Epiphanies of the past week…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

This week I was listening to Antrese Wood podcast The Savvy Painter: Exploring the Language of Paining, with Maggie Siner. (November 15, 2018) Maggie Siner talked about every stroke of the brush expresses how the artist feels. So if you are bored your brush work expresses this. I have often wondered if hand writing might express people feelings. Never had I considered brush work, thus entire bodies of work expressing an artist’s feelings. Leading one to wonder if a picture a collector finds appealing is actually the energy the artist expressed not just with the images they show, but the brush strokes. A point to contemplate. Have you run across such materials? Books? Classes? Experiences with your own work? I am going to revisit this subject in later posts when I have found more information on this topic.

Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

Weekend Pursuits…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

This weekend was really about unplugging. Napping and getting household stuff out of the way so we can have Thanksgiving next Saturday. I worked a bit on my latest kitchen towel. I have officially reached boredom with this project. I have five more centimeters that are just going to have to be finished one line at a time…

We have a huge tree in our garden. The poor thing has never had a prune. As my mother has a story of me making a Japanese maple a bonsai. I am a bit leery of trying out pruning. There is also the factor that I do not know the pruning rules for living in snow. So I have spoken to gardeners. As soon as they learn that little tree looms over our two story house they run the other direction. The one thing that is very clear is it must be done in fall and we must find a gardener in May. So our tree goes unpruned one more year. We have been putting off raking leaves. This weekend it was a must do. So far the fall winds have not picked up. I told Andi it has to happen this weekend or our neighbors will hate us as our leaves will blow into their raked gardens. Eight bags later we are pretty much done.

This morning we woke up to this…

I don’t think we will be having fall winds just winter ones…

Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

In the Studio…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

Here is what is happening in the studio. I am enjoying putting washes down and seeing where the color goes. Then making shapes into objects. Some of them do not have enough color on them, like the water lilies. Some of them have too much paint on them the orange flower painting. I am trying to un-paint light places into them. There is every possibility I am trying to save a picture that may not work. I feel something with this one. The end result may mean a dead picture. I am counting whatever I learn from playing with the colors there is material for the following pictures.

My husband does not enjoy the flower experiment. He prefers the single objects that pop. Flowers are a challenge for me. I like to fill my brush and put lots of color on the paper. Flowers require a delicate process of more water than paint. Sometimes I hit the balance sometimes like the orange flowers I commit too quickly. This feels like a skill I need to master to go on to the next step… What is the next step? Therein lies the magic, I will know when I pass into the mist make a happy mistake and then I will be off on that adventure.

The most important part about this process is practicing so I can make those mistakes which teach me the next process. Some days I take two steps forwards, others three steps back. The part I have had to learn is getting over my perfectionism and embracing the mistakes. Can you relate? Please share…

Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

Epiphanies of the past week…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

Last week I ran a challenge to sketch something small and fast every day. I did do it once…sigh… The good news is I based the sketch on a painting I am working on. We were always drilled on sketching what we would commit to paint. In my attempt at putting spontaneity back into my painting practice I threw this idea out. I feel like this painting is going places…something was definitely missing. I was amazed while sketching I realized I was missing a dragon fly. So cool a practice pays off so spectacularly. So from here on out when I get hung up on a painting I will try this again… Underneath is the fast sketch of my painting:

Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

Weekend Pursuits…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

The last week things went topsy turvey with family and the excitement of the election. I contemplated writing all my posts on the weekend. Then I decided rest recover and begin on Monday. On Monday I was away from my computer I wrote myself a post as an e-mail.  The e-mail never arrived…

So Tuesday I re-write and update the one for today…

This last weekend I finished Louis’ hat. Yeah! Unfortunately the sizing came out big. Today I tried boiling the hat to see if alpaca will shrink to size. At present waiting for the hat to dry…

When we moved here I searched high and low for a cool post box. Finally I landed on these charming mosaic posts made in Australia. I sat down with my father in law who designed the inside like a bird house. I brought his birdhouse home and tiled the post box. Every year a few tiles pull up due to weather. So this weekend I spent time gluing tiles down and preparing the house to be winterized. This year three layers of lacquer to see if the house will winter more gracefully…

Pictures need adding...

 Sincerely,

Emily Froemel

www.edgeatmirage.com

Thoughts from the studio…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

Years ago I was reading through some artists blogs. They were counting their strokes as a marker of a good painting. I tried to wrap my head around how this might be equal to a good painting. When I looked at their pictures I could feel their toil of counting all those strokes. I found them to be flat. As if they were painting by number and measured strokes. I wanted to ask if they held a counter in their hand as they stroked their canvas? Did they just count for 30 seconds and multiply by the time they painted?

Today I was painting water lilies from memory. I got so excited as I began the shadowing process of the lily pads as they sunk into the water. Water for me is hard. So much fun when the water colors lend a hand and spread out in the right directions. I had this aha moment. I think this is what the artists were trying to express by counting their strokes. There is this moment in every painting where you put a stroke down and the picture pops! Before this moment the picture is paper and shadowy colors. After the objects in the picture have become dimensional. Most of the time I know which of the objects in the painting will pop. Sometimes a stroke changes how the objects will be seen. This stroke is what I paint for.

So if I were to count my paint strokes I would most likely tell you how many to this stroke and how many after. I have decidedly struck this out of my repertoire. Counting my strokes seems counter intuitive to being creative.

Emily Froemel

edgeatmirage.com

Weekend Pursuits…

Dear Creative Adventurers,

This weekend I tried to get a hat finished for my son. Alas about half way through. Last winters hat was always a tad large and the beanie was falling apart. So this year I found a pattern that I thought might prove a bit challenging. Turns out if one can knit and purl in patterns of five the pattern is fairly easy to follow. Here is the free pattern…https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/christians-hat. Below are my efforts…

Emily Froemel

edgeatmirage.com