Update on New Series!

I am off to our cottage in central Ontario tomorrow, so thought I would post a newsletter before I go. The new series now contains 15 paintings, 12x12" down to 6x6", the first 5 of which were in the last newsletter. I have prepared a bunch of large cradled panels and am excited to get to them when I get back mid August.

Here are the next three in the series, all 8x10" and showing the 'dry' stage of mark making, inks and collage, and then the final (maybe they are done??) work after being taken into encaustic. The wax is lovely for its ability to yield transparent glazes of colour, translucent veils which partially obscure what is underneath, and gorgeous solid opaques that completely hide what is underneath. The encaustic also gives the paintings a lovely warm glow, and they smell so good! I still don't have a name for this series, so if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them!

Not sure where the puppies came from, but they were so cute, I kept them!

Upcoming shows!

My time at the July Rosebud Artisan Market was so successful, that I have decided to return for a second market on August 14 from 10-4pm -yes, we get in the night before and have to be up at 6 to get to Rosebud in time to set up. Hopefully the vacation will be relaxing!! A new venture coming up on August 21 from 11-3pm is "Art In The Park". This is the first Art Market to be held at the Oakridge Community Hall. We are gathering artists from our area to participate. I have dreamed of doing this for so many years, I am thrilled to see it actually coming to fruition. We will be having food trucks and musical entertainment to go with the market, so it should be a fun time for all. Hopefully I will have a poster about the event to share with you in my next email. And last, but not least, I am in a 2 month show that Art On 9TH is having in Invermere, BC, that begins shortly and runs until the end of October. If you are in the area, I hope you will stop by and see the gorgeous work from a wonderful collection of talented artists! I hope you have a wonderful rest of July and beginning of August! I will write again when I am back from holiday and give you the newest scoop on my series! Blessings Sharon

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Back in the saddle!

Hello friends, I realize I haven't been here for 3 years -wow that went by really fast! I have decided that in this time of Covid sheltering at home, I would like to connect with you all again. I hope that you and all those you love are well, and are finding your way through this strange time. My hubby Dave and I have been healthy, physically and mostly emotionally, although I personally feel like I am on a bit of a roller coaster, tossing between sorrow for those less fortunate than I am (think single mothers with little kids, women in abusive relationships, etc, etc...) and elation at how beautiful the weather is becoming and that I am SO grateful to be alive and have all of my needs met, and then feeling a bit guilty for that, rinse and repeat!

So I decided that perhaps I can bring a little colour and joy into your inbox. That was my answer to the question "What do you have in your hand that could help others?" So I hope you will receive it in the spirit that it is being sent!

I am not going to try to fill in what has taken place over the last 3 years artistically, but I will share my recent work. Over the last 2 years I have been on a search to find a more contemporary expression for the landscapes that I love painting so much, searching for a unique and authentic voice that I loved and also captured the hearts of people. So below is some of that new work.

This painting is a sort of summary of my new work.  "The Red Makes It", now in its forever home, captures my new approach to the landscape. Over the past 7 years of painting in oils 'en plein air' (outside in front of the scene) I have grasped an appreciation of how the sun illuminates all the objects it falls on, giving each part its own individual identity, as if each one has a solo part in a choir full of beauty. Words fail me, that is not my gift. So I take my brush and paint how I feel about the things I see. My adjectives are radiant, intense colours, my nouns the form that are devised to play and dance with the other shapes on the canvas. This is not the world you might see with your eyes, but hopefully it expresses what you might feel if you were standing in my painting.

I did "Embrace Of Nature" purely from my imagination this winter. I began with a ton of colour and texture, having the idea of wanting to paint a forest, and eager to see what would reveal itself. The yellow and blue bands felt like arms to me and as I 'painted away the parts that weren't trees',  I began to see the importance of Nature, enfolding everything in its arms, giving order to the seemingly wild and untamed.

And this last piece, "Rundle's Song" was an attempt to put my new philosophy into practice with landscapes that I have painted many times in somewhat more representational, 'realistic' ways. I think it expresses the joy I feel standing at the side of Vermillion Lakes, gazing up at the power that is Mt Rundle.

I hope that you enjoy these images -please let me know if you do!

Blessings
Sharon
(You can see more of my new work on my website at http://sharonlynnwilliams.com)


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On Being An Artist....

"Steppin' Out", 9x12" acrylic on paper
$150 unframed

Today I thought I would write a bit about my journey as an artist. I hope you will find it interesting and inspiring! I posted it some of it on my Facebook page, so some of you may have seen it there.

