Free to Be

Welcome to my butterfly garden. Several places I have visited over the years have had a certain area made just for butterflies and are called "Butterfly Gardens". The plants and the habitation are perfect for them. They skirt around from one plant to another, taking beauty and color whereever they land. They do not know they are beautiful, they are just being free. Can we learn that lesson from them? I hope so.

Free To Be - Watercolor 22 X 30

Petal Tips! This butterfly painting is a watercolor on 300# paper. I purposed to make the wings transparent and glowing. Nothing is added, just watercolor on paper. No tricks. The following paintings in my butterfly garden  have a different feeling because they are rendered differently.  This painting began as wet on wet, meaning I wet the paper with clear water and dropped in some color.  I made sure I kept the white paper in the center. This first step became my underpainting. After it dried, I carved in the shape of a butterfly. I wet the top of the butterfly's wing and put in some ultramarine. The red was splattered. I took a toothbrush and flipped some red for the feeling of flowers and texture. I left the space  behind the butterly's head light so that it should draw the eye to that place. I just wanted the chaotic feeling of foliage in the background. I added some random strokes to the foliage.

This butterfly is on only a quarter sheet, but it conveys what I was looking for. This was an old watercolor, so I didn't have anything to lose. I placed a scrap from an old plastic doily table cloth on to the surface of the paper and I sprayed gold metalic paint onto the paper, making designs on the butterfly wing. I used a permenant  black marker to make a line or two, to differentiate the butterfly from the background since the color of the two are similar.

The white behind the butterfly's head was from the original white gesso I used to cover some of the old watercolor painting. If you simply take watered down watercolor paint and drag it over the white, it glazes it to a soft white and disguises the underneath gesso.

Flight in metalic (mixed media)

This painting is done with the same process as the above one. I use to think that I couldn't compromise the painting with spray paint, gesso or accrylic, but who says? We should be free to take flights in metalic paint or however we want to create. There are the purists and they will continue to stay purists, but for me, the sky is the limit when it comes to creating.

Flutter of Wings

This painting is probably my favorite of all the butterfly paintings I have done. It is so loose, it moves in and out and around and about. It is like the flutter of wings without seeing the object. I want you to see the design.  It is more about the design than the subject.These butterfly paintings would be considered impressionist. I added the white oil paints at the end to to bring a definite design. I thought the white line gave it another dimension. There is a lot of the watercolor underpainting  showing among the wings.  This one is very clean. Sometimes everything goes right, every stroke on the paper counts.


Meanderings~~~~~ I wrote an article about caged artists who play it safe. You can see my most recent articles on my writer's  blog http://bettyslade.blogspot.com/ Learn to be free to be, the world needs to see your art from a higher place.
 
Artists are Made to Fly!

Artists are made to fly, to soar with new ideas and create in realms that are beyond them. But what if your wings are clipped and your heart is pumping and you are going nowhere? I have been there. I remember a time by my own making and by circumstance I couldn’t control, I felt like a caged bird and thought when the door flies open I’m out of here. Being grounded just brings more frustration, confusion and harsh self-judgment.

In a book by Brenda Ueland called If You Want to Write, she quotes from a letter that Van Gogh wrote to his brother. I understand if an artist continues to grow he must become honest with himself and his work. It seems that he must go backwards before he can go forward.

Impassioned with grief and pain, Van Gogh writes, “There are two kinds of idleness that form a great contrast. There is the man who is idle from laziness and from lack of character, from the baseness of his nature. You may if you like take me for such a one…”

“But there is the other idle man, who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, who does nothing because he seems to be imprisoned in some cage, because he does not possess what he needs to make him productive, because the fatality of circumstances brings him to that point, such a man does not always know what he could do, but he feels by instinct: yet I am good for something, my life has an aim after all, I know that I might be quite a different man! You may take me for such a one.”

“A caged bird in spring knows quite well that he might serve some end; he feels quite well that there is something for him to do, but he cannot do it. What is it? He does not remember quite well. Then he has some vague ideas and says to himself: ‘The others make their nests and lay their eggs and bring up their little ones,’ and then he knocks his head against the bars of the cage. But the cage stands there and the bird is maddened by anguish.’”

“Look at the lazy animal,’ says another bird that passes by, ‘he seems to be living at his ease.’ Yes, the prisoner lives, his health is good, he is more or less gay when the sun shines. But then comes the season of migration. Attacks of melancholia, - ‘but he has got everything he wants,’ say the children that tend him in his cage. He looks at the overcast sky and he inwardly rebels against his fate. ‘I am caged, I am caged, and you tell me I do not want anything, fools! You think I have everything I need. Oh, I beseech you, liberty, to be a bird like others birds!’…But I should be very glad if it were possible for you to see in me something else than an idle man of the worst type.”

Van Gogh’s life seemed to remain in a state of dilemma. I heard years ago that a dilemma is nothing more than a new place for new understanding for a new horizon. It is a higher place where we haven’t been before. It could be that we are flapping our wings like little sparrows, flying too close to earth and do not know there is more out there.

A couple of years ago, as Van Gogh states, there was a place that I inwardly rebelled and I knew there was a higher place I needed to go with my art. I decided with my oils to change from traditional to impressionist and contemporary. I took a risk and began trying different things.

With my own frustration and self-judgment, I crashed. It felt that I had digressed, and I didn’t know how to regain my footing. It took time experimenting with new unfamiliar ideas and finally I pushed through and I discovered a new and edgy style. Of course, my family and friends thought that I had lost it and wished that I would go back to my old safe way of painting. Safe meaning that everything is identifiable and not far out.

For me it would be asking me to climb back into the cage. I had seen some new horizons in my work and I couldn’t go back. I learned that when we make a change, it is not popular. We have come to a new horizon by persevering, but others haven’t and can not understand.

I’m not telling anything out of school, yes, all artists have been there if they have tried to go higher. And yes, they feel they have digressed and can easily go back into the cage and many do. But, oh me, when you have soared with the eagles and you are looking from a new vantage point, you want everyone to come up and see what you see.

Final Brushstroke! Being grounded is necessary. It is a place to get new wind under your wings and re-think how your art is affecting you. It will affect others with the same intensity or lack there of as it affects you. Take assurance, the artist in you will see new horizons if you refuse to play it safe.