My "Artist's Block" is gone and Roger finished his latest stained glass window!

I'm happy to say ideas for paintings started to flow not long after I did my last blog post 10 days ago. While I was in my funk I started stripping paint off of one of the old chairs I bought at a yard sale last summer.  What a messy job!  After one day of working on it my brain started to spit out ideas for paintings.  I immediately stopped stripping and started painting.  (Hmm...I should clarify...I stopped stripping paint!)  Anyway, my husband finished the nasty job of getting the paint off of the chair while I worked on my paintings.

I completed two canvas paintings and three paintings on 10" wooden plates.  Here is what I got done in the past week.

The first is an abstract which I call "Swirl and Whirl". It is 15" square.  I did this one while I was waiting for the base coats to dry on the other canvas and the plates.  Abstracts are fun to do because they are quick and I never know what the finished product will look like.  I channel my inner Jackson Pollock.  You know...drip and splatter and swirl.  Here is what I came up with.

The other canvas painting is an 8X10 titled "Run Like the Wind".

Next I worked on some 10" wooden plates which I purchased at a resale shop last fall.  There were about a dozen of them and I put them aside and forgot about them.  I found them when I was cleaning my shop and decided I should start working on them.  The first one I did is one of my geometric designs on a black background.

I got my inspiration for the next two from posts I saw on Facebook.  Someone posted a video of the works of Diego Rivera who is one of my favorite artists.  It put me in the mood to paint calla lilies.  Here is what I came up with.

The day after I saw the video I saw a photo of a very colorful peacock.  I loved the color combination so did this painting using the same colors.

After going though a week without painting because I was in a dry spell I then produced 5 paintings last week.

For the past month Roger has been working on a large stained glass window for our living room.  There are two windows in the front of the room looking out onto out new porch and one window on the side of the room with a view of a vacant lot.  We have a game table sitting in front of that window.  Most of the time I kept the blind shut because we did not like the view and also because as cars pulled into our development they could see into the house.  We decided early on that we need to put stained glass in the window to block people from seeing in and to give a nice appearance to that side of the house.  We had other project to keep us busy our first year here so this window was on the bottom of the list of things to do.  It finally worked it's way to the top of the list.  Here it is.

I just remembered that today is Valentine's Day so Happy Valentine's Day wishes to all my readers.

Three new paintings done this week

I am finally feeling better after my bout with the flu.  I spent this week working on three paintings.  The first is based on a photo of some friend's new rescue kitten.  They found it in the motor of their car awhile back on a freezing cold day.  They planned to take it to the rescue center but on the trip there they fell in love with her and decided to give her a home themselves.  Her name is Mocha.  I saw this photo of her and decided to use it as inspiration for a new painting that I titled "Little Ball of Fur"

At the same time I was working on the kitty painting I decided to do an abstract painting so did the base coat on the canvas in beige and then sponged some brown on top of that.  I thought that after it dried I would add more to it but when I was done sponging on the brown I liked it just the way it was and declared it a finished abstract painting.  It took maybe a half hour of my time to do it.  I am going to keep it for myself because there is something in it's simplicity that I really like.  I think I will hang it next to my "Stormy Day" painting.  I call this one "Brown on Beige".  It is a large painting but shows up here as much smaller than the true size, also, I just noticed that I didn't sign it.  I'll have to do that and I think that once I hang it I'll take another photo which I will include in a future post so you can have a better perspective of the size.

The third painting I did this week is another version of "Phantom Herd". I painted variations of  this painting four times in the past and sold all of them.  Here is the newest one which is number five.

Here are photos of the other four paintings shown in the order in which they were painted.  The third one was commissioned  and the client wanted it facing the other direction.  The other three were sold in exhibitions.

Now that I am feeling better I am anxious to get to work on some new and original subject matter.  The problem is that I am going through an "artist block".  I can't decide  what I want to paint.  It was so easy to come up with ideas when I lived in the southwest.  Since I moved to Michigan my idea pool seems to have run dry.  I'm thinking of maybe doing a lighthouse painting.  Being close to the Great Lakes, there are lighthouses everywhere.  That is the only idea I have come up with.  I may hold off on doing a canvas painting and work on some old chairs that I got at a yard sale last summer. They both need stripped of the old paint. I'm suffering from a bad case of cabin fever and need something to keep me busy.  Stripping paint might just be what I need to fill my time while I wait for my creative side to kick in with some new ideas.