with fingers once again crossed until straightening them felt odd I started…

I started with the red-orange completely dried then added the white.

I normally dilute the glue with a little tiny bit of water so it’s not so thick and hard to spread but with the white I just went straight from the bottle.

Dry fish, wet bubbles...

I had expected the thicker glue to take longer to dry but it really didn’t. Dorothy dried clear, of course, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I was sure that I liked the shape of the spots and if I didn’t like the finished piece someone out there would. It wasn’t like I couldn’t do another one. So I started adding bubbles…

Two more layers of bubbles..

You know, sometimes I don’t know what I’m thinking. I know it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference nor can you really see it here but I added two layers of blue. For the coloring I started with the lightest shade of blue that I wanted, made a bunch of it, than added blue, red, or green to get the shades I felt were the best.

Four layers of blue and now we're nearly through.

Now that I think about it, if I had shown you every layer of blue that would be boring as all hell. I’m glad I forgot to take pictures. I will have to remember to forget more often. I should probably mention that in between layers I allowed some time to lapse. How much time? Who knows! I didn’t bother tracking this one. And there was fan usage as well. I’ll probably get more scientific eventually. But then again maybe not.

And now we wait...

After adding a very purple final layer of water all I had to do was keep busy and wait for it all to dry.

Bubbles in the morning sun

And she was done, again, and it was how I had pictured it in my head. This one was more of a focus on her favorite thing to swim through, the bubbles from the wand under the gravel. Bubbles is how I will always remember her…

Ok, so this is taking a bit of time to get caught up. I’ve been painting with glue for nearly a month and i have a dozen pieces finished, another three in the works. Hence these blogs are about to get pretty picture heavy for the sake of saving time. That’s what we all want life to be anyway, right? A giant picture book of some sort?

Dorothy was our first family goldfish. She was a tiny 1 1/2 inch red fantail. I love goldfish for their color, intelligence, and playful nature. I did a sketch of her in the fall of 2009.

Dorothy, pencil sketch. This took me about 30 minutes.

This past spring Dorothy hit her third birthday and at 9 inches in length and weighing nearly a pound, she passed in the night. I was very sad as was the rest of the family. Part of my healing process was to do a couple of paintings of her, pretty much consecutively. The first one was just called Dorothy and I experimented with trying to do shading while the glue was still wet.

I started with the highlights.

The highlights came first because for some reason my grandmother’s painting lessons were starting to recite themselves in my head. “You can always go darker but going lighter is much more difficult.”

Dorothy after the next two colors were filled in.

I waited a little while for the yellow to set part way and since I wasn’t interested in complete separation of colors I went ahead and added the orange. Without a second thought I added the dark red orange to create shadows. I wasn’t sure if it would meld or just bleed or what. Meh. Learning process!

Dorthy dry.

The next day I saw what had occurred in the night. The yellows were crisply defined and the reds bled nicely into the orange.

Now for the background it took me a few days to think about how I was even going to go about it. I wanted a watery effect but I had no idea how to do this. Again, I started with the light.

Watery lights.

I looked a bunch of water photos and noticed the wiggly lines of the light hitting the water. I figured that can’t be too hard to reproduce and since there wasn’t anything to fail at I just dribbled some pale greenish yellow all about.

Then I added the next layer of water...

I added the next shade of water. It was bleeding a bit too fast for my liking so I pointed the clip fan I got from my in-laws at it.

Well this is new...

Within an hour I was shocked to see all these little wrinkles forming in the glue, much like the ones created by holding up Evolve before she was dry. When I touched the surface I could feel how the inside was still liquid and the surface was slightly dryer than tacky, dry enough to touch without lifting glue away from the piece but it was a thin skin, ready to tear if given reason. I liked the wrinkles since in my head it made an even better watery effect.

You can see here how I've set up my easel to get a good angle on the fan's direction.

After the third and fourth layer of water Dorothy was at the waiting stage. This type of painting gives me a great sense of patience. There is little you can do to rush the physical properties without adding drying agents. If I do move into that phase it will give me a whole new reason to keep notes. How many parts glue to agent equal what amount of time, alteration of color, etc. Bah. I’m not that interested. I like learning patience.

About 7am with interior and exterior light, Dorothy completed.

I couldn’t wait for the day to brighten up the space enough so I just took a quick picture before work. I again lament the crappy camera. There are bubbles trapped throughout the water.

Bubbles…. Hhhmmmm…. That gives me an idea…

Evolve is possible the number one, all time, best, most amazing word in the entirety of language. It implies permanence with the flexibility of change. I hints that now matter what it is now everything has the potential to become better. I am in love with this one word. If I was a character in a cartoon little heart bubbles would start flowing out from my eyes and ears every time I thought about the word. The only Ani DiFranco album I’ve ever memorized is titled Evolve. The first perfume I ever received as a gift (thank you Keri) is called Evolve and after only a couple years it’s nearly run out. When I first drew the sketch I now call Evolve I had no idea how much actual evolution would go into it. She’s been a flier for the band, a seat of the pants “mistake” experiment for the glue paintings, and is about to be a shoulder tattoo.

Although Bloom wasn’t a total loss it wasn’t what i wanted either. One of the beautiful things about this process is the fact that if I don’t like something I can do it over and over again. Like screen printing, the original is intact and just waiting for it’s next incarnation. As soon as the colors decided to play their own game I started a second version of the same motif. I painted the face and shoulders and let it dry, then I added the hair. I looked at my melting mess and my new controlled chaos and I realized two really is better than one.

After allowing the skin to dry I added the hair and watched for color bleed.

I was terrified of the wet layer melting the dried layer. I was nervous about color bleed. I was dizzy with excitement! It was working!!! I went to bed and dreamed dreams of warm winds rushing along the process.

I had found a way to get what I wanted.

When I woke I was greeted by a fresh dusting of stupid snow (after this winter I seriously considered moving to Puerto Rico) and then I ran upstairs to my little sun porch. It was just as I had imagined!

Side by side comparison of the two paintings.

I think it was the joy over Evolve that made it easier to not be crushed, controlled, or disappointed with Bloom. It gave me the courage to experiment more. I think that without small victories we tend to take the battle a little too seriously and it makes the wounds take that much longer to heal. I learned from this that I should always have a couple paintings going at any given time. If one doesn’t’ work, the other just might. I am my own buffer and I need to rely on that more than anything.

I added a background in soft greens and blues.

When I thought about how the painting looked in my mind I saw stripes of greens and blues, all softly bleeding into each other. After I added the colors I wanted I remembered: wet glue doesn’t just bleed, it melds. So said, “Meh,” and dripped food coloring all over it.

Straight food coloring was dripped all about the background.

I mean, what can possibly happen that I couldn’t foresee, right? Well, fifteen minutes later I found out.

I had forgotten the tipsy nature of my house.

Oh yeah! My house is tispy and the sun studio is even worse. Gravity and the ghosts had once again decided to have their say.

Another small span of time...

And another 20-30 minutes… (I knew I should have timed the photos. Next time I just might remember)

A few hours later the movement seems to have stopped

By the early evening the movement seemed to have slowed, possibly to the point of stopping. Who the hell knows?

By nightfall she was dry enough to pick up and try and get some cool pictures.

She is infused with light...

I had my husband, Luke, come up and help with taking the pictures as I directed and oh so gently held my girl up to the light… She was infused with the light. She became the light.

So I guess temperature has something to do with drying time...

The next morning I truly began to see how much temperature has to do with drying time. Being in a room without a heat vent, space heater, and three walls made up of 2/3rd’s window (no storm windows either) made the drying process something I really had to wait for when it concerned larger areas. I did some deep breaths and let it go. I can’t rush time and so neither can I allow time to rush me. Deadlines start with the word dead for a reason.

The first real dry day.

I was so enthralled. Everything was how it was in my head but better. There was shadow, movement, and evolution. She really had earned the title Evolve.

