safre blog: some oil and water color paintings of my recent past

I will be blogging on composition issues and my theories about how to avoid the mistakes that I have made in the past to find peace and enjoyment, rather than frustration and stress, from painting in oils and watercolors. The easy answer is, of course, that you have to find what is within yourself and what it takes to make you yourself happy in what you are doing. Then you can do anything in art.

In oils, I learned to paint with a thick hog-hair brush, really caking on the paint, and then evolved into using sable-haired brushes and layering. In watercolors, I started out using wet on dry as a base followed by wet on wet layers, and then evolved into using wet on wet as a base followed by wet on wet and the odd wet on dry embellishment while working harder on planning the shapes and positioning BEFORE I STARTED the work. But those stories of hair-pulling development of theory to deal with my own personality are for later days and posts. I will tell those stories later. Today, I just wanted to post some of my paintings. Later, this week, I will write about what I think, so far, about composition and color and, hopefully (if my energy stays high), show some watercolor works as I am working on them.

Here they are:

(As you can see, I have this thing for branches. The short version of the reason for this is that when I was a very small child and there was no one to play with, I used to lie on the ground and look up into the branches of trees and imagine stories or see shapes or just find meditative space. So it was, that as an adult, when I returned to drawing and painting, and I was looking for subject matter, branches were a natural for me.)