Watercolor Exploration Book Two is available now!

I’m so happy to have finished my second little watercolor book on Amazon (and this website on my ebook page), this one focusing solely on floral watercolor painting. I love this medium so much, and had a while there when I documented everything I did. It’s been fun to revisit and flesh out all of my step-by-step photos and notes so that they make a coherent instructional ebook.

I’ve got six new floral demonstrations in this one, and they are realistic, many-layered florals which I try to break down into stages and techniques. My work usually proceeds with all parts of the painting being tackled at once, so that I have an overall view of how the color composition and value composition is coming along. It’s on full view in this book.

Incidentally, the book incorporates some of the single demos from my library of watercolor demos, notably the Azaleas and China Vase and the Rhododendron floral.

Here’s a link to a little video about my wet-into-wet approach in floral painting (this is one of a few videos linked to in the book)

As always, thanks for being a reader and come back later to see more of what I’ve been working on!

Susan

My New Landscape Paintings in my Ebay Art store and Trash Lumber Art Frames!

I’m in overdrive working on finishing paintings that have been staring at me for five years. You can see them all on my revived eBay Store right now. I’m so inspired by the fall colors, and even the dead trees from the drought are making me want to paint! My 83-year-old dad who is painting is making me want to paint! My new gallery in Blue Ridge is making me want to paint! Trying to escape from hideous news on the TV is making me want to paint!

Forgive me, but I am certainly inspired. I’ve even been obsessively painting every piece of wood at home that I can paint (just ask my family members). Art is certainly a creative-destructive-creative process, and doing things over, then over, then over again is apparently the way it’s going to go for me.

And the biggest inspiration to me lately is, strangely, some casein paints I’ve gotten my hands on. Their chalkiness, opacity and incredