In Between Painting Paintings

I am still in this "inbetween" state where I am home, taking care of life's demands and preparing for my next painting series. At this very moment I am doing a commission. It's always a fun thing to do. But there is the other part of my brain still filled with images from Italy.

I have posted a sketch which I did at Hanbury Botanical Gardens in Ventimiglia. This is the kind of sketches I do. They could be considered technical sketches, more like diagrams of a painting plan rather than a sketch for art's sake. My two favorite things to do in kindergarten were to paint and to build with blocks. Maybe that's why I construct paintings from building blocks of color. Here you can see that I broke the sketch down into blocks of value with color and value notations. It's how I think and why I do thumbnails. I am the kind of painter who can work out problems on paper and keep the visualization in my mind's eye. However, a caveat, having a plan does not mean that the painting turns out as you plan it. All paintings have a life on their own and you have to know what each paintingis asking for and what it needs. But I start with a plan. I finish with a work of art.

There is chatter about right brain - left brain art making, where the right brain is non verbal and intuitive and the left brain is verbal and precise. Current brain imaging is changing that particular brain theory. Art goes on in my entire brain. I feel it. I was once told by a teacher, a student of Hans Hofmann, that I was the most even brained artist he had ever met apart from Hans Hofmann himself. As an aside, I am ambidextrous (I can use chop sticks with either hand) and that does in handy!OK-bad pun. But seriously I find myself in states from the flowing mindlessness of a muse led hand to technical struggles that torture my waking and sleeping hours. It has been said of artists that we do it, not because we can or want to but because we HAVE to. And so it goes.