Inspired by Queen Anne's Lace

This field is now an ugly apartment building on Troost and I'm pretty sore about it.

 Queen Anne's Lace is one of my favorite things on Planet Earth.  It's beautiful in the breeze, it feeds pollinators and caterpillars, and every part of it is edible (it's wild carrot, after all).  Every stage of its life cycle is appealing to me, even the dried seed heads.

Playing with a little macro lens I got right up in that inspiration.

Is it going to eat me?

Sketched a little.  Actually, probably a lot, but I painted over most of them.

This one got me excited.

another sketch that has been painted over

So I decided to lay the groundwork on the canvas...these images were pulled from my Instagram, and were taken in my makeshift basement painting studio, so they're not great but I like to show process shots.

There were several more layers of paint than this, but the point is that I put a lot of color in this then washed it out and added papers and whatnot.

This stranger lives inside the painting forever.

I scratched into the surface like I was doing to my ceramics at the time.

Last step before adding ink and paint.

Aliens? What is this?

Weird I'd reference O'Keefe...not vaginal at all.

In summation--I made a few more, but using this single type of design didn't bring me joy like the repeated use of orzos does--although this is quite a similar shape when you get down to it.  I'm glad I went through this exercise, as it got me to start drawing, which led to a lot of very good things, but for now I'm going to be keeping this idea on the back burner.  Summer 2019 I got a wild hair to buy hundreds of feet of canvas, so I think the spark was that I was trying to figure out how to use it and make bigger work in general.

See current works in progress on my Instagram.