Where Some Ideas Come From

I spent the last week and a half creating a newsletter and working on the mailing list. My husband Frank who retired a couple of years ago and is now helping me full time did most of the work in the mailing and we are just about ready to launch it.

In the meantime I have also been working on two 48"x48" commission pieces. I hope to complete the second one today and I have one more 32"x32" commission to complete. So--- I have not had much time to spend on my blog or on my new series. Now that the newsletter is done for the month of September and my commissions are about done I can move on to creating and posting the blog as I go along.

Since this blog is about painting and series development, I will talk about the things that have been going on with developing my new series. I stated my intent in my newsletter to develop two new series for my show in Houston coming up Nov. 8th. Whew! That's putting a bit of pressure on myself. I hope I can pull it off. I haven't been able to start on work yet or that show, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it.

Here's how some ideas get started for me. I read a LOT of magazines including those on home decor and have probably become the catalog queen of my area. It seems everywhere I look there are black and white designs and I am really attracted to them. For several years early in my career I worked only in black and white pencil or ink. I think this is one thing which has helped me in the use of strong values in my work. Although one of my strengths is color I began to get the idea for a black and white series. My intent for this series is to have color in under layers but still have predominately black and white designs.

My other idea is for an abstract figurative series which I've been wanting to do for several years. I took 4 years of life drawing in college and in my prior artistic life I did detailed portraits. Since re-inventing myself as an abstract artist I have avoided doing the figure because I couldn't seem to break away from doing all that detail. I think now, after several years of painting abstractly, I am ready to give it a try even though it makes me nervous. Sooooo -- as I look through all my magazines and catalogs I have been pulling out tear-sheets on black and white designs as well as on figures and putting them in file folders. Along with this I have been doing some sketches. All of these things are kind of jelling in my mind as I work on other stuff so that by the time I can start them I hope to be raring to go.

I hope by next week I will have finished the commissions and will be ready to get started. I'll give some reports on the process and the progress.

Max
http://www.maxineprice.com/