But wait! There’s more!!!

Now my camera is NOT a good one. In fact it’s supposed to be a video camera but it’s awful at doing that. I can’t get good detail close up nor do I have control over the color tone of the photograph. If I could show you how the sun has now taken it’s roll seriously around here and added a beautiful gold to the painting I would, really. However, things are what they are. I guess you’ll just have to take an in person gander at the upcoming art show!

This will be one of the longest blogs. In the future I hope to do daily updates so I don’t freak everyone out with a thirty minute read. I fully expect about 2/3rds of you to stop reading soon and just look at the pictures. Totally fine by me as I am pretty honest in admitting that sometimes I do this too. Like I said, this blog is partly for my benefit. I am sorta inventing a medium and I need to keep track of how this all works.

"Evolve" is the original title. You can see the drawing in the upper left of the drawing board.

Bloom was from a drawing I did about 5 years ago. It was one of those drawings where I thought, “Hey I really want to look at that right now but it doesn’t exist,” so I had to draw it. I was fortunate that it came out how I wanted it to the first time.

Old Tsumi flier utilizing "Evolve" with much digital alteration.

Then I used it on a flier which turned out to be the perfect size years later as I began these paintings. Starting with the right size drawing has proven itself to be very important.

Bloom as a line painting.

I love this photo for the accidental art it creates in and of itself. You can see where I’ve blotted the excess black acrylic paint from my brush and where Pooled spilled off of the glass. I like photos best when they’re taken slightly off kilter too.

You can see here that I've propped up the glass with a canvas. This is so that if the glue runs off it won't stick to the paper beneath it.

Bloom was my first attempt to have color separation. However, what I did not realize is that I live in a tipsy house. My sunny studio was an afterthought for this house and so it is not really level. Well, none of our 101 year old house is. So I added one color, then another, then another. I thought if I did this all quickly it would be ok for some reason… (insert eye roll here). I also tried to achieve the colors I wanted by adding more glue to lighten everything. You’ll see why this deserves its own special eye roll in a minute.

This is how it first looked after all colors were applied.

So I know it looks a little messy but I thought maybe after it all dried some of the colors would still match up to the line painting. I thought that it would create a little visual movement behind the thick, stiff lines.

Oh mess.

Then about an hour passed and I could tell how gravity was going to have it’s own say in how this all turned out.

As glue dries it has a possibility of pulling away from itself in an attempt to cover all of the surface.

So in this tipsy house, with wet glue running amok like a ghost doing finger paintings, I thought I had my first do-over on the rise. But then I really looked at the colors melding and decided I might have just found a new way of doing things. I also had the eureka moment that since I was making this all up I couldn’t really be doing it wrong, only finding new techniques. This opened up a whole new form of relief and excitement! Everything I do has the potential of being awesome! No one has set any sort of bar so I had nothing to outline failure except for my own expectations!

I love the milky colors here.

So as Bloom began to dry I got super excited and started messing with my metal clip light, shining it through from one direction and another, trying to get a glimpse of what she would look like. I fell for the swirls, the milky light, the soft sage edging…

It was going so well. Every roadblock was becoming a blessing.

When it was dry enough to pick up I quickly did and took another photo with the clip light behind it. I watched asa the glue held its top layer and the underside clung to the glass, making beautiful ripples. It was sigh worthy. (note to self: find out at what time point a painting can be set on its side in order to get deep ripples to set in)

Then the next day came.

Um, yeeeeaaahhhh... this isn't what I ordered?

You see, what I had failed to think about was one of the biggest major selling points of Elmer’s Glue All. It dries clear. So all that time I had spent adding glue to create a soft, light, nearly pastel color was doing nothing but increasing the transparency. Bleargh. My swirls and eddies of colors were now only faintly recognizable. But I didn’t feel like scrapping it. I mean, if I’m making this up I might as well play with it, right?

Can't get worse, right?

