Pug Fish Wish

When the twins were born I started painting funny fish creatures. Made of at least a fish plus one other species. Not very scientific, but the girls were delighted, and nonsense does seem to please kids a lot, I seem to notice. This old kid anyway. So I am trying to talk a little about my motivation in these cartoonish paintings, as well as talk a little bit about the colorfield paintings. Yesterday I called them 'Colorpots" but I decided that sounds like a collection of make-up, and I would to back to my old standby, and call them colorfield paintings again.

Now the more difficult part for me is the stories that go with the paintings. They are simple, and I only think of simple stories. Which I do believe are probably enough for little children who really only like the pictures, and the stories if their names are in them, or the names of people and animals they know and love. So this character was easy.

To me he looks like Groucho Marks, but to my granddaugthers, way too young to even imagine such an ancient being, this PugFishWish looks like nobody other than - Maxx! - thus the title. PugFishWish. Maybe Maxx would like to be a Fish too, because for a Pug, he certainly loves swimming, or did when he was a little tyke.

So as the weather is growing more cold and grim; the leaves fell before they turned color this year, for instance, a sad event, I am more drawn to creating happy and colorful art. Well, what makes me feel happy and colorful. Sort of like internal carbonation. Being able to paint again is a miracle to me, and that is that. So I can't help but bubble along.

This is not Thursday

An Artists' Life

I just noticed that it looks as though ZZ the Lionhearted and Tuna Not were posted last Wednesday. Well date that not! It was yesterday, late, after a whole lot of the usual nonsense I have to go through of resizing the original 25 paintings I did. They were all too large for Blogger, something Lucky figured out for me, & after I resized them they post with the date of the painting, not the post. Well, so be it.

People have asked me about this abstract painting stuff and how long does it take; things like that. Do I have a plan? Well, it takes as long as it takes, sometimes they are done so fast I blink, and sometimes so slowly I am exhausted and sick of them, but still have to finish because I want to see the outcome myself. So I guess my plan is to finish a painting that I will be happy with. How is that? At the same time I always hope the viewer will enjoy the painting too.

For a very long time I didn't paint any objects at all, much like a couple of these abstracts. I like calling them 'Colorpots' now. I think I just made that up but there is nothing I have ever made up that turns out that way. Nothing new under the sun, etc. But now I am adding abstract fish and kids and stuff. It is fun, and I try to put things in that our grandchildren will like. And possibly even recognize. As I mentioned earlier, they seem to know what the abstract ones are right away. And I like to decorate their stories.