Follow-up to yesterday's blog post . . .

Before I posted yesterday's article about finding inspiration, I wanted to get permission to do so from the artist who painted the image I used as an example (Lisa Pressman).

As I went through her website looking for an e-mail address, I saw she had a calendar of her workshops posted. And it turns out she was conducting a workshop here in Coupeville THIS WEEK!

She kindly granted me permission to use her painting photo in yesterday's post, and then also invited me to come over to the Pacific Northwest Art School to chat and see what the class was doing. Bonus!

We just got back home from our visit. The big room they were working in was a complete mess. It was supposed to be a complete mess! It's encaustic painting, after all, and there was colored wax everywhere, lots of tools for scraping, stencils and strings for texture, and more. And everyone was having a great time.

So I ask you: What are the odds that I should post an article using Lisa Pressman's encaustic painting as an example yesterday, that I would e-mail her and receive an immediate response, and that she (this woman from New Jersey) would be just seven minutes up the road from us?

Art. Art is messy. Art brings us together. Art is fun. This was a fun set of circumstances for me, all about art.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.

Finding inspiration

From time to time I'll refer to what I call my "inspiration file," images I've saved that, for whatever reason, I was drawn to. And when I'm sort of adrift, feeling nothing's going right with my art, I'll riffle through other people's images to see what might pop out.

That's what happened here when I saw an encaustic painting done by artist Lisa Pressman that appeared on her blog in 2009. She titled it "Between the Lines 11."

What I found intriguing was her color palette, the soft celadon in the background, the yummy yellow/ochre, the touches of black, and the deep reddish-orange bits. Colors I wouldn't think of using on my own.

And so I began. I began with color and then added additional items such as torn paper, ink scribbles, etc. for the texture. I also used a photo I'd taken of a piece of metal that had a number of crosshead screws in it, and so up top and down at the bottom you can see the little "x's" that are those screws. And then I wondered what if I included a photo I took a few years ago of a vine clinging to an old wall, a wall that featured two iron reinforcement anchor plates in the shape of stars. I call the piece "Reaching for Stars."

My resulting image, inspired by Lisa Pressman's exquisite painting, was fun to make. Her inspiration took me out of my comfort zone, both in selecting colors and then putting together a composition.

Are these colors I might use again? Not sure. And what about the orange-red color Lisa Pressman used? Why didn't I use the same color in mine? In my case, it was a little too much, and didn't work as well for me as Lisa's color worked in her encaustic painting.

Let me show you her blogpost from 2009, and then her current blog postings. She is a wonderful artist and creates exciting pictures. Check out her work. You might just come away inspired, as I did.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.