Blue Sailboat, Red Net

Mixed media on panel, 11″x14″, 2012

About this piece:
I did a couple of paintings after reading “The Little Red Hen” with my kids. It’s such an old school book and one of the illustrations caught my eye. It was a fishing net one of the characters was holding. It was rendered in bright red simple geometric lines, making this random, kind of disorderly pattern. I loved it and wanted to recreate that in some of my paintings. This was one of them. The little blue lines came out looking like a stick figure sailboat—which seemed to fit somehow.

The light green is actually wax paint, liquid at first but as it dried it had this great smooth texture and sheen to it. I love discovering random, almost throw away or obsolete materials like that wax paint (it came in a marker like tube) at thrift stores or clearance bins and seeing what they can do. There is always something of the unknown when you use them and introduce them to the other materials you have on hand.

That concept is a big part of my practice. So many of my images and movements are repetitive and familiar but I use materials that are unpredictable and ‘rare’. I’ll never find that green wax paint again just like I’ll never be able to recreate with ‘real’ artist paint, the consistency and color of so many of the ‘mistinted’ paints (from the hardware store) that make up the foundations of all my paintings.