Hailey's Angel

I love talking about my pieces.  I love that in a blog form, one can read it and also be happy about art.  And if art isn't your thing, you don't have to read it.  However, you might want to read this story because this piece of art is special and has an interesting story.

I knew this piece was going to be this dress.  It has been backed up in my mind for a while.  It's relatively large for a painting of a child's dress, around 4'x3'.  It began with a molten wax pour.  I enjoy playing with the molten wax, scattering pigments and swishing them all around. 

Because of gravity, the piece has to lay flat while I'm working with wax.  I take pictures of my work as I go to get an idea of what it will look like standing up.  I saw the angel right away and then I noticed a little girl in a big party dress, reaching up to kiss the angel.  At moments like these, one has to decide whether or not to include what is seen in the piece.  I decided that it would be a great dress.

I continued to finish the work, protecting the images that I had originally seen.  After she cooled, I stood her up and took pictures.  Before I named her, or even really took a close look at her, I was distracted for several hours.  Upon returning to her, I immediately saw that the girl in the wax was my niece, Hailey, kissing her guardian angel.

She's in a big pink party dress-up dress a few sizes too large for her tiny frame.  Her hair is halfway up; the flying ribbons of her bow and sash exhibit her constant frilly motion. 

The angel is to the left of Hailey, hugging the curves of the dress.  Her body is positioned like a shining art deco hood ornament but she is very softly dressed in the most beautiful gown I've ever seen. Her wings are gloriously spread.  I don't often get personal messages from God but this was a great one.  It gives me a great sense of peace, comfort and joy every time I see her.

What's even better than all of that?  I realized later that the day I finished the piece was Hailey's actual fifth birthday!  Happy Birthday, Princess Girl!  Love, Aunt Ree.

An Emerging Artist

My 10 year old grandson, Pla Shee, is an artist.  He has the gift. It will be interesting to see how it develops as he grows.  In his home, hangs the piece, Homage to Mondrian, which has been nicknamed The Jellybean Tree.  It's an encaustic wax piece with glass.

Pla Shee received paint this Christmas from my parents to encourage him in his art endeavors, as they did for me.  A couple of days ago, his mom asked him if he'd like to paint her a piece opposite The Jellybean Tree so that she would have one that was day and one that was night.  That was his only instruction. Let me also mention here that Pla Shee has never painted with this sort of paint before and only painted a couple of times with watercolor.  Here's what he came up with:

It's a great first painting for anyone and he hit some points that most people would.  However, there are elemnts of his piece that show his gift.  Let's look at the pics side by side:



The first thing that jumped out at me was the tree. He has never been taught how to draw a tree, he just knows intuitively.  Notice how he has main branches that are mirror images of the daytime piece.  His moon is in the mirror image of the day's sun.  Where there is glass in the day painting, there are buttons on the night painting.  The color palette is the same in both pieces.  All of those things make it a good piece.

More of the details make it a better piece.  The night tree mimics the day tree with bright colors mixed in to the dark main color.  The trunk's roots also contain a shadow in the same dark green on both trees.  The rectangular spots that can represent falling leaves or rays of sun are similar in both pieces.  Also, notice the circular rays of color in the sun piece.  They are mimicked in the cool light surrounding the moon.

What makes it a piece that shows his gift is the perfect mirror imaging.  With no training or supervision while painting his first piece, he intuitively knew how to make mirror images in color palette as well as the components of the image itself.

Here are the pieces hanging together in his home.

Thank you, Nana, Papa and Blakeley for encouraging Pla Shee's amazing gift!



Media coverage of Granbury Show



Reproduced with permission.  Copyright Hood County News 2010.

 This article regarding my upcoming show, Art Without Boundaries, ran in the Hood County News on November 24th. 

To read the article, go to my art's facebook page:  annmariepaints. 

Hope to see you all this weekend!

Ferdinand Frolicking

Ferdinand Frolicking, 22"x30", watercolor & encaustic on panel

Ferdinand is an interesting piece in that he's a little different than the other brightly colored pieces of this collection.  He's much more 3-D than the others. 

When my brother was little, he was in the hospital for a couple of weeks with patches over his eyes from an accident.  My Aunt Jean read several books to him via cassette tape and he listened to them in the hospital.  We also listened to her read those same books over and over on the tape for years thereafter.  Ferdinand was our favorite story and when I saw this little red bull emerge in this piece, he (the little bull) told me that his name was, of course, Ferdinand. VERY special memories rush back to me every time I see him.  Aunt Jean was always very special in my life.

Do my pieces always tell me what to name them?  Most of the time they do.

