10 Year Anniversary: The Painting Diary 16 of 30

The Painting Diary16 of 30: Changes, 2016

2016 was a good year for my creative development. I had the luxury of dedicating all my time to my art and I could feel a real change in me that year, I could see that I was becoming more confident about the vision that I had been chasing. It was there all along of course, but what started as a simple fascination with trees, and then roots, was now clearly expanding into a more broad, all encompassing love for Mother Nature, in all her darkness and light, full of magic and mystery. 

I can attribute most of this leveling up to my live painting experiences, which were having a profound effect on me. As a live painter I was becoming more confident working in front of people and was developing a style that was quick and expressive and a lot of fun. Before live painting I was the painter that didn’t want people to see “the ugly phase” and would slave away, alone in my studio, working slowly and painfully. 

All that said, todays selection is not a live painting, it’s a studio painting done entirely in oil paints. I wanted to make a triptych that was not separated into three pieces. This concept changed a lot since the initial concept sketch. Originally it had a pyramid on the water side and an almost modern looking skyscraper on the desert side and in the center was a person praying or something. I honestly have forgotten what I was going for with that concept. In the end it became a lot simpler, thankfully, and is a piece about the cycles of nature and my favorite concept of life and death, and the balances of nature. 

This was the last time I ever painted a hornets nest, after about 10 paintings with that as a subject, I finally felt like I got what I was looking for and could move on. You’ll also find a couple other old friends in there; dandelion, blackberry and carnivorous plants, as well as peyote, and a lotus flower. The seasons are represented in the branches that circle the nest.

Changes, Oil on board, 2016