I have decided to go back to doing some figurative work, revisiting an idea I explored almost two decades ago. I have begun again to go to live model drawing, weekly since June, skipping the summer months, and boy was I ever rusty! I had never been taught how to draw the figure or portraits (even in art school), so my learning has been up to me. It is exhilarating, depressing and exhausting, but I know my efforts will pay off if I stick to it. The internet has become a fantastic tool to learn just about anything by, often at little cost compared to live workshops or classes, and learning to draw is right up there. 12 years ago when I began to work with the figure, there was hardly anything online (heck was there even internet back then :)?) Learning figure drawing from books is a very difficult way to learn for a visual learner like me!

While I was looking for great figure drawing lessons, I came across two videos that I think are valuable to watch, not just for artists, but for everyone. The first is found here, called "How NOT To Be An Artist". Pretty funny and right on. The other is a video on "How To Practice -Improve your Art Skills (or any skills) the Smart Way". Find it here. Please let me know what you think of these when you are finished watching them!

Now, I am pretty insecure showing anyone my efforts thus far, but hopefully will begin to do so more as I become more comfortable with the process. I am showing you one of my latest explorations above -done from a 2 minute sketch done on a painted background I had from an old Jane Davies class, and then painted. I love how the background shows through -I used to do something similar, but in an entirely different way. 

Here is one of my old figure paintings. The figure was done from a photo rather than from life, and that is NOT what I want to do now!

"Too Loose", 12x12" acrylic and collage, 2002

My favourite thing is to combine what I have already 'mastered' with the new thing -always a challenge that allows me to continue to grow as an artist. So I want to PAINT the figure as well -Oil, acrylic, collage, watercolour, pastel -media that I have learned to use, by putting in all the hours and hours of hard work described in the video above. Oh, and there is abstracted realism, which I find fascinating and WAY more difficult and visually interesting than pure realism IMHO.

Never satisfied with copying anything, I need to find my OWN way to express what I see and feel. Now that significantly ups the stakes, as not only do I need to learn HOW to do something, I need to learn how it looks MY way. Of course that means LOTS of work, trial and error, and the subsequent MOUNTAIN of failures. Not for the faint of ❤️.

I have the following quote stuck to my studio door that you may feel inspiring:

Wish me luck (and sanity).

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Winter Brings New Directions!

"Rae Glacier Abstraction ii", 30x40" acrylic on gallery canvas
$2100

I just love the winter time when it is too cold or miserable to venture outside to paint, as that gives me prolonged studio time to explore ideas away from the actual scene I am trying to interpret.

This is a much larger version of an original 11x14" acrylic and collage painting I did in 2007 during a Gerald Brommer workshop on Line And Shape (see image below). Wow, that was 10 years ago almost to the date!! I always say, and seldom do myself, that it is a great idea to revisit old ideas and to see how far your art has advanced in the interim. At the time I did several quick pencil sketches of PARTS of a photo I took of a hike we were on, and explored each of them in abstraction, choosing to focus on only parts of the scene in each one. I have been interested in adding line as a major element in my work for years, while continuing my interest in shape as a dominant element, which is why I just loved Brommer's workshop! By the way he is an incredible teacher of PAINTING IDEAS, and I highly recommend advanced artists to take a workshop or two with him. He is in his 80's now, so do it quickly if you can :).

In this current attempt, I wanted to focus on texture as well as abstract shape, so I kept the colour more muted. I also kept the element of line as a less dominant element, although it is still present. If you blare all the elements of design the result is a train wreck!
Firstly I drew the large shapes from the original painting onto the canvas with a large sharpie marker, gridding them up so that I maintained the composition. Then I spent some time texturing the large canvas using soft gel, self leveling gel, clear tar gel and gesso, and pressing different textures into the wet mediums and scraping with palette knives, sponges and brushes.
While that was still wet, I flowed on india ink and acrylic inks and let them do their thing.
When all that had dried, I played with the shapes I had drawn, trying to incorporate the random colour and texture that had happened, while still keeping to the spirit of the original.
I found it very useful to have this compositional 'playground' to play within, knowing that if I followed that, I would have a strong painting. Please click on the top image to see it larger and in more detail.

Original "Rae Glacier Abstraction", 11x14" ink, acrylic and collage. Tertiary triadic colour scheme (BV, YO, YG).

For interest sake, and because I hope that my posts will be educational, fun and inspirational for you, I will post the other paintings I did in this series at the time. They are all done on 1/4 sheets of watercolour paper using sharpie markers, india ink, watercolour and acrylic. Obviously the colour schemes are made up -the bottom 4 are all based on analogous colour schemes (another thing I was exploring at the time!) All are sold, so I am REALLY glad I had taken good photos of them :)

This is the first one in the series. Just watercolour and ink.