These brightly colored pieces all have a common process that is utilized to create the image.  I begin with handmade watercolor paper, water and pigment.  I slosh around each color randomly, let the paper dry and then slosh another color on.  Sometimes images are so strong and emerge so quickly, like with Ferdinand, that I feel compelled to include them in the finished piece.  Other times, there is no clear figural image or there is one but I choose to ignore it.  Those pieces generally convey an abstract thought, movement or light.

Ferdinand, as the others like him, continued to be developed further with watercolors until he almost looked like a finished watercolor piece.  Then comes the wax.  Yay!  I mounted the paper to a self-framing board and began the dots. 

I love making the dots of color out of the encaustic wax.  One of the very first things I learned about art was how to mix paint to match any color in the world.  I've carried that over into the wax pigments as well and thoroughly enjoy it.  The colored dots can be larger or smaller, match the paint underneath or be their opposite on the color wheel.  I use them to emphasize certain areas or show where backgrounds are.  Sometimes I make them in patterns just because they're pleasing to the eye.

Ferdinand, just like the little bull in the children's book, chose to be just a little bit different than all the others with the bright colors.  In one of the layers of watercolors, he chose to bend the paper just where his horns are.  I then chose to emphasize his horns.  They are bowed out by the paper as well as thick layers of wax laid down in such a way that the texture almost feels like horns when you touch them.

At that point, Ferdinand himself had to be waxed in a different way.  I applied darker and lighter shades of red wax layers.  The wax was carved through the layers in a stylized manner to create his eyes, muscles and hair and shade his features.  He's truly a very special little bull.

Flip Flop

Flip Flop is mostly a found object piece but is mixed with encaustic wax.  We hadn't been back from Hawaii long when I was throwing away tons of coke boxes and saw a beach in them.  In case you're reading this from somewhere other than the great state of Texas, the term "coke" is used to describe any brand of soft drink. 

The bright, wonderful colors in this piece are made up of lots of different types of coke 12-pack boxes.  They are layered on top of each other and the encaustic wax.  Gravel, sand, broken glass and mirror are also layered in with iridescent blue and gold pigmented wax to represent the feel of walking on the beach.  Larger, thicker pieces of broken green glass represent a broken bottle, littering the beach.  There is so much water and soft drinks at our house in the summer.  This piece is a happy reminder of the bright, happy fun of summer.

Pay Pal Available for The Watercolors series

Have an original watercolor delivered to your door in time for the holidays!  Choose a piece from the blog, contact us, pay via Pay Pal and the piece will arrive, matted and framed on your doorstep right away.   

Call Blake for assistance: 877-877-8766

Ken

Ken  24"x49"  encaustic, toad and videotape

Barbie and Ken are matching pieces.  They're not a traditional diptych because they don't need to be hung together.  They don't match in the traditional sense but rather the thought, age and stage of each piece's concept is the match.  They are both conceptual pieces, one of a female and one of a male at age 40.

The most difficult work of art to understand is often a conceptual piece.  It takes effort on the part of the artist to convey the thought of the piece. Likewise, it takes effort on the part of the viewer to let go of  preconceptions of what a piece of art should be and ask instead what is this piece trying to say.

I'm sure there are pieces of art that seem crazy to the majority of the public and also have nothing to say.  However, I find that if there is a soup can sitting on the floor across from a film projector in a pile of candy, there's generally something that is being said.  Now when you see pieces such as that, you can say, "Ah, I bet that's a conceptual piece of art" and you will most likely be right.

Ken is conceptual.  Ken has 150 or so individually crafted orbs of videotape merged together into a loose rectangular mass.  There are a few manly-hued primary colors of encaustic wax and a bit of dark colored netting hiding amongst the videotape.  Oh and there's a small dead toad hiding in the corner.  A uniform, sensual 1/2 inch thick layer of natural beeswax makes the base.

A toad?  "What would posses a person to do that?" I've had many people ask.  After my previous blog, Frenzy, with the dead bees, I thought an explanation would be helpful.  I found the toad outside one evening while I was working on Ken.  He was already dead and dried out, perfectly posed like he is in the piece.  He's been dipped in the encaustic wax so he's perfectly preserved forever. The purpose of the toad in the piece is to say that even though you're a 40-something man, you still have a dead toad in your pocket, as you would as a 4 year old boy.

Conversely, the videotape, the scale and the smoothness of the wax show how you're a 40-something man.  You are self-assured, you know what you like, you enjoy techno-toys, such as the latest video-flat screen-sub-woofer-whatever-it-is that men need to be men.  Ken is clean and sexy with a sleek, media-room style while still being a little boy underneath his facade.  Ken is a complex man in all the most wonderful ways.