IsabeauxStudio

From my most recent workshop that I attended on February 9th,  I came away with the germ of an idea how to start a new series of works.  Admittedly I have been floundering since my colored pencil series now almost a year ago, waiting for that bolt of lightning to hit me with the "a-ha! this is what I am going to do" moment.  I like to do things in groups, it gives a sense of cohesiveness, and shows that the technique wasn't an accident or a one hit wonder.

The task during the workshop was to create a personal collage.  That in itself was a pretty broad and vague assignment.  But I have done a lot of collage pieces on my own, and it was right up my alley.  Initially I wanted to use a motif that I use quite frequently in my pieces,  a ladder  (see journal entry "City's Edge") and mix that with more organic shapes.  I had just returned from Hawaii where being in the water and snorkeling had made quite an impression.  I wanted to somehow combine the two elements-geometric and organic. I had high hopes from where I started but ended up on a completely different path-here are the initial rough sketch book sketches....

The ladder shapes in this sketch become almost a city landscape, and the wave moves in and around the "buildings."  I wasn't so happy with this sketch, so I tried another.

This image I thought was the stronger of the two pieces,  so I decided to proceed with this one.   As I began to transfer this sketch to the good watercolor paper, I got an idea, which took me into a totally different direction.  As I was drawing in the left hand side of the image, I realized that it could very easily become a tree.

This is what the piece evolved into.  You can see how in the sketch above how that evolved into the tree form at left. Of course it is still not done- what I really love about it is the way the "ladders" form the tree and the landscape.  I like how I used the color to change the continuous wrapping ladders so it evokes the feeling of "ground" and "tree" without having to draw exact representations of them.  What I don't like is the figure.  It made the whole piece end up to look very much like a children's book illustration- not that there is anything wrong with that, it just wasn't my intial goal.

What I do take away from doing this painting is how I will start to construct my next one. The lightning bolt had finally hit, and I am excited to start something for the first time in a long while.