My Paintings in the Poydras Home Art Show and Sale

Here are the three paintings “Diez,” “Once” and “Doce,” hanging at the Poydras Home Art Show and Sale, November 6th and 7th. The show included a large group of artists from the New Orleans area.

Doce

The last of the trio, of dot paintings, had a lot more blue and green dots in it. I was exhausted by the time I finished it. Fortunately I finished all three paintings days before the actual deadline for a group show.


acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Once

As I finished one, I started in on another one. I kept the same colors, but I varied the scope of the spectrum. The dots took a lot of time to apply. Along the way I mixed quite a bit of paint. This one had a lot more red in it.


acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Diez

This fall I completed three more 20” x 20” paintings in my “Numeros” series. Each time I change up the design. This year I was inspired by one my “5 x 5” paintings that I painted earlier in the year. Below is the first one of the
new three.


acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Here is the painting, "te," that inspired my three new paintings. I used it as a launching point and then followed my intuition from there. As in my previous “Numeros” paintings, I used a pastel palette.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

zo

The last painting in this batch has to do with an annual festival that takes place in old Memphis during the month of September. It is known as the Cooper-Young Festival. Along both sides of two intersecting narrow roads, artists and charitable organizations and individuals set up their tents and tables. The Saturday I went, the streets were very crowded. Anyway, the 2005 festival poster lead me to this stained glass sun design. The painting didn’t go according to plan, but it captured the event for me.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

yo

On my first day in Memphis, August 28, 2005, I visited the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. That happened to be the last day of a show called, “Patrick Kelly: A Retrospective.” The 80s clothes, he designed, were known for their use of colorful decorative buttons. Kelly was an African American who was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In 1979, he moved to New York to study at Parsons School of Design. In 1985 he showed his first collection. He died in 1990 of complications from AIDS at the age of thirty-five. The bright colors of the buttons I saw in the show lead me to create this painting.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

xo

Perkin’s Restaurant and Barkery is a chain of restaurants I discovered during my stay in Memphis. I ate breakfast at one of the restaurant locations most mornings. You pay as you leave the restaurant. While standing in line for the register, I would browse an assortment of bakery items in a display case. This painting is representative of a display of muffins.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

wo

On my last night in Memphis I went with a friend, and a couple of her friends, to a restaurant called Yia Yia’s Euro Bistro. It was one place I had not tried yet. The colors in this painting come from the colors of the inside décor – including mosaic tile work. We had a fun that evening and I had fun painting.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

ov

One of the first days I was in Memphis I visited the The Pink Palace Mansion, which is the headquarters for The Pink Palace Family of Museums. Before leaving I purchased a book on the mansion. When I started painting these paintings I seized upon a motif from a photo in the book. It was part of a decorative plasterwork located in one of the rooms of the house. That is the basis for the image you see in this painting. I went with pink for the color of the motif since came from the Pink House Mansion.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

uo

My second Nashville stop was the Tennessee State Museum where I viewed the “Rau Collection: Six Centuries with the European Masters.” The show included artwork from the early Renaissance (1425) through the mid-20th century (1955). Each room, of the exhibition, had a different color to denote specific artistic schools. In my design I used the room colors for each stripe as well as the background of my painting. Beginning with the “to” and continuing with this painting, I used a color and its tints. It is an effect I sometimes use in my dot art.
acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

to

Many of the mini malls in Memphis have a uniform look. Each business has the same red for lettered signs, the same brick color and similar foliage. Anyway this piece is a response to the mini malls. I visited several of them while shopping for necessities.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

so

Another restaurant I visited in Memphis was Napa Café. The bright artwork on the walls hung in contrast dark red walls and dark green woodwork. I took colors that I saw there and came up with this painting. I enjoyed the food and the atmosphere when I dined there.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

ro

On one of my first days in Memphis I tracked down the Peabody Place Museum and Gallery to see a collection of Chinese art. This painting is based on a green sculpture of a lion creature featured on the museum brochure. When I searched for the museum online, I noticed the name has been changed to Belz Museum of Aisian and Judaic Art at Peabody Place. The sculpture, on this page, is similar to the one I depicted.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

qo

AAA’s Tennessee tourist guide helped me locate some interesting restaurants during my stay in Memphis. One of the restaurants listed was Rook’s Corner located at a Hilton in the German Town area. The lobby of the hotel was very modern and striking. The corridor to the restaurant was painted yellow and included contemporary works of art. When I created this dot painting, I mimicked the curvy pattern and colors of the artworks I saw.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

Five Years Later

Five years ago I found my way to Blogger while exploring an AOL Top Ten Blog List. I was merely trying to find out what blogs were and why people were constantly talking about them. Suddenly I was prompted to create a blog. Surprised at first, I clicked away. A few minutes later I went back and created my first blog about my dot art. It wasn’t long before I set up several more blogs. I jumped in with gusto.