So I added another layer. I dripped food coloring onto it and watched it run. I tried out the intensity of my reds and found out it was pretty much just pink. And I watched…

I watched it change so swiftly and so slowly. Then the buckling came.

Buckles? Mountains?

It was so tiny at first. Just a little bit of a ridge. I looked online for research about the properties of glue and what happens to it chemically as it dries. Everything was either way over my head or completely useless. Ok, deep breath. The worst that happens is… nope. There is no worst. There is nothing else to compare it to. Ok, another deep breath, this is all fine.

The buckles turned into a topographical map of the county of Bloom.

The Buckle Mountain Range on the Bloom Continent...

I was super pumped at this because now I know that glue can create its own texture, albeit uncontrollably, if I let one layer dry and add another to it. We’ll call this The Mountain Effect. I loved how it curled around in just the right places.

Bloom, a little over a day and a half after the second layer was poured.

So then came a shocker I should have expected: the second layer takes nearly twice as long to dry as the first. I thought it was only a day but according to my notes it was longer. But it was worth it. After one day I could see the depth of the mountains and the smoothness of the valleys. It was soft like satin and ice together but the the hardness of the glass canvas.

Bloom, totally dried and cured

After a couple of weeks of waiting the colors had cured and Bloom was ready for framing. She was worth the wait and all the knowledge I got out of it was amazing. This is the most fun I’ve had painting in a long while… I am so glad for all of it.

I truly believe all art comes from that place deep inside that is always wanting.  Some fill it up with work, others drown it in drink. I tried everything. I should have known better.

While I am a musician and have been playing regularly for six years it just wasn’t filling the empty place anymore. I am a sixth generation painter and for some reason I just didn’t want to paint with acrylics and it had been so long I couldn’t remember how to paint with oils. Watercolor takes a delicate hand, something I was not blessed with, and although sketching is beautiful and I have a bit of talent with it it just doesn’t have that flow that painting does. The way the brush glides, leaving color behind. The way the layers lead to shape. The way shape leads to shadow. So even though I had creative outlets I was still wanting.

Then I realized I am a dumbass. Here I am, in this beautiful house that my husband and I bought, and it has the second floor sun porch I’ve always wanted for a painting studio. It was the selling point for me when we looked at the house. I had dreamed from the deepest depths of my childhood that I would have a place full of light, seemingly made of it, where I could draw, paint, sit and drink coffee and stare at whatever I was working on so I could tweak it a little in my head. So I was sitting at the end of the longest winter, buried in blankets my great-grandmother had made, dying to paint in this imaginary space that I already had. In the basement was just about every medium imaginable, trifles bought with the intention of use that became very good at gathering layers of dust over the years. So I got mad. How could I have been this big of a dumbass for this long? I got up, brushed away the last of the winter chill, started a pot of coffee and started clearing out the sun porch and hauling everything artsy out of the basement.

I painted a painting, hated it. Started another, didn’t feel like finishing it. “So this is it, ” I thought. “Well, that was short and painful.” But I had always had this idea…

This is what has inspired me to try and invent something to do.

My ex’s brother gave me this wonderful abstract. I was like colored plastic on plastic. I thought he had said something about glue and acrylic paints on plexiglass. So I googled, and googled, and nothing. I tried to find him on Facebook but finding an ex’s family is never easy. I sent a message and waited. Twenty whole minutes passed and, can you believe it, nothing. My patience competes with that of a 3-year-old with ADHD right after chugging a whole 2 liter of cola. I looked around the house for SOMEthing. I was frantic with ideas. I found a pic of me and some old girlfriends I don’t even talk to anymore, a bottle of Elmer’s Glue All in my stepdaughter’s room, a sketch that I blew up on the copy function on my printer, and all my acrylic paints. I found my camera. I decided that since I had no idea what was going to happen I had better keep track of it. I started a Flickr account not knowing that after just two paintings my upload capacity would be maxed out.

Click to see the photo diary of Marion, my first.

Here is my second, Pooled, which I used food coloring instead of acrylic.

And that’s how it got started.

It then got better.