Mixed Media – Page 6 – The Consulting Artist

Edge of Glory

I’m taking part in the 64Million Artists January creative challenge. Each day of this month a challenge is set, and you take part, or not. It’s up to you. I’ve had a go at most of them so far, and this week I made my first painting in response to the following:

Just Imagine …

The great Albert Einstein once said that: ‘Logic can take you from a to b but imagination can take you anywhere.’ Children draw orange trees and blue grass and yellow elephants – they draw what they want to see. Inspired by this, today we would like you to unlock your own imagination and:

Get to the highest point you can, either in your house or office or school or outside, wherever you are. Look as far as you can. Draw what you can imagine there – be as fantastical as you like. Or realistic. Look out and imagine who might be standing there looking back towards you.

This is my response.

Edge of Glory.jpg

How high could I get? In my mind I climbed high enough to see the curvature of the earth, and painted what was in my imagination. Edge of Glory. Acrylic and gold leaf. This painting will be given away this weekend as part of the We Are All Artists free art project.

Autumn Fire

I know, it’s Winter, and I came up with this design a few months ago. I’m pleased to say it has kept me very busy since.

I made the first Autumn Fire for the We Are All Artists free art project, an abstraction of fire using acrylic paint and gold leaf. Here it is along with a picture of it in situ at the Carshalton War Memorial, before it was found.

People responded very positively to this design. I like it, a lot, Yet I was surprised by how many folk contacted me about it, to say how much they like it, and to ask if I would make one for them. I happily obliged, and once word got out that I was making a series of Autumn Fire, the requests kept coming. I was asked to scale up, I painted one for someone locally, one went to Cambridge, and another to New Zealand.

Autumn Fire.jpg

This represents a turning point for me and my art, the first time I designed an art work which resonated so strongly with others. My next post will be about where this art work took me next, a literal twist or two. Until then – here’s a picture of the 2016 New Year’s Eve free art, which I placed at a wedding of some dear friends in St Louis.

Museum Piece : An Invitation To The Tate

Carole and I recently visited the ceramics department at the V&A museum. We were blown away by the range and quality of what we saw, here are just a few examples.

As we left the museum, I spotted a jar of seed markers on sale, and bought a few. I knew I wanted to do something artistic with them, I just wasn’t sure what.

Seeing how they were meant to be used in a garden – I returned to a previous favourite of mine, the poppy. I worked up an abstraction of poppy heads on the reverse of the sticks.

I’m really pleased with how these turned out. I should have left it there, but sometimes it’s tempting to keep on keeping on, and before I knew it…

…I’d gone too far. I really didn’t like what I saw in front of me so I painted over this image.

Frustrated, I abandoned the work. A few days later, I went to a preview of the new wing of the Tate Modern with a couple of good friends. We had a great time, and on my return home – I painted a version of the graphic which was on our preview invitation, onto the blank seed marker ‘canvas’.

I certainly didn’t imagine this when I first spotted the seed markers at the V&A, and I’m OK with the fact that I’ve ended up with an abstraction of a museum, painted onto something I bought at…a museum.