Saxophone and Bass Painting

I have family visiting this week and yet I have actually managed to get some painting and printmaking done. I had fun painting a very colorful saxophone and bass picture on a 24 inch canvas. I may make a few changes but I think it is pretty much finished.

I also wanted to work on a print for the new exhibition 'Parch, Thirst of the Earth' which opens on August 21st at the Heaven Blue Rose Gallery in Roswell where I am represented. With global warming and a drought here in Georgia it seems a very apt theme for an exhibition. I have been trying to create a collagraph print that evokes the idea of a parched and dry cracked earth. I made a plate with an interesting textured surface and pulled two prints from it today, one of which I quite like. I'll post a photograph of it in a few days time.

The Golden Saxophone is Finished

I feel this Saxophone painting is finished. It's rather busy with all the patterned underpainting showing through but I think it makes it more interesting, in fact, I have enhanced the pattern in many places by backpainting around and into it. You can see pictures of the process, right from the start, in previous posts. If you like musical paintings check out my web site http://www.susanneclark.com/ and go to the musical page where you will find lots of cello and saxophone paintings with a few pianos thrown in.

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I have been putting it off for months. Procrastinating and filling my time instead by hanging out online and watching quite tedious interior design shows on TV, but the time has finally come to confront the blog.

Deciding what to write is an interesting exercise. What could I possibly write, I thought, that would be of interest to other artists and people who visit my website. Somehow though, I knew from past experience, getting started is the hardest part. Once one commits to a project and starts to work, things fall into line and start to happen, and so I am hoping that this is the case as I start with my first blog entry

I recently moved to Atlanta from York, in the UK, where I lived from late 2001 until March 2007. It was a very disruptive move as there was a long delay between packing up and finally moving into a permanent home here in Atlanta and during that time I really wasn't able to paint. Now I have my studio set up again and have completed quite a few new paintings.

I have been working for some time now on a series based on musical instruments. I started doing these a few years back because my middle son Todd, who is a musician, wanted a painting to give as a gift of appreciation to the producer he had just finished making a CD with. He suggested a cello or violin because they have a nice curvy shape. Being a good mother I immediately went to work on the suggested subject and found I really enjoyed doing it. That was the start of a whole series of cello works and then I got interested in saxophones. These paintings have been very popular with music lovers and musicians and I have sold most of them. They have also been used as posters for musical events in countries as far away as Australia and Switzerland, with my permission of course, and as the cover on an internet music society cookbook, a Christmas card for the Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House, and on a soon to be released cover of a classical music CD.

My most recent piece "Variation on a Musical Theme 2" is a large dramatic painting of saxophones overlaying a cello and is full of bold colors as is most of my work. Now I want to continue that theme but perhaps take it in a new and more abstract direction However I have the canvas out and some ideas so I just need to start.