Made It: Tempting Feast of Good Things

Oh, hi there.  It's been a while.  I've been doing some stuff.  And also not doing anything, which is the way things go this time of year.

Since September I've been working on several large pieces that were installed mid-December at the University of Michigan Medical Center through the Gifts of Art program.  They'll be up until mid-March.  I took some progress shots while working on the collection (called "Prairie Mantras") and I'm going to share in the coming posts.

First up: Tempting Feast of Good Things

48 in wide x 36 in high

I primed and painted many aluminum pieces at the same time, looking at color combos.  The red one there is what ended up being the above piece.  Here I'd only primed and put on maybe two layers of paint.

Juveniles.

Then I put on vinyl as a mask in an orzo design and painted over.

I got to use up some ugly green vinyl this way without feeling bad.

Peeled!

 After I peeled off the vinyl I sanded the surface to soften it up and bring back some of the under layer.

Sanded!

 Rinse and repeat.

Round two.  Cream and blue over top.

 After the second layer of applying, painting, and peeling, I painted and sanded again, this time with blues.  Then added more vinyl AGAIN. TWICE.

The little ones really started making me feel some mania.  Again, I got to use some
basically useless vinyl (it was printed on and weird, some of the scrap pile's dogs).

 Paint, peel, sand, paint...I really wanted all the layers to show up so I added more of a wash at the end, the purple and blue really got the other colors to pop.

 I felt like I was channeling Maxfield Parrish and didn't want to screw it up, so I just added some lavender orzos as a little hill on the bottom to create a dreamy, under-big-trees-in-summer feeling.  I'd like to visit that place.

And, once again, here's the finished product:

The title, as with most of my work nowadays, comes from a book, "Sunflowers: A Book of Kansas Poems," I found at my grandma's house.  Published in 1916.  The particular poem is by William Allen White called "Where a Lovely Time Was Had."

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