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The first Art in April Festival was held in St. Bernard in 1996. It celebrates the culture of St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana. The area flooded during Hurricane Katrina. In the spring of 2007, I decided to visit the festival and take some photos. The festival uses a sunflower as a symbol.




acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5

So that is where my process began. Although the sunflower was a motif for the festival, I had no photos of real sunflowers. So, I searched sunflower photos online. After scrutinizing the images of real sunflowers, I rendered the painting below. Above it is a photo from Art in April Festival.

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One afternoon during a rainstorm I happened to take some photos from inside my car. I let the rain on the windows and windshield distort my images. The results were unusual. Later on I used the images as backgrounds photos for various profile pages. I posted the group of photos on my blog pic folio.




acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

Going back to my rain photos, I picked one as a starting point for a painting. I’ve posted it below. Beginning with dark greens, I then added pale blue dots to finish. Along the way I abstracted my photo while maintaining the look of this series.

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Next up is a painting that celebrates an art supply store on Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans. It is called National Art and Hobby. What’s unique about this particular art store is that it features murals on an outside wall facing a side street. Some murals from a couple of years ago were my inspiration for this painting. Recently they were painted over making way for a new mural.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

After much contemplation, I came up with this design. Again, I incorporated a grid into my painting. The name of the store is visible if the piece is turned sideways. I set the painting aside for a few days before I finally finished it.

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In the spring of 2007, I attended a screening of the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts for 2006 presented by the New Orleans Film Society. One of the shorts that amused me was “The Danish Poet.” I had the title on my list of events I wanted to remember, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

In the last year I have revisited an interest in maps in my art sketches. I’ve played with imaginary layouts of city blocks, but kept them abstract. In the “a” series Next I mentioned that I had seen a show of mosaics. That experience also fed my process. So what does that have to do with this piece?

When I was stuck for an image, I watched the cartoon online to aid my creativity. Then it hit me. The beginning and end of the short include maps of a small city. In fact they were similar to the drawings I’ve been making. Early on I had picked colors from the short for my background. But now I had my idea for a design. From there I played with the layout of my dots and create my own pattern.

Nueve

Finally here is the third painting in this grouping. I started out with aqua and then added colors I used on the other two paintings. At some point I’ll work on the other six I have in progress. So, that’s the latest on the “Numeros” series.


acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Ocho

This one began with a red background. I used many of the same colors that I used on the first one in this trio. While one painting dried I worked on another one. There is nothing worse than smearing the dots.


acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Siete

For months I have been stewing about how to complete my next three paintings from a series I call "Numeros." The canvases for these paintings are all 20” x 20”. Although I had a certain process for the previous ones, I didn’t want to repeat what I had done before. During the summer I thought about using some colors I had seen in the Japanese animé cartoon, “Ponyo.” Beyond that, I had to think about what I could do to make these next three pieces different.


acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

A couple of weeks back I began by choosing specific background colors inspired by “Ponyo.” I then started creating meandering lines similar to ones I used in previous paintings in this series. While I was rotating my canvases, an idea hit me. Why not have the lines run horizontally rather than run vertically? I looked at my meandering lines and thought of all the line graphs that have been used to talk about the economic news over the last year. Anyway, this is the first of the three new paintings.

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A couple of springs back, I saw an installation by Ammar Eloueini at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans.
The structure made of lit triangular shapes intrigued me. So I included the experience on my dot-art-idea list. The question became how to best depict what I had seen and make it
my own.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

Fortunately I was able to purchase a book about his work. Recently I skimmed through the book looking for the basic elements of his designs. Triangles and lighting were the two most dominant features. Already I had chosen two dark blue shades for my background. So then I painted lighter blue dots in the shape of triangles on top it. I used varying tints of blue to create intensities. To make the image mine, I loosened the grid in places so that it wasn’t quite so rigid and accurate.