The Renaissance

"Self Portrait" Last Elemental

Day 2 (12/30/2018)

The New Art started out as simple sketches in pastels and watercolors. Forty years later, most have been lost and only a few remain. It was in no means a quick development. For years I would go back to my roots and work on other things. I had graduated from college and for a couple of years worked on more traditional art but the idea was always there waiting for release with the flow of the swamp as a renaissance always in the back of my mind. Every once in a while I would go back and explore the possibilities more. The earliest sketches used both primary and secondary colors to represent the elements and forces of life. Yellow and orange represented the suns energy while blue and violet represented air and water.  Green and red represented the current of life. They were little more than abstracts of the flow of energy. Slowly they developed more and more imagery. With the imagery came more structure and the fragments started to take forms. In the end the last pieces were done with Prang oval pan watercolors using only the primary colors. I liked the glossy surface that was produced by the gum Arabic in the semi moist paints.  It eventually, like much of my early stuff, became tighter and tighter. The final piece was a self-portrait. At that point I realized how much time it would take to continue painting in that style. Later I would continue with the idea of directional flow but by then I was re-exploring my earlier attraction to airbrush.

"Rolling Landscape" A very early pondering

Early Elemental

Another Early Elemental

First Watercolor Elemental

Early Tree Elemental

Later Watercolor