Original artwork description:

"Betty & Blue" - mixed media on yupo paper, 9" x 12". Ready for framing.

My love affair with yupo continues. Good gracious! The groovy textures and smeary wonderland paint creates on yupo makes me swoon. Within moments, paint layers become galaxies of starry night skies and cosmic mystery. The ability to easily scrape into the layers and leave markings makes it hard to stop...then dropping another color into those deep grooves and ahhhhh. Yupo = bliss.

When I work with my little girls, these primitive portraits and characters, it is part of a journey of "re-wilding". This word resonates with me deeply. So much of our human experience is civilized, technology-based and contained within artificial environments (and I love air conditioning as much as most Florida-based people!) that I think it is important to find ways to counter balance - things that make us feel a little more wild. A good hike will do that for me. An afternoon in a kayak. A walk in the rain. And painting these girls.

There is something about their roughness, their out-of-proportion heads and bodies, the uncontrollable process by which they emerge under my hands - it reconnects me with instinct. Feeling the paint, feeling the character, following the feeling and not thinking about it at all. Being fully present. In flow.

I have to chuckle at this. For the first half-century of my life, I was learning to become a civilized human in modern society. For the second half, I am in pursuit of becoming wild again.

Materials used:

acrylic, ink, charcoal, china marker and ephemera on yupo paper

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