I think this was the second one. This one has random collage papers placed on a line drawing and then acrylic and watercolour was added, and more line. Some of the lines became trees and rocks. I was going for a V composition which framed everything else.

This is the third one, getting even looser. Here you can see the edges of the random collage papers, some of which were incorporated as objects and some just left to just be.

This was the last one. I wanted to keep the strong abstraction in the cruciform design, yet see how true I could get to representing what was actually in the photo -well, sort of! This was a  really valuable lesson for me!

 Enjoy and please feel free to SHARE!!

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"The Song of Spring", encaustic painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"The Song of Spring", 12 x 12" encaustic painting on cradled birch panel
$495, ready to hang

I did this painting at the same time I did yesterday's post. It is hard to photograph encaustics well in order to capture the luminosity of the paint layers. If you click on this to see the enlargement, you will see that there are floating layers of collage text beneath the white layer. You might even be able to see the scratched into surface!

Enjoy!

To purchase this painting, commission your own painting or contact me to do a workshop in your area, please email me at williamsdotsharonatshawdotca (insert characters for the dot and at!)

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"Counting The Time" encaustic painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Counting The Time", 12x12" encaustic painting on cradled panel
SOLD

This encaustic painting will be shown in the upcoming FCA exhibition at the Edgemont Community Centre on
Mach 9th from 10am to 4pm. Another experimental piece, this time using translucent and opaque layers, and encorporating powdered graphite, and stencil work.

Enjoy!

To purchase this painting, commission your own painting or contact me to do a workshop in your area, please email me at williamsdotsharonatshawdotca (insert characters for the dot and at!)

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Collage Workshop and Bad News :(

 "Surf Side", 12 x 12", mixed media
I had the final day of my collage workshop on Nov 22nd, but unfortunately I have been having a family crisis -my Mother, and best friend, was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic lung cancer on the 24th, and we have been living through some very tough times since. She is now feeling much better after an 8 day hospital stay, and is living with me for the time being. So needless to say, I won't be getting much time to paint any time soon. So I thought I should post these final photos from the workshop. (I do have some work that was done prior that I can post until I can get back to work, so you will be hearing from me!)

This is the first stage in the collage, just pasting on the various transparent papers I had made in the shape of a 'T'.

 This is the next stage. I have added some transitional papers around the edges to bridge the positive and negative shapes, and have added some decorated papers  to add interest.

More papers have been added to get a directional flow going, and the focal point is being developed. In the final (so far) version at the top, you can see how I decided to play with a focal point and its repeat. I painted the background with a pale peach colour to establish the orange as the dominant colour. I also incorporated some line work to move the eye around. My son Evan (the actor) who is home to visit Grandma decided that there was a sea feeling to the painting, and hence the title.

Here are some of my students in my lovely large workshop space.

And here we all are holding our masterpieces! It was a wonderful workshop and I think we all had fun and learned a lot.
Enjoy!

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CLEARANCE SALE CONTINUES

"Cosmopolitan Jazz", 22 x 30" acrylic on watercolor paper mounted to board
Retail price $1250.00 -for a limited time now only $200 unframed plus shipping and handling

This is an acyrlic painting that began as a visually textured and rather chaotic surface. The shape of the grand piano began the search for the rest of the orchestra, who were found and brought out in time.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

"Wooded Places", mixed media painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Wooded Places", mixed media painting, 12 x 12"
SOLD

I haven't done a collage painting for such a long time, and it was SO fun to do. I paint and decorate all my own collage papers, and the paintings begin with a random smattering of them. Then I look and look to the painting to tell me the direction to take. This one began easily as the two main trees were suggested in the paper, and off I went painting, covering up, repainting, simplifying and then making busy again until the whole thing began to form a cohesive unit. It would be neat to have several of the exact same starts to see the different paintings they would become.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

More fun stuff from Bob's workshop

"All Fly Away", acrylic, 11.5 x 11.5"
Each day Bob had us begin with warm-up exercises, by having us "paint a verb/adverb" -words such as 'encapsulate' and 'excitement'. We had one minute to respond in black and white, just trying to make some marks on the paper that capture that feeling. These later became under paintings for layered paintings. I believe the word under this is 'to set free' -and the idea held through the next many versions of this painting. I was going after a cantilever composition, which is a new one for me.