My first intent was to put images of my art out there since many of pieces had survived Hurricane Katrina and the Flood. I was grateful that the works were spared. Some of my college, and younger artwork, perished in the basement of my aunt’s house. The art wasn’t high enough, from the floor, to remain dry.

It’s taken some time for me to find a groove for this blog. Along the way I’ve been lucky enough to have regular readers. Several of them enjoy telling me what they see in these pieces.

Tonight I am working on some new dot paintings. The deadline to submit them is in the coming week. I still have many hours of adding dots to three 20” x 20” canvases. My process takes a lot of time.

A BIG THANK YOU to my readers who continue to visit this blog. Thank you to those readers who comment and regularly share their observations. I really appreciate your feedback.

Now back to work . . .

po

While in Memphis a fraternity brother showed me two of his separate landscaping projects. Both involved colored cement. The cement used in the backyard of a townhouse was a yellow-brown color. In the other project, the cement path from the main house to a new basketball court, was purple. Thus I combined the colors from both projects in a dot painting. In addition the colors turned up in a photo published in the local paper. That was coincidental. Anyway, I was very pleased by the color combination.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

oo

Sometimes a certain icon will pop up in my daily life. If it repeats several times, there’s a good chance it will show up in my artwork. My story begins with rabbit images featured in an art show at Cheekwood Art & Gardens in Nashville. Artist Joseph Peragine chose a white rabbit as he explores the theme of “vulnerability” following 9/11. Also in the show included images of Sherman tanks. Apparently, the design did not do well in tank-to-tank combat.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

When I arrived back to Memphis, I thumbed through a book I bought at Cheekwood. In it I stumbled across a photo of a sculpture located on the grounds. Sophie Ryder built her sculpture, Crawling Lady Hare, in 1997, when she was an artist-in-residence. It was constructed out of tightly bundled galvanized wire supported by a steel armature.

The following day I met an art professor, my family put me in touch with, over at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery. There was an exhibit of T. L. Solien’s work. Several of his pieces included cartoon-like rabbits. I don’t remember if this one is in the show, but it was similar to the ones included in the brochure I picked up. His surreal images depict events in his life.

Some weeks later when I was back in New Orleans I noticed a newspaper story about a giant pink bunny sculpture erected on an Italian mountainside. A Viennese group of artists, calling themselves Gelitin (Gelatin until 2005) stated that the giant stuffed toy was “knitted by grannies of pink wool.” The idea was to give people the feeling that the rabbit was the giant, Gulliver. People who have visited the sculphttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifture have been invited by Gelitin to upload photos to the website photo album.

Well having encountered these four instances of rabbits, I decided it was a good symbol for me to represent my evacuation to Memphis. Also, the day I went to Cheekwood, I was trying to keep my mind off the fact that Rita was delaying return home. The excursion was an additional escape, if you will. For this painting I decided to paint a simplified white rabbit with a green background. The white rabbit was one I first saw At Cheekwood. The green background has to do with the Cheekwood gardens.

While in Memphis I saw a film entitled “Forty Shades of Blue.” It was filmed in Memphis and the director was on hand to take questions after the movie. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the movie enough to stay. In fact I hated the movie. In the plot, there was a love triangle with people that just did not interest me. Overall I found the film irritating and depressing.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

That being said, some of the background shots included flickering blue lights. I previously have discussed bokeh/circles of confusion. Well that part interested me. My order of canvases, beyond the first eight, did not arrive until the day before I left Memphis to go back home to Metairie.

Back in the New Orleans area I saw many roofs of houses covered with blue tarps. Well, that’s the blue I used to create a background color. My composition had a number of variations of that same blue color. This is the first instance where I consciously mixed something from Memphis and something from my return to the New Orleans area as I continued working on these dot paintings. As for the title, it is pure coincidence that "no" (New Orleans) was the title for this content. The title for each of my dot paintings, in this series, is assigned according to its date of completion.

mo

When I made my day trip to Nashville, I first stoped at The Frist Center for the Visual Arts. Inside this large modern building was a group show entitled The Fragile Species: the New Art Nashville. The shows theme was “vulnerability of the body and the transitory nature of life.”


