Tip # 3 - move color chips around

The color chips placed in a styrafoam plate can easily be arranged using gravity to give the appearance that they have been dispersed naturally. I work hard to make my art look like it happened easily.

Tip 2 Collages are excellent for expressing your emotional color preferances.

If you do not have old paintings that have become a little boring, make colors just for the sake of it to be cut up for arranging and rearranging. I have learned that I hate most of the red pieces but love themnext to their compliment. I love the yellows but have relatively few of them. They are more difficult to manage in paintings without them popping.

My watercolor paintings going back ten or more years are a source for my play. My play is sorting the colors and textures into piles of color harmonies each pile having a dominate color. I have a pile of each of these blues, greens, yellows, reds, salmon oranges, whites, metalics, blacks, and neutrals. Within the color piles there are hints of every other color all in harmony because of their similar dominate hue. I have compressed the piles into zip lock bages and stored them on shelves. I feel like with paper I can weave and quilt using little pieces from c paintings that have sentimental memories. I get inspiration from just looking at these color bags. I have a quantity of greens from mostly Oregon landscapes, Salmon from Utah landscapes, reds from abstracts, yellows also from abstracts and flowers. Blacks from gesso I purchased to encourage a student about 20 years ago who liked black. From the same period I did abstracts with purples. The amazing thing is no matter how worked over a painting is, breaking it up into small pieces, each and every piece can be places in an awesome harmonious new home.

Tip 1 for creativity

Surround yourself with inspiration. The carpet on my studio floor probably helped me in seeing an exotic picture in the scraps of paper I have been recycling from older paintings.

Collage abstracts from cut and torn watercolor paintings

These collages except for some more recently painted backgrounds are made of old paintings that have bored me. They are 10 years old or older. It is best to keep more recent work as a gage of my development.

Jean Valjean emerging from Paris sewer

One from the red nose series

My studio taken over by collage making

Red nosed dandy clown

Red nosed deer whistling, watercolor collage

The lips said the whole face had to relate to them. The decisions I make with a collage are fun because of the greater fleximility than wet paint. I am allowed to try this piece and that piece before they are glued. In these collages expression is what I value.

The Clowns, Red nosed puppy, man, woman and two birds

One of the interesting things about doing collage, is seeing more and more faces and animals in radom color. First I did the clown and then the woman, folowed by the dog and two birds.

Red Nose, watercolor collage series

Last year I went through hundreds of watercolors sorting them into keepers. The keepers were sorted onto labeled shelves - ocean, water, people, animals, gardens, flowers, and abstarcts. The unselected went on a shelf waiting for collages. Then when I heard that at the Oregon State LaSelles Stewart Center Guistina Gallery is having an open African exhibit i remembered the collages of Matisse and Picasso influenced by visits to Northern Africa. When I started arranging torn and cut pieces of my watercolor painted paper, I saw clowns. Looking in Wikipedia, I learned the earliest known clowns found were in Egypt thousands of years ago.

Gray Clown Watercolor Collage

Collage of clowns and discovery of natural phenomina

The natural phenomina: I see suggestions of faces looking through my old experimental paintings, especially this one that I made to answer the question: "What if I influence the flow and drying of the paint by placing the paper on an uneven surface and dropping stones here and there? I am having great fun. I feel gratified when I see what I like in random marks. I feel gratified when I move torn painted papers over my painted backgrounds until I make a face with the just right expression for me.

The editing functions are back for this blog.

I am ready to celebrate.

This is a painting I did in 1986 in honor of the style of my Portland State University Professor Frederich Heidel. When I was a student I made a proposal for a mossaic in the Portland State cafeteria. I did not get the commission. But I did write a paper about a color theory of using tinted grout in back of broken glass and ceramics. In addition to setting limitations on color, I addressed the different kind of shapes off the more brightly hued chards. This theory is adapted to paint.

Clown Collage in honor of Matisse.

Oregon Hatchery Research Center and my Humbug Creek Series

Now I can post pictures again

How I see my art process

https://picasaweb.google.com/102278685227751548259/DianeWidlerWenzelArt#5763536581719781506

http://dianewidlerwenzelart.wordpress.com/This summer is a great time to concentrate on oil painting. To focus on my progress, I am continuing with a new blog. Originally the Diane Widler Wenzel Art was started because I lost functions on this one - most important of these functions to me was the ability to download pictures. After much grief, I was able to post pictures again. But still I like the idea of starting fresh in a new blog with only occasional posts at Umbrella Painting Journal.

Tension between painting and simulataneous viewing of fishing line

Review of BETWEEN THE FOLDS by filmmaker Vanessa Gould

"Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium."  Henry Matisse

Paper folding has become an art form that reflects the nature of everything in the universe. The process of folding is basic to all that moves in the universe. So no wonder paper folding is a fascination of scientists, mathematicians, and musicians. It is an educational tool for all kinds of mathematics.  Paper in our culture is a humble medium without an archival longevity making the paper folded masterpieces hard to be seen as valuable for marketing. The process of making  incredible paper art is most valuable to the artist/scientist.