"Curtain Call", acrylic, 11.5 x 11.5"
I have no idea what word was under this one, but my goal was to find some loose figures and let them tell a story. The 'flowers' in the orange figures arms was actually a skin I peeled off my mixing area and collaged on the painting. Too much fun!

By the way, this is my 300th post on this blog. Wow, it had been quite a ride. I want to thank all of you who look at this blog on a regular basis for all the support and encouragement you have been to me over the past 25 months, it has really kept me going.

Here's to the next 100 posts!

Fishing for the final compostition!

This painting has had more lives than Carter has little liver pills! I thought this was the final painting, but the more I looked at it, the less satisfied I became. Ah, the danger of holding onto a painting too long...

So I had another go at it. I thought that the light pastel opaque areas were too stark, so I glazed over most of the painting with a wash of Quin. Gold. Then played back into it. Thought it was done, but alas, when I saw it as a bitty thumbnail on my camera, I realized it was just too busy...

"Resonances", acrylic, 16 x 20"
SOLD

So I went back into it yet again! This time I brought back some of the light opaques I liked the first time around, and then glazed over other areas to quieten them down. I also felt it worked better turned around 180 degrees -sometimes working abstractly works like that. It is still a bit busy, but my paintings tend to be like that -products of a busy mind...

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

"Take Another Look", watercolour painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Take Another Look", watercolour painting, 11 x 14"
$225.00 archivally matted, FREE S&H

This is another watercolour I did during my class's venture into abstraction. After making the painting, which had a strong cruciform design, I thought the result was good, but not WOW. So I decided to impose a frame-on-frame compostition on top of the cruciform. I did this by using the theory of 'counter-change', which has a shape that changes from dark against light in one area to light against dark in another. I did this by lifting the paint in areas and painting darker in others. The end result makes you 'take another look', hence the title.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

"Mountain Patterns", watercolor painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Mountain Patterns", watercolor painting, 11 x 15"
SOLD

This is another experiment into abstraction with my advanced class. This was a totally new departure for me, quite a shock actually, and I think I really like it! It is based on a photo I took while driving through the Kananaskis Mountains -I liked the shapes and values but the photo was just filled with greys and greens. What fun to paint it like I wish it really was.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Mixed Media Demonstration -cont.

Ok, so after I had gotten to the last step of the mixed media demo from Jan 27th, I spent several hours playing with it, trying to make it work, but it was going from bad to worse! I got frustrated with it and decided to gesso it over and give it another try -kind of a catharsis. I put 2 layers of gesso on it and then a layer of gloss medium to seal the surface. Then I thought I would stamp into the gesso with my large, dry stamp, and behold the gesso was not quite dry so it left a cool imprint in it. You can see above where the stamp actually grazed into the underlying color a bit (the shine is the gloss medium, so you can see where it got removed with my stamp)

So I was re-energized to begin again and see how the new imprints would take the paint. I used the same colours as before (Quin gold, Quin crimson and Ultramarine blue) and popped them in and mixed them around. You can see how the gesso takes the paint differently(it is semi-absorbant) than the gloss medium (non-absorbant); as well, the paint kind of settled into the indentations. I did a little more stamping as well at this stage, mostly with the small spiral stamp.

Next I took a viewfinder design and began to block out some of the shapes with darker paint. At this point I could see the suggestion of where a figure could be (the breast shape on center right side and a butt-cheek and legs in the lower part of the painting. I had no idea where the head would be or what her upper torso was doing. I spent another several hours trying to get her to work -but alas, that wasn't working out either. So desperation hit yet again (heavy sigh) and I took my rubbing alcohol and poured it all over the painting and took my wet sandpaper and scrubbed at the mess until all I had was a ghost of the former paint. This left a very cool texture again, because I had applied the gesso layers with a foam roller, which left a bumpy texture, so the paint lifted off the high bits and remained in the valleys. If you zoom into the painting below, you can see some of that texture.

This time I took and put in some more dark passages, and decided to keep it abstract-no more figure finding for me right now! I painted through a stencil in varying ways to keep the texture moving from the lower right to the upper left -light against dark and then dark against light. Repetition with variation, remember? Then I began to add different colour opaques to it, breaking up shapes and joining others. I was once again having fun!

More dark pattern to link the the elements of the painting together. I think this is the final painting -at least for now!

Moral of this lesson: It's never over 'til it's over -gotta love acrylics...

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Mixed Media demonstration -part 2

Here I am still at the make shapes and values stage. I have added a thin very dark glaze of acrylic, and while it is still wet, I spritz some rubbing alcohol with my handy Chloraseptic bottle (gives spotty spray rather than a fine mist). The rubbing alcohol pushes the dark glaze aside, revealing donut shapes of the lighter under glaze. I also stamped into this glaze with a dry stamp. I have also eliminated any distracting white shapes near the edges of the paper with transparent glazes.