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"


One piece, in the show, caught my eye; it was called Especially Considering Exposure by artist, Barbara Yontz. When I made my dot painting I imitated hanging threads with my dots. My colors choices were influenced by the show as a whole. Many of the works had a medical feel to them. Not every show I see moves me to make art, but this one did.

lo

lo” was inspired by Paulette’s, a French restaurant, in an Midtown Memphis. It is in walking distance of a movie theater and a performance theater. The interior tile work inspired my color choice. When I asked my server about the speedy service at the restaurant, she told me that the staff is aware that diners are anxious to get to a movie or play. I enjoyed the dishes I ordered both times I dined there.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

ko

At the University of Memphis Art Museum, I attended the opening of an exhibit called “The Perfect Show.” All the pieces were by artists who worked in very detailed compulsive manner of perfectionism. There’s one piece that had black enamel dots that was the specific trigger for this one.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

An interesting point about the show was that it was originally supposed to show the at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center in the summer of 2005. However, the CAC did not have enough money to follow through. Anyway, I’m glad I had an opportunity to see it. I went to a program given by the curators of the show who talked about their experiences in pulling the show together.

In painting the dots on this piece, I mixed paint with acrylic polymer gloss; so these dots are translucent. When I finished I thought more about the green mold that plagued folks who had water in their house. I’m glad I did not have to contend with that issue.

jo

The orange background made me just want to mute the color with cool colors. I started from the middle and just went around and around until I finished the canvas. There is no one place that led to my palette. My guess is that the colors were from some Malco theaters – like some of the earlier paintings in this series.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

io

Previously I used the path of Hurricane Katrina for a dot painting. It was only natural that I do one for Hurricane Rita. The weekend the storm hit the Gulf coast, I joined a couple of friends to see the film “Pretty Persuasion.” It was filmed at the same school used in “Donnie Darko.” The pinks and blues were derived from the colors of school uniforms in the film. Boys had blue shirts and girls had pink ones. A light blue line of dots marks the storm's path.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

ho

This past week a local radio host brought up the subject of Hurricane Rita and how some people have forgotten about the damage Hurricane Rita did to Louisiana. Five years ago I was toying with returning home. But with Hurricane Rita on the way, roads were closed into New Orleans. By this point I had already visited many of the art museums in Memphis. So, I searched for places to go in Nashville.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

I made a day trip to Nashville to see several art exhibitions. One place I traveled to was Cheekwood. It is an art museum and botanical garden. While exploring the gardens there, I visited a Japanese Garden. In it was a corridor with walls of dark green bamboo. Following my day trip I created this painting.

This painting was a turning point for my series. Something clicked while I was painting this one. Not only was I inspired to finish it. But suddenly I had ideas for more paintings.

go

The palette I used for this painting was also inspired by colors I saw at a Malco movie theater. Unlike the previous palettes, this one had more variations of brown and pink. Again I placed spirals in each of four squares that made up the painting. Even though I was pleased with the result, I wasn’t excited about the group of them as a whole. Something clicked when I created my next painting.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

fo

Let me start my post by saying that the title above begat the nomenclature for my 5” x 5” dot art paintings. In particular the letters “FO” appeared (and still do) on a prescription medication I’ve been taking since early August of 2005. The drug helps with triglycerides. While staying in Memphis, I was staring at one of these pills when the idea to play with the letter “o,” and other alphabet letters, came to me. The possible words formed, however, have nothing to do with the paintings. They are simply arbitrary names in spite of the fact that some of my titles may provoke giggles.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

As for the painting design, it consists of four squares containing spirals of dots inspired by the active hurricane season. Each spiral includes a transition from light to dark using tints of red, blue and purple. Again, I painted with colors already mixed. After completing this one, I was tired of the colors.

eo

When I painted this one, I went back to an old theme from college. I used to create off-balance-designs. It goes back to the odd camera angles I noticed in horror films and the old “Batman” series from the 60s. The odd angles disturb the viewers’ sense of balance and make viewers uneasy. The painting is my reaction to the horrific images from Katrina and the flood,


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

do

Although my palette had more blue in this painting, I completed it around the same time as the first three dot paintings. Again, I was influenced by colors I saw at the Malco movie theaters in Memphis. The pattern was not specifically derived from anything specific.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

co

Again I used the same palette to create this curved dot pattern. I don’t remember any specific reason for the pattern, but I painted this one around the time Hurricane Rita was hitting the Texas-Louisiana coastline. It was a stressful period.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

bo

Having mixed too much paint I carried over the same colors into this piece. The lines of dots represent the flooding of New Orleans after the levees broke. One image, shown over and over again, was the flooding from a canal floodwall near my house. I live on the opposite side of the canal.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

ao

Five years ago Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. I evacuated to Memphis two days before the storm. The storm came through Memphis knocking the power out at my hotel. Tree limbs littered streets. When I went to create this painting, I depicted the path (yellow-green) of the storm as it hit coast and continued its path near me in Memphis. The colors came from some the film theaters I visited.


