Drawing on Ceramics I

 Around the time I started to relearn to draw (500 years ago?  no...a year ago but still In The Beforetimes), I made a few test pieces with underglaze and sgraffito techniques based on saved dried flowers and seeds from summer 2019. They didn't trip my trigger at the time, but I kept running across them, so I'm going to share.  That also means I can throw them out!

Aliens?

That one is based on my first round of abstract Queen Anne's Lace drawings and paintings.

Pretty sex-organ-y.

Based on river oats

These were only about three or four inches tall, so the nuance I could get from larger drawings, as well as from ink flow, just weren't there.  They're called sketches for a reason.  I let these ideas marinate for my time away from the Clay Guild and during my summer of collecting flower images and drawing on traditional surfaces...

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.

Queen Anne's Lace III

Queen Anne's Lace III

Feel the breezeeeee.

Available at Society6.

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Queen Anne's Lace II

Queen Anne's Lace II

Another shot from the same wild field off Troost Avenue, the unofficial racial and socio-economic dividing line of our city.  You don't really think about all that stuff when looking at all these beautiful flowers waving in the wind.

Available as an art print--> Society6

Queen Anne's Lace I

Queen Anne's Lace

My oh my, how I love Queen Anne's Lace!  Around the urban core of Kansas City, we have plenty of vacant lots and "waste spaces" that nature fills in with local wild flowers, and QAL runs amok.  Beware!  There are two lookalikes--Bishop's Flower and Poison Hemlock.  Bishop's isn't as invasive and is part of the wild carrot family, but Hemlock is POISONOUS, as the name indicates.  If you cut a stem of any of these, you'll know Lace and Bishop because they smell sweet like carrots, and Hemlock smells bad.  Just don't eat any of them to be safe.

Available as an art print on Society6.