How I discovered Little Worlds
Sep 19, 2022
30 artworks in 30 days? Sounds impossible to me.
I have a full-time job, a family, and once the pandemic started, the guest room that housed my studio turned into a shared office space for my husband and me and most of my supplies had to be shelved. Like so many people, I was not at my “optimal performance” level during lockdown and the nerve-wracking year+ that followed, when it felt like the world was imploding and all hope was gone for a return to “normal” life.
But around 18 months into the apocalypse, I started to get the “itch” again. It had been dormant for a while, really even before the pandemic, after I switched careers and went from a public school art teacher into corporate marketing. You see, the best part of teaching is the time off. And as an artist, I was able to use that time off to make art. I was also constantly “in” art in that job - working with lots of different media, discovering new artists and techniques all the time. It is truly the only thing I miss about that career. Sure, there were a couple of amazing students and colleagues sprinkled in, but after 13 years, the cons far outweighed the pros for me.
Anyway, when I started to feel the urge to create again, I knew I wasn’t looking to do my trusty realistic oil paintings. It was too rigid and cerebral and frankly, after a long hiatus, it felt like I had forgotten how. I wanted to get my hands dirty, and play and not have any real plan. Then I saw the call for a local annual show I had admired from afar before, but never participated in: The 6x6x30 Show. I was ready to commit to it for the first time, and it was a little terrifying.
I decided to approach it a little differently than most artists do. I wanted to challenge myself to create a whole composition with all 30 panels in which each stood on its own. I didn’t want it to be realistic, at least I didn’t want to paint anything representational. I revisited the lines I used so often in my stained glass from the early 00s. To accomplish this, I knew I’d have to work on all of the panels at the same time to make sure they were congruent. See horribly lit and janky process shots below:
The only part I planned was the line designs. Everything else was spur of the moment. I knew I wanted layers and depth, so used a matte medium mixed with white to create a cloudy by translucent glaze to create the illusion of atmosphere, letting some lines recede into the distance. Once I had all the lines painted in, I hit a wall. It looked kinda cool, but what the hell was I doing? How was I going to make each one interesting? I had recently started to cut some images out of old magazines and moving them around in my sketchbook. Sure, why not give those a try? I started playing around placing the images on a couple of adjacent panels. I was OBSESSED. The narratives, the tense juxtapositions, the power of the gaze to create movement and emphasis. And the realism without any of the painstaking work of painting it!
And like that, I discovered Little Worlds - the next chapter in my art journey.
Check out the article about the show in the local newspaper here.