Concentric Circles and Brief Synopsis of My Art Practice

Concentric Circles with Reflections

 

Acrylic on Arches paper, 8.5x11, 11/2018

 

Concentric Circles with Leaf

Acrylic on Arches paper, 8.5x11, 11/2018

 

 

 

Concentric Circles

Digital painting, 11/2018
Acrylic painting photographed and worked in photoshop



A Brief Synopsis of My Art Practice

 

 

I have been painting most of my life.  My earliest memory is of being delighted to smear finger paints.  Won first place in Sunday School art show, when I was seven years old.  I painted and sketched and had a couple of art classes in high school.  Had a few art classes as an adult.  Enjoyed learning from Marie Hull in Jackson, MS, in the sixties. She was very supportive, and encouraging. (I am 75 years old.)  I studied a few classes with Auseklis Ozols at New Orleans Academy of Fine Art.  He is an excellent teaches.  Took a few other classes here and there, mostly I dropped out before long, because they either taught something I already knew, or something I was not interested in learning, or mostly because I had a lot of responsibilities that kept me to busy for school. 

 

My instructions and art practice have been distracted by constant moving.  As an Air Force brat  moved constantly when my father was transferred.  Attended eighteen schools before graduating high school.  I continued frequent moving as an adult.  " Daddy always kept moving so she did too", Neil Young song. I have lived here, there and everywhere.  "I've been everywhere, man."  Willie Nelson song.

 

 Lived in post WWII occupied Japan, 1950, six years old. Seeing Japanese art and being in a very different culture had a tremendous effect on me, has influenced my art since that time. 

 

Another huge distraction from art was being married and divorced twice and being a single Mom. 

 

Never the less I always made art.  Way back in the day, I remember telling a friend, "I can make art when I am too tired to do anything else".   Her one word response was, "Good", she was also an artist. I usually had a studio, in a garage or a spare room.

 

I really identified as an artist in the mid seventies,  my early thirties.  At that time, I committed to doing serious work.

 

Over these many decades of painting my work, style and subject matter have been all over the map.  For the last, maybe twenty years, I have worked three main series, which I call:  POP Religion, Luminous Woman and Down to Earth (landscapes).

I work primarily on paper now, because I like it, and because I have run out of storage space for canvasses.

I have consistently produced art since the mid seventies, but have shown my work only intermittently.  I am just really terrible at marketing.  Not being successful has its upside.  I paint what I want, follow my muse where ever she leads.

In 2002, at 58, I finally found a stable home.  I work in my wonderful, beautiful studio, on my gorgeous property, almost every day.   

To see my resume click here:

https://janetboydart.blogspot.com/p/resume.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

Looking Up

 

Looking Up, 1

Acrylic on archival paper,  18"x24",12/2018

Looking Up, 2

Acrylic on archival paper,  18"x24", 12/2018

Looking Up, 3

Acrylic on archival paper,  18"x24", 12/2018

 

 

 

 

 

The sun is rising as I step out into a bright, light purple world.  Purple prose be damned, that is how it started.  I wanted to paint that purple light.  The quality of the sunrise might be called lavender, but lavender sounds even more purple than purple. 

 

I had been planning, in my mind, the creation of Looking Up. My best planning is done in the hypnogogic and hypnopompic states that occur when one is falling asleep, and as one is waking up.  On an electroencephalogram, the electromagnetic waves of the brain would measure a slower pace for the firing of neurons.  The change in perception, the change of a brain channel, is indicated visually, is measured, becomes scientific data.  Introspectively the brain channel changes from waking, to dreamy and visual, then to sleeping and levels of sleep, then, before waking the channel is again dreamy and visual, on the edge of waking "reality" and dreams.  A bridge between the subconscious, or Jung's collective consciousness, and the concrete of wakefulness. I see pictures, I visualize painting the pictures, as I move between various conscious states. 

 

I painted three pictures working with the plan.  Modifying the plan as I painted. I am open to changes, new insights, happy accidents, that occur in the painting process. 140 pound Arches cold pressed paper.  I like the pebbly surface, it makes a fine texture under water thinned paint.  I paint with Golden acrylics from the tube used in a watercolor manner.  The paint is watered thin enough for the white of the paper to enlighten the picture.  When it is called for I will use opaque paint, but mostly I like the fluidity of wet in wet.  Layers of transparent color, glazes, create subtle color variations. 

 

These pictures show exaggerated perspective, the lines of the trunks create depth.  The branches get smaller as the trees move toward the off center circle, more depth.  Color is greyed, lines a bit blurred, more depth. 

The viewers eye is driven by the impelling convergence of the trunks. 

 

The eyes are led to the pale circle.  But, there is not much in that circle, it is just pale with an irregular outline.  It could be the sun, or the moon, or the gate of heaven, or a portal to a different reality, or just a peculiar/mundane round patch of sky.  A mandala design allows for layers of meaning and the viewers subjective experience.  The blankness of the patch invites reflection, makes an empty space that may induce introspection.