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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

Visible Woman, Enlivened

Photoshop image,  24M,  10/2018

 

close up

 

 

 



 



Visible Woman, Enlivened

 

Visible Woman is the name of a toy.  It is a model figure illustrating simple pregnant female anatomy, that a child can assemble.  The toy has been around for maybe fifty years.  Not so long ago, and even today, there was, still is, a taboo against teaching a young female about her own body.  A human can drive a car, without knowing how an internal combustion engine works.  A girl can run and jump without even a hint of knowledge about muscles, bones and blood circulation.  However, when the storms of adolescence make landfall, it would comfort her, and help her to guide her life, to know about the tubes and folds of flesh and the cat 5 hormones that roar and whirl wind her mind and body.  It would help her to know about the cycles of the moon. 

 

 

Sex, Sex, Sex.  Sexual images are everywhere, enticing us to buy, buy, buy. The choices for a girl range from cloistered nun to Fellini orgies.  She can be a saint or a slut or anywhere in between. The traditional route features marriage and donating her body to incubate infants.  Each human has a personal path.  Not all decisions are made by reasoning,  however, information helps. 

 

 

A human girl needs level, healthy information to make informed choices.  But still there is a gibberish babble, a confusion of signals that make understanding difficult. 

 

I have been creating images that reference the Visible Woman, because, I, a saggy old grey lady, I am still trying to sort it all out. 

To see more of the Visible Woman go to:

 https://janetboydart.blogspot.com/2018/06/gold-fish-mashup-suite.html

 

 

 

 

 



Gold Fish Mashup Suite

 

 

Gold Fish, Warhol, Elvis, Mashup

digital painting, 6/2018



Gold Fish, Visible Couple Mashup

 

 digital painting, 6/2018



 

 

 





Gold Fish, Picasso Mashup

digital painting, 6/2018

Here are three Photoshop paintings, completed recently (6/2018).  Size is 103Mb for each individual picture.  I make prints with Arches paper and a new Pro Epson printer.

 You may ask, "What does it mean?"   And I will answer, "Your guess is as good as mine".

top picture, Warhol, Elvis, Goldfish Mashup,  Warhol did a picture, Double Elvis, with a gun totting cowboy.  Warhol, Elvis, goldfish and water, all mashed up.  Elvis is shooting and the fish are flying.

middle picture, Visible Couple Mashup,  Anatomy is so interesting.  As a child, I was eager to explore the Visible Man toy.  When the woman with an incubator belly came out, sometime later, I was delighted. 

bottom picture,  Picasso, Goldfish Mashup. A riff on another famous picture.  When creating a digital painting I alter the inspiration picture by photoshopping the entire picture. This Picasso woman is a recognizable image but has been completely redone.  I call the digital works digital paintings, because I have been a painter for such a long time and the texture looks like painting.


Water is a continuing element in my art.  Several of my recent pictures and many past pictures have featured water.  I love swimming, kayaking, and gazing at water.  Ocean, Gulf, lakes and creeks.  My studio flooded twice in 2015.  There was some damage, the bottom of the sheetrock had to be redone, I accept this threat, because, nature is so beautiful here.

On the property here we have two creeks.  One small, the other larger.  There is a relatively low population density along the creek and running toward the Pearl River.  This is a bird flyway and is bountifully populated with wild animals. 

Yesterday

 

 

Yesterday

Digital painting, 5/10/2018

 

 

About half way through working on this piece, after roughing in the background and the foreground, I realized that I was painting Ophelia.

The Forest is My Cathedral

 

The Forest Cathedral

Digital image, 2017

 

 

I have a deep need for nature.  Walking in the forest gives me an elevated feeling.  Petty concerns melt away and I feel a reverence for the earth. 

 

A tree has a million leaves.  Each leaf has a beautiful design of branching veins.  If you look at the leaf microscopically there are a million perfect cells.  How can this happen?  The detail is staggering.  I find it difficult to explain this rationally and must resort to metaphysical wonderings.

 

 

 

 



Weather Report



 

Morning Glory

Acrylic on paper, June, 2017, 18"x24"

 

  

 



Down to Earth, Weather Report

Recent work, these past six months, year of 2017, continues the landscape series, "Down to Earth."  Each day I work in the studio and in the garden.  If we have guest here, then I sometimes miss a few days.  I am blessed with living in a very beautiful deep country area of Louisiana. 

(I know that without nature I would shrivel into a fetal position.)

I paint, I do Photoshop, I garden and I stroll the woods.  These creativities weave together like braided hair.  Each informs another.  A theme emerges and plays out in concert.  I plant wisteria and morning glory, they grow and flower. I pull the glory flowers into paint. 

A few acres of land, bordering on a riparian corridor, is left to Mother Nature's devices.  Trees grow.  Trails are carved down to the creek.   I harvest the visual of forest.  Repeated attempts to do painted representations of the creek, keep me aiming for glory on a flat surface. 

I walk the trail down to the creek, where nature proliferates in tangles of trees and vines and herbs.  I stroll from the relatively civilized area of the house to barely tamed wildness in but a few minutes.  Beyond the lightly used area, there are areas that are impassable due to super thick growths of vegetation.

Deer, coon, squirrel, armadillo, possum, various turtles, reptiles, fish, an embarrassment of bird song.

 I watch were I put my hands and feet, because water moccasins love damp creeky areas.  Another dangerous, occasional forest inhabitant, is the wild boar.  Two hundred fifty pounds or more of potential ramming fury.  (Climb a tree?) The dangers are not great, most of the snakes and boar, along with other wildlife shun humans, but the aggressive critters are threatening enough to increase  my respect.  Add a dash of adrenaline to the mix.

 

Flock Flying

Acrylic on paper, 24"X18", 2017



 

Weather Report

Acrylic on paper, 24"X18", 2017

 

 

The Spring Creek corridor connects with the Pearl River corridor, where there are rumors of the Honey Island Swamp Man, Big Foot.  These mysterious rumors, which I entertain as possibly true, add another layer of meaning to the land.

Ambling from the house, a primarily human area along the short trail, to the border of wilding area,  I can feel my spirit lift, I can feel the nurturing energies of nature.  I humbly attempt to pin this,  all of this spot of earth reality, down on a small piece of paper. 



July 29, 2017
I started this blog entry in early July.  Between this time July 29, 2017, and that, I suffered a terrible tragedy, about which, I am unable to go into detail.  This morning I awoke at 3am.  Set myself a goal of posting a blog entry.  I had not loaded pictures, I had only written words to this blog.  I loaded some pictures, and here is the blog entry.

August 24, 2017
I hope to get this blog entry posted today.

 

Beaming

Acrylic on paper, May, 2017, 18"x24"