How I am making painting a more relaxed experience

1) Keeping a journal
2) Doing more sketches in preperation
3) Sketching to brain storm solutions
4) A three hour time limit on painting sessions
5) Setting a whimsical mood by displaying my grandchildren's drawings and paintings in the house and their painted ceramic tiles in my garden.
6) Inviting friends to paint with me

Liking larger changes a little better on two paintings

Searching for my wandering stateless Widler Family, Jaffa, 1891

All over the canvas small changes DID NOT save a painting that I no longer liked.

"Girl Jumping Flying Hearts" - a saved oil painting

Looking for a way of painting that is more relaxing

The way I get life into my paintings is to become supercharged and excited.  That is a way of the past. I want to paint serenity.

Snow Canyon, Utah State Park

Zion National Park, on the way up to Angel's Landing

Zion National Park, Lower Emerald Pool

Two boys playing at Frenchglen Hotel State Heritage Site, Oregon State Park

The Frenchglen Hotel offers dinners, breakfasts and lunches. From the dinning table window I painted this picture the snowy morning of April 4, 2012. The atmosphere of the hotel is very quaint. The birds, cotton tail rabbits, and deer are well fed too.

Review of J.H. Sweet's book GYPSY FIDDLE

Gypsy Fiddle, by J. H. Sweet, is between magical fantasy and science fiction for 10 years and up. It is much fun to read and I can readily see that Sweet was having the best time ever writing the story. As a 68 year old grandmother, I enjoyed it for the wholesome main character who was brave in exploring a strange world where she was proactive in surrounding herself with caring adults. The new mother substitute nurtured her when her biological mother who also loved her but fell short.

As an artist I loved the message that even if your first art works do not fill the expectations of some critics, art is useful and in the reach of everyone - art helps to bring people together by showing tangible works so we can appreciate our similarities in needs. The hand crocheted border on a salvaged towel makes a beautiful personalized gift from a great aunt who I am trying to convince is artful in her living. I can't wait until I write her about Sweet's book. Click here on the blue tiltle to get a copy of this free e-book, GYPSY FIDDLE.

See my blog titled Diane Widler Wenzel to view my latest paintings of Talking Water Garden, Albany, Oregon.

Steve Carpenter, painter of world renown is giving back

Steve Carpenter is a graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School, Portland, Oregon. He is an example of when your high school teachers and friends believe you can be an artist to the fullest depth of the word, the seed of the dream can materialize with work and focus. In high school Steve's biggest dream was to be an illustrator like Norman Rockwell which he accomplished early on in his career. He was a commercial artist for Disney as part of a rich art journey taking him to Europe where he was a fine arts painter. Recently he returned back to the United States to give back to the arts by creating a school in New York. Steve says anyone can learn to draw and learn from him by watching a four hour long video on building a portrait.
Below is his painting "Cosmos Dialous I".

Below Steve's teacher, Henry Heine's demonstration from years ago has sharp differences and faint similarities.

"The Mechanical Birds" by Henry Heine was part of his lesson. He showed us a number of examples of cubist painters and talked about the history of science impacting the artists of the early 20th century. Artists learned from science that there were more ways to see. Mr. Heine, also, demonstrated the process at work. He applied the paint with a sprayer and used printing techniques as well as brushes. He demonstrated an energetic attitude and promised us a break through where we would let our hair down, feel freedom, and promised it would be great fun for us when we make a break through where creative expression would flow. During the 60's there was a movement in art education to paint from our own notions and disregard the tradition of representational painting. This philosophy produced practitioners of painting who complain. Many felt misguided because they don't know what they are doing when painting abstracts. During the three years we were with him, Heine gave us an understanding of abstracting the essence and directional guides based on art history in many of his assignments.

Henry Heine somewhere in the cosmos is very proud of Steve. To learn more about Steve click on the links in blue and underlined above.

Inanimate things or people the most difficult to paint?

I find no difference in difficulty whether I am painting something alive or inanimate. I paint their gesture and energy. When I am painting the rocks I feel myself as a rock. The gesture of the rock comes from its skelton-like creation standing up to water and wind. When I am painting the ocean water instead of picking a still moment. I do a dance of gestures as though I were to paint. I feel slish, slosh, kazame of water moving into the rocks pushed by weather and tidal forces. My muscles do the planning in a state completely in the moment. Theoretically my goal is to live in tha moment.
The end results do not always flow. But when they do I am pleased.

February 3rd, Seal Rock Sunset

Seal Rock - 60 degrees F.-slight breeze - 10 foot swells

Wishing to correct for the scale of Seal Rocks and the early morning sun light on them, I painted over the on location experience. I think this one was a learning experience.

Review of e-book,Golden Chains by Rain Truax

Rain calls her books Romances with an Edge. GOLDEN CHAINS is one of many books each with aspects of Rain's creative life. This one is from her art involvement. Rain is also a sculptress like her main character, Ravine. In GOLDEN CHAINS Rain's philosophy of art pretaining to art education and business is woven into a suspenseful, entertaining murder mystery/love story set on a present day imaginary, small college campus in Portland, Oregon.

In order to read her book, I downloaded Kindle for PC's found through a Google search. I purchased the book from an Amazon link on Rain Truaxes' web site .