Words and pictures again

I belonged to a writing group for a number of years. The first time I attended, the leader started our session with a brief meditation. Eyes closed, I envisioned the path she described and followed it until I drifted off and went to la la land. When I opened my eyes I was surprised to see a large painting on the wall across the room and in it the path I just envisioned. Of course, you might not think this remarkable, but I began to lovingly paint paths as a result of that experience. And the end is never in sight.

Words and pictures continued

 I’ve been thinking so much about how to sell my pictures in Florida. Truth is, I know so little about the art world here. I know so little about selling art anywhere. I had a number of exhibits in Massachusetts. I sold a number of  pieces over the years; originals as well as prints. I still have stacks of artwork. But last night I made a decision. I’m just going to make paintings for now. This is a whole new world. New colors, new f eelings, new everything. I’m not going to worry it. I’m just going to enjoy making pictures.  So then, this idea popped into my head for using maskIng fluid and watercolor. Add oil pastel. Hmmmm

Words and pictures, too

Love this! Perfect for this week’s prompt. I don’t know who to give credit to, but thanks for the chuckle.

Words and Pictures

I’m a poetry lover wannabe. I have difficulty understanding poetry. My friend Christine Polk explained her poetry to me by saying that her poems were just thoughts that she’d written down.

Oh. That helped.

While I have been painting mainly sky, ocean and shore for months, she has taken walking trips to various coasts. She wrote her thoughts about her experiences and made this beautiful book of her words and my pictures.

Sound and music-how it affects my drawing, continued

I will often don earphones and listen to Pandora on my Ipad as I draw. I like rhythmic music. It feels energizing and expansive. For me, aligning with the music while painting can be transformative. It’s like the last part of the yoga class when the ethereal music comes on and we do deep relaxation. I know I’m being still but I really go way out there. The difference between the yoga experience and the art experience is that I’ll have an image I can look at over and over that can instantly bring me back, in mind and body, to that lovely place. If when others look at my work, they have some positive, visceral response, I’m thrilled. And so grateful for the positive feedback.

Blog prompt: Music and sound: how it affects my drawing

For now, we live in a furnished rental apartment. I’ve carved
out a piece of the living room to serve as a studio. My folding table fits perfectly under the window. Through the blinds and the bars of the breezewayg railing, I can see the canal and more condos lined up on the other side, their reflections in the water. I thought we would have tv noise from hard of hearing neighbors, but the buildings are solid concrete and it’s actually rather quiet here.

Fortunately, Millie is willing to watch sports with the sound off if I’m painting when we’re together in the living room. It’s new for us to be together 24/7 and I think we’re doing very well, but we Libras need quiet time and we can easily sit in companionable silence.

Music and sound

This week’s prompt is Music and sound; how it affects how I draw.
This is an interesting topic for me and rather timely, too. Relocating to Florida has been a radical change. For over 20 years I lived in the beautiful Berkshires of western Massachusetts. I had a whole room to myself for an art studio. Two large windows faced out onto the neighbors property. Their house and barn sat back from the road, on a hill. Their front yard was wooded and an outline of the mountains beyond showed through the trees. The only sounds were the birds calling out to each other, their squawks echoing in the tall pines. I painted that view many times, in every season. The quiet and peaceful scene helped to reduce the noise in my mind and allowed me to produce many serene images. Here are a couple from the archives.

Density and light

This week’s prompt is “density and light”. Living in the Berkshires for over 20 years, I grew accustomed to painting the view from my studio window; dense with trees, shrubs and mountains. If you’ve been following my posts, (you can subscribe at andreafeldmanstudio.blogspot.com), you know that for the past several months, I’ve been painting sky, water and sand. Those pictures, of Florida, are very light; simple, sunny and expansive. Today’s picture is also Florida, but it is rather dense. It has a different feeling. It felt different in my body to paint it. Tighter.

Scaled Down 2

Scaled down 2

I peered over the canasta cards in my hand and had the thought that while Thanksgiving was small this year, it was a joyous ocassion filled with love, laughter, and fabulous dessert. It was a quiet day, rather serene as a result of good planning, preparation and of course, the best participants. I actually had time enough to paint the first layers before company came. I finished it in between the final credits and cleaning up.

Something old, something new, something smaller

Well I’ve painted variations of this picture several times. This is the latest version which I scaled down. The others were on 11”x15” paper. This one I did on 7 1/2” x 11”. It was finished in no time, but I think I enjoyed painting the larger ones more. With this one, I grew impatient with the details. I needed to use a smaller brush, load up with paint more often and made shorter and tighter brush strokes. The finished larger piece also has more impact. The difference in scale is not revealed by viewing online.  It’s impossible to tell the size from the photos. Andreafeldmanstudio.blogspot.com

   

Something old, something new-different perspective.

This new picture has the same elements as the one before; sky, shrubs, grasses, but I changed the  proportions and made the sky bigger and the foreground smaller. It changed the feel of it for me. I think the sky can be even bigger. Next time. Florida has such huge skies.

Something old, something new, too

I’m continuing to respond to the blog prompt of ‘Something old, something new’.
I lived inland for over 20 years where I developed a love of painting landscapes. I painted many pictures of  trees and mountains. What’s new for me is painting beach, sky and ocean. For this piece, I referenced a photo I took the other day at the beach. This picture shines new light on  the textures I’ve grown to love.

Something old, something new

Our blog prompt this week is something old, something new. So many thoughts come to mind, but what I’m working on right now fits in nicely. What’s old is water; ocean. Can’t get much older than that. I’ve many paintings that include water, but that’s not the focus. Also, I usually just allude to it by making a streak of blue or green.What’s new is that I’m studying how to paint the water. So beautiful and challenging. In this piece I tried creating the foam with white oil pastel.

