Acrylic, ink, Japanese paper on canvas (started 2021, still in progress 2023)
Size: w 22″ x h 28″‘ x d 2″
This is the first of two (or more) baby octopuses joining the Nereids in this painting. I think I am procrastinating about finishing the sea dragons who occupy the bottom half of the canvas, but who’s in a hurry? Unfortunately the sun came out when I had just gotten started photographing, so the top half of the image is a bit obscured in the glare.
Acrylic and Japanese paper on canvas (started 2021, still in progress 2023)
Size: w 22″ x h 28″ x d 2″
I started this painting over two years ago. It went off course into a dead end and has been collecting dust for some months now. Recently I painted over the bits that weren’t working. We’ll see where it goes. The tentative title is still the same, though I have yet to paint the ruby seahorse itself. The leafy seadragons, seen back in my “in progress” post for March 2021, are shown above along with a detail of the ocean surface.
Acrylic, ink, pastel, Japanese paper on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 30″ x h 15″ x d 1.5″
This painting was inspired by the cloudscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe (especially Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965) and Kees van Dongen’s depiction of the ballerinas Anna Pavlova and Ida Rubinstein dancing Cléopâtre (1909). I see it hung paired with Nereids at Nightfall See Fire and Rain (my March 2022 post https://npaulartworks.com/2022/03/31/nereids-in-fire-and-rain/).
Acrylic, ink, Japanese paper on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 24″ x h 12″ x d 1.5″
The Northern White Rhino is on the verge of extinction but efforts to engineer the revival of the species are generating excitement. According to The Guardian (Dec2022): “Scientists who collected semen and eggs from the last living members of the rhino species hope to be able to implant embryos into a cousin of the northern white rhino as part of nascent repopulation efforts which, if successful, would be unprecedented.”
Conte on paper mounted on cradled birch panel, finished with acrylic and pastel (2022)
Size: w 12″ x h 12″ x d 1.5″
I think of this piece as depicting the three graces bathing in sunshine. An antidote to darkness.
Acrylic, pastel, ink, Japanese paper on canvas (work in progress, 2022)
Size: w 30″ x h 15″ x d 1.5″
This painting began as a simple study of white clouds across a blue sky, with of course my two Nereid friends present leaping from one to the next. I decided it needed more colour, texture and complexity. The above detail is roughly 6″ x 4″, so I have a bit yet to do.
Acrylic and Japanese paper on canvas (2021)
Size: w 22″ x h 28″ x d 2″
Another detail from a piece I started a while back (see https://npaulartworks.com/2021/03/28/leafy-sea-dragon-detail/). Still in progress.
Acrylic, ink, crayon, mesh netting on canvas (2021)
Size: w 16″ x h 10″ x d 1.75″
Why Paint? That is the question asked of members of the Organization of Kingston Women Artists. Those in the group who choose paint as their medium have responded and their work will be exhibited in a show at Art Noise Gallery, Kingston, Canada (https://www.artnoise.ca/gallery.html) from 24 June to 07 August 2021. My contributions to this show include this piece as well as Nereids in the Garden of Hippocampus (https://npaulartworks.com/2021/01/13/nereids-in-the-garden-of-hippocampus/).
Nereids Reach the Deep Sea Floor started with an impulse to play – with pigment, mediums, collage – with paint. Over time and iterations I came to understand at last where it was going and brought in the Nereids and their friends: the luminescent, fanged creatures of the dark mountainous world that is the bottom of the ocean. Monstrous in appearance to us, it is they who are under threat, endangered because of the commercial fishery practice of bottom trawling. (Present here: Dragonfish (x2), anomuran, coelacanth, hatchet fish, fangtooth (x2), anglerfish, viperfish (x2), predatory tunicate, frilled shark, gulper eel (x2), tube-eye.)
Acrylic and ink on canvas (2021)
Size: w 16″ x h 10″ x d 1.75″
Inspired by, and dedicated to, SJ by her AN.
Hippocampus: part of the brain associated with memory, thought to resemble a seahorse.
The starting point for this painting was an image of the hippocampus obtained by means of antibody staining by Thomas Deerinck and Mark Ellisman (2004), reproduced in Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. My sea dragon (barely discernible, certainly not recognizable, in any case upside down) inhabits an underwater garden of memory, dream and desire.
Acrylic, graphite, collage on canvas (2018, work in progress)
Size: w 20″ x h 16″
My upcoming solo show at the wonderful music listening space at Art Noise gallery (Tri-Art paints) in Kingston Ontario is titled Restoring Balance: Before and Between. Works created using acrylic paint and media plus graphite, collage, pastel on stone, canvas, paper will be displayed. Please drop in! the exhibit is up 23 August to 20 September 2018.
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