acrylic on canvas, 5" x 5"

Shades of Gray

Since I was still trying to figure out how to continue my current series of dot paintings, I decided to experiment with drawing dots. I played with size and darkness of my dots. There is no image to find. If you do find one, well, it is unintentional.


graphite on paper, 8.5" x 11"

Oil Spill Clippings and My Idea Books

Since the oil spill began in April, I have been collecting newspaper and magazine clippings to paste in my idea book. As you can see I ran out of room in the first book and have since filled three more books. For the moment I will put the remaining artifacts aside. After all I have other materials I want to include my fifth idea book. Normally I have done one or two books in a year. In 2005 and 2008 I did three. This year is unusual since I went more than three. And still, there are four more months left of 2010.

Hidden Circles

graphite on paper, 8.5" x 11"

Sixth of Six

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Fifth of Six

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Fourth of Six

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Third of Six

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Second of Six

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

First of Six

In addition to the “Oil Spill Series” of dot paintings, I have been working on six more paintings in the “Numeros Series.” Since I had paint left over, I figured I should use some of it for the first layer of paint on those paintings. You will notice that I haven’t even finished the first coat on them. Here’s the first of the six paintings. The order of the paintings may change as I

finish them.


acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20"

Concentric Circles

At a National Art Education Association Convention in Boston in 2004, I attended an “Ice Cream Party” sponsored by Stafford. Around the room there were tables designated for using Stafford products to create art projects. Below is what I made with a coffee filter, Sharpie markers and paint pens. Naturally I gravitated to making a dot piece.


Sharpie markers and paint pens on coffee filter, 7.5 " diameter

Dolphin

The list of sea life, affected by the spill, continues to grow. For this painting, I worked from a couple of photos of dolphins. I chose realistic colors and kept my final image subtle. I have no further plans for paintings related to the oil spill. The topic has become a sore point for me.


acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"

Oyster

The oil spill has also affected the local menu in this area. Some restaurants no longer offer oysters entrées, appetizers nor sandwiches. In making my dot painting, I decided not to show oysters on the half shell. Instead I just depicted an oyster outer shell. I painter purple for dark parts and the same purple added to white for light areas.


acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"

Pelican

Of all the photos from the oil spill, the ones with brown pelicans have hit home for me. They are the state bird and appear on the Louisiana state flag. Years ago they were on the endangered species list. So, seeing images of them covered in oil has been upsetting. To create my dot painting I just made it “oil free.” I stuck to purples and pastels.


acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"

Sea Turtle

For the last few weeks I’ve had creative block. I’ve been stuck – not deciding how to go forward with my oil spill theme. Finally I decided I should simply work with images of animals affected by the disaster. I didn’t want to depict oil-covered animals. Brown colors would take me away from the pastel colors I prefer. Anyway, here is my painting of a sea turtle.


acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"

Leak

The one image that has been seared into my brain is the underwater video of the continuous oil leak. I’ve been mulling over how to depict it. Finally I decided it best not to be bound by the colors. I chose a yellow-orange background. Then I consulted my color wheel to determine a compliment. I began mixing blue and purple to make some blue violet shades. The result is an abstraction of the oil leak.


acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"

Coffer Dam

What is it? Well, it is the shape of an object called a “coffer dam.” When lowered over an oil leak, it is supposed to help contain the oil. The local newspaper showed a white painted coffer dam being used in dramatic night photos. So, I used bluish white dots contrasted by blue and purple dots over a yellow background. Yes, my painting vibrates visually.


acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"

Boom

Looking at newspaper photos of Louisiana marsh with lines of orange booms inspired this dot painting. My image is right at the edge where water meets land. I’ve indicated the orange boom with orange dots and the marsh grass with dark green dots. Blue water dots follow the curve of the boom.


acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"

Slick

Each day The Times-Picayune has provided a forecast maps for the oil spill’s reach off the coast of Louisiana. It details different bands of thickness in the Gulf of Mexico. The forecasts inspired my dot pattern in this painting.


acrylic on canvas, 6" x 6"