Do some thing!

The blogmates and I did not take on a new prompt this week. We were all otherwise occupied. I found myself facing a blank page, having the desire to produce something but not knowing what to paint. I generally paint as a meditation; to relieve anxiety and to restore order and balance. When I don’t know what to paint, I need to do something to get the energy moving.
I’ll use the less precious practice paper and maybe start doodling, or divide up the paper into squares and draw something different in each one. The idea is to do something rather than nothing. It’s easier to develop an idea from a place of movement rather than stillness. I did  manage to complete a picture. It’s a practice piece. Water is so interesting and so challenging to paint.

Roots? Nay, nay

When my blogmates, Deb Koffman, Michele Beck and I decided to continue with “roots” as the prompt for another week, I was excited. I thought. Trouble is, thinking up something is one thing, drawing it is another. I scanned an article yesterday that said that if you’re afraid of drawing something new, you resort to the same old stuff you’ve painted before. Hmmm. Didn’t seem to hurt Degas, Monet, Mary Cassatt......

Back to My Roots

I continue to ponder this week's prompt of 'roots'. Today I thought of 'heritage'. Where did my family come from?  I figured I didn't have to do a DNA test as my sister told me a while ago that she did one. The result she got was something like 99% Russian. Makes sense. In Brooklyn, where I was born and lived until I was about seventeen, there are still neighborhoods where everyone looks like me. Strong roots.

This week’s blog prompt is ‘roots’. Sometimes I overthink the prompt and end up with nothing. I may have ideas but I either start something and not complete it, or it may never leave the confines of my head. That’s what happened last week. The prompt was ‘growth’. It sparked a lively conversation....with myself. I never put anything on paper. So I’m just doing a simple doodle here, not second guessing myself, just posting.

 October is breast cancer awareness month.   

Please go get a mammogram.

Last week's prompt was 'swimming'. In response,  I dusted off this story that I wrote a while ago in our memoir group.

Summer Times


We pulled on sweatshirts over our pajamas, hopping across the cold linoleum to watch tv while we ate breakfast. The porch was enclosed, but there was no heat anywhere in the bungalow. By around 11 AM, the sun had began to pour in through the windows. We shed layers as mom determined it was a beach day. Most were. We were at our country house for the summer with our mother. Dad came up from the city on weekends.
It took a while for us to get ready. We struggled into our damp bathing suits that had spent the night on the clothesline. We put our beach jackets over them while Mom made our sandwiches, usually canned tuna, to eat on the beach.

Mom didn’t drive so we walked down the hills to get to the beach. Sometimes we would see Sadie. She was a friend of Aunt Esther’s and had a summer cottage that we passed along the way. I remember Sadie wore a black bathing suit even when gardening, and had a deep reddish tan that seemed permanent. She had a son named Junior that I had a crush on. His skin matched his mother’s with a tan the same color, and a black bathing suit, too. Mom almost always stopped to talk and my sister and I would start whining after what seemed like forever. “Let’s go, you can talk to her on the beach,” we said, tugging on mom’s white  terry jacket. 

Our neighbor, Marie Reina sold beach passes and church raffle tickets from her ‘office’ near the gate. She kindly stashed my mother’s chair so we didn’t have to carry it down. We weren’t supposed to tell anyone.

We set up our blanket, putting shoes on each corner to hold it down. Then one of us had to go to the office and get Mom’s chair. Marie would be sitting inside the little hut. The top half of the door was open, her cigarette dangled from the side if her mouth, one eye  squinting from the smoke. She could see us coming and handed the chair over the closed bottom half of the door.

Mom put her chair in the water at the edge of the lake so she could watch us. She never came in. Her standard line when asked was that she couldn’t get her bathing suit wet. She never elaborated as to why it was so. When she told her little joke, people laughed politely. Years later, we found out she didn’t know how to swim.
We sat on the blanket to eat our lunch. It had been sitting in a paper bag under a beach towel to protect it from the sun. By the time we ate our sandwiches the white bread was nice and gummy. 

There was a bus that left about once an hour that went up to the hills and could let us off right in front of our house. Very often though, mom wanted to stay later than the last bus, but only if someone would drive us home. Walking down was one thing, but up was pretty tough. Mom was pretty good at finding rides, though not everyone was a good driver. Sometimes we were lucky to get home safely.

Missing the Autumn

My palette here in Florida is soooo different from the colors I’d been using for years in the Berkshires. This picture sort of popped in as I was studying up on palm trees and tropical sky. I do miss the change of seasons.andreafeldmanstudio.blogspot.com

Missing

This week’s blog prompt is ‘Missing’ I’m enjoying painting sky and beach, but when I finished this picture, I felt like I was forgetting something. I’ve been here in Florida for almost three months, but it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that we’re not going back to the Berkshires. We live here now! We are not on vacation.

Free and Easy? Not!

For me, when I’m in flow; when I paint with a sure hand, when I just take delight in the process. That is how I would describe a piece as ‘free and easy’, which is this week’s blog prompt.

While I did enjoy painting this path to the beach, I struggled with it and as a result, it looks dark and heavy. I may try it again, now that I learned a thing or two.

Watercolor

Wow! It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I’m thinking that I’d like to continue to share my creative process. I’m always in a place of discovery, but especially now since I’ve relocated to Florida just a few weeks ago. The tropical environment is radically different. And the skies are so huge and so beautiful. I’ve been awed by the sunrise and sunset. The clouds are amazing. I’ve been taking lots of photos and now experimenting with watercolor on paper to capture what I see.