ten

ten, mixed media and encaustic, 6×8 inches

This past Thursday, my husband, Noah and I attended the opening reception for the “Silence” exhibit out in Kenmore. It all looked really wonderful. My painting in the show is my largest painting that I have ever done at 48 x 36 inches. One of the people that had bought two of my minis (4×4 inches) the past Saturday at the Open Studio sale was there and was so surpised that the huge painting was mine. Like I said in the last post, I change depending on the medium and the painting in the exhibit is very different from my little mixed media pieces. She was so nice and told me how much the large painting moved her. It always feels good to hear the impact that a painting has on someone.

Ever since the opening I have felt a huge sense of relief. The last of all things planned was finally behind me. I cooked a lot, cleaned, made a Christmas stocking for my dog out of felted scraps of wool, worked on special request orders for amanobooks.com, started a new journal for myself, did some christmas shopping. And in between all that, I just relaxed and played with Noah.

Lots of pondering on how I envision this new year coming up as well.

I finished the above panel this morning. I started this panel many months ago but thought it was a total disaster, so I let it sit. Today it just clicked and I knew I could save it. I am happy with the outcome and glad that I didn’t toss the panel in the trash as I had wanted to several times. The title is pretty boring, but sometimes I just have a hard time coming up with titles.

That’s the nice thing about working with wax. You can usually salvage it. What I did was used a sharp razor blade and scraped up as much of the “disaster zone” area of the piece that I could and then just reworked my original idea. Layering torn pieces of sewing pattern paper helped to add texture as well as cover up the parts of the “disaster zone” that I couldn’t lift off. I use a small quilting iron to attach small bits of this and that into the wax. Today my iron started to smoke quite a bit. I think it’s time to get a new iron…it’s been through a lot these past few years!