Art Practice Moon Magic: February

The new moon, and the new theme for Art Practice Moon Magic is here already! This month there's a double theme: Feeling What You Feel and Freedom. At first it was a little overwhelming, not only having multiple concepts, but having such profound words as feeling and freedom... I needed a few days to let it percolate in my mind.

A few days later, I was watching one of Suzi Blu's Paint Plan and Chronicle with Me youtube videos, and one of the affirmations she had in her planner was "I do the work I love." It resonated with me, and I wrote "Paint what you love" several times throughout my art journal.

It made me realise that the faces I'd been painting recently weren't really speaking to me. So I grabbed one of my sketchbooks and started mucking around making faces with bigger noses, wonkier mouths, more stylised hair. Part of me thinks, oh these are awful! But part of me likes them more because they're less like attempts to be perfect. (P.S. The ones in black are older sketches.)

Then on Thursday I took a trip into the city to have lunch with a friend who's a photographer, and we talked about creativity. Afterwards I wandered the city looking for inspiration and happened to wander into ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image). I just happened to come across the Mediatheque, a free area set aside for viewing the Centre's film collections. I watched a couple of films in a series on artists and craftspeople in regional Victoria, as well as many other things. It's an amazing, free way to kill an afternoon if you're in Melbourne, I recommend it! After all that inspo, I was dying to break out my paints!

At the end of all this creative percolation, I decided to spend all of yesterday painting. Not only that, but painting what I love. Handily, I'd made a list about 6 months ago of things I was inspired by, for a blog post that never eventuated. I checked the list and yes, I'm still inspired by those things!

PATTERNS
I want to embellish my paintings with patterns, but I decided to start creating my own instead of using collage papers. Hence these loose sheets:

I'm planning on either cutting them up to use as hair or garments, or as backgrounds. I also tried incorporating pattern into a sketch of a figure. I wasn't that happy with it, but it's only a first go:

TOTEMIC FIGURES and MY DREAMS

Here is a portrait of Yallo. In the last year, I've had several dreams where I'm either drawing or painting him, and now I'm bringing them to life. Over the last few weeks, I've done large circles like this in my journals in preparation for paintings such as this. This is the first one I've finished. It's also an early attempt to embellish with a patterned background. I didn't really like trying to fill in the pattern after the fact, which is why I started pre-preparing the patterned backgrounds above.

These ghost-like creatures emerged randomly from some sketches I did one day. The bizarre horse-like creature, I have no idea where that came from! And there's Yallo flying overhead. Even though this page is much more minimalist than what I normally do, I consider it finished. I'm quite proud of it because normally I have an urge to add more and more until my head is spinning and I'm thinking, geez, will this ever be finished?? But there you are. Finished.

I also did a lot of work on my second painting on canvas. I think it's nearly finished, too! It's Yallo again.

The materials I used for these paintings included acrylic paint, house paint, nail polish, Sakura Gelly Roll Pens, and textas.