Now I am working upright sometimes, so that I can get back and see what is happenind -trying to remember to get the big shapes right. I have glazed over various parts of the painting with transparent glazes of colour to give a wonderful glow and to link areas together, thereby creating larger shapes. You can still see some of my chalk outlines, which I have now changed since I first put them on. I am trying to play with the illusion of depth, making some of the boxes appear to be in front of others. It's fun to play with depth in an abstract painting, and to flatten the perspective in a realistic one!

Here I have removed the chalk outlines. This is it for the darks, for right now anyway. Up to now I have only been working with transparent layers.

This is the way it was left at the end of class. While working on it I have rotated it around many times and worked in that new orientation for a while, trying to keep my options open. Bad to fall in love too early! At this stage I have begun to add opaque lights into the painting. I am still just using the colours I began with, only this time they are added to gesso (my easy white) to make opaque layers. I have put some on translucently (thined with a bit of water) so that I could do my alcohol trick(see the light blue shape on the upper right edge) -repetition with variation, the key to a successful painting. Light against dark/dark against light. I applied some of the opaques through stencils to create new interesting textures. I really hated to leave it at this stage as I felt it was really beginning to come together. I will try to work on it this week to bring it to a finish -or maybe I will wait and do that so the class can watch next Monday. And thanks to Lindsay for providing the photos :)

Stay tuned for part 3... to come!

New Mixed Media demonstration -part 1

This is the end of the first step of the demo that I did on Monday for my Mixed media class. The objective was to make a 'start' using fluid acrylics, stamps and stencils, and then working our way to a finished abstract painting. I began this painting by squeezing Quin Gold, Quin Crimson and Ultramarine blue from the bottles in squirts around the gloss medium coated Aquarius paper, then squirts of Acrylic Glazing Liquid were added on top. Then a scraper was used to squeegie this around the page a bit to make some wonderful stained areas-these are the brilliant colour areas. Very cool as you get very unexpected patterns. The excess was then scraped off, drawn through and played with. Dry stamps were pressed into the wet paint areas to lift the paint, paint was added to stamps and stamped for a positive image, and a rubber shapper was used to draw lines back to the white of the coated paper. Sure enough, we have chaos here, but I have lots of textures and colours to work with.

Here I am hard at work -remember to wash off your scraper between scrapings or else you will end up with mud. I save most of the scrapped paint to use as darks later on. This stage is all about texture and colour.

While the first stage is still wet, I go back with my scraper and begin to define some geometric shapes. I am looking to get a flow between organic shapes in the foreground and geometric shapes in the background.

At this stage I have drawn some shapes with white chalk to suggest a direction I might like to go in. Of course, all this is subject to change as you shall see. I begin to place in some darks to define some of the geometric shapes. I also lift with some rubbing alcohol to get some white paper back. That is the beauty of working on a sealed surface! This stage is all about adding shape and value to the colour and texture we got on step one.

Stay tuned tomorrow for part 2!

"Tree Patterns", acrylic abstract painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Tree Patterns", acrylic abstract painting, 16 x 16"
$575 framed, FREE S&H

This is another painting done on a textured ground. This one was textured with light modeling paste and gel medium, both of which were stamped into with a hand carved stamp and carved into with a credit card while still wet. After the ground dried I layered transparent washes of my favorite combination of colours: Quin Gold, Quin Burnt Orange and Permanent Violet Dark (Golden Fluid Acrylics). I also applied a float of watered down Irridescent Bronze which settles into the crevases in a lovely combination of gold and a startling green colour. Once more, calligraphy played a huge role in the development of the painting. This time the grid structure happened at the beginning in the shapes that I put my texture down in. I took the idea for the moon from my last painting, and the painted lacy edging pattern completed the theme.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

"Fall Abstract", abstract landscape painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Fall Abstract", abstract landscape painting, 12 x 12"
SOLD

This is one of the paintings that I did at the Gerald Brommer workshop I just attended. It is based on my painting "Early Evening Shadows" posted on July 8, 2009, which has been sold. First we painted all kinds of oriental papers with acrylics in an assortment of colours, varying the values and intensities of each colour family. Then we glued them on in a rough fashion and then painted back into them to develop the compositional planes. Great fun and very creative as you have no idea where the painting will lead you.

Here it is in its frame. This painting is another that will be for sale at my upcoming Calyx show this Saturday (see invitation in the side bar)

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.