Everyday art

It's 'art in the everyday' at Inspire Me Thursday this time around, and this photograph is exactly that. It is a snap of a section of a lamppost I took a few weeks ago, which has, over the course of its existence, obviously been exposed to various events and layers, such as posters stuck and removed, rusting, cracking, spray painting, weathering and who knows what other everyday occurrences.

L. Blumfeld

Dramatic mountain landscape

Dramatic Mountain Landscape
Gouache and oil crayon on Guardi Artistico paper

Posted for Inspire Me Thursday's Crayon Art theme.

I use this technique quite frequently, starting with light shades of oil crayon, then painting over the crayon with gouache or watercolor. The waxy crayon repels the water-based paint, creating an interesting effect. Thanks to the excellent picture quality of my new reflex camera, not much work on the digital image is needed to obtain colors that are close to the original.

L.B.

Warm and cold

Warm and Cold
Gouache and oil crayon, 2004

A painting instead of writing for One Single Impression's "warm" prompt.

Composition in red, blue and gold

Composition in Red, Blue and Gold
(detail, acrylic and ink on paper, 2008)
for Sunday Scribblings #107 – Compose and
Reduce Reuse Recycle at Inspire Me Thursday.

This painting, done specifically to create something titled Composition in Red, Blue and Gold, is the outcome of two done simultaneously on two different acrylic paper blocks using the same colors. I ended up disliking one of them so intensely that I tore it up, but then took some of the pieces and glued them onto the other one. Unfortunately, these two layers are hardly discernible in the scan. Gold and black ink I added after the rip-up and paste-on process.

Rosy spring come on in

Inspire Me Thursday is asking for wallpapers this time around; here is a section of a larger painting (acrylic on crinkled up paper) that I could possibly imagine as a motif for a bright sitting room with large windows into a garden.

Also, I intend it as an invitation for spring (not only at One Single Impression), which so far has come in flowers but not in temperatures:

Easter has come
with daffodils
in snow

– Leonard Blumfeld

Acrylic blot mutation

Believe it or not – this started out as a blot according to the instructions at Inspire Me Thursday. Not in ink, but in acrylic. I then enhanced it with a black ink pen. It looked like a dog's face with gigantic fuzzy ears. I did not find it esthetically pleasing but scanned it anyway and then tried out various effects, eventually settling for the kaleidoscope one shown here. The dog is gone; what's left looks like some Swedish folklore motif perhaps. And is easy on my eyes.

– Leonard Blumfeld

Intrepid little bird

Intrepid Little Bird (2006)
Acrylic on kraft paper

Inspire Me Thursday's proposition for this week was:

Action Painting

This week let us be inspired by Action Painting, a “style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied.” Think Jackson Pollock, the American Abstract Expressionist painter who was fond of huge canvases on the floor, applying paint with a stick or other objects, using a ‘drip’ technique, walking around the canvas, being ‘in the painting.’

I was immediately reminded of a series of paintings I did in 2006, for which I partially used a drip technique. What I call "Intrepid Little Bird" above is just a small section of a larger painting done with a combination of dripping and rolling.

– Leonard Blumfeld

Glass ...

Inspire Me Thursday's prompt this time is "Glass" – here's my creation (not brand new, I admit, but today's digital modification of an acrylic painting dating back to 2002 that had turned out somewhat like a glass pane):

Lonely sheep on the blue planet

Company
Lonely sheep on the blue planet, wants to keep company with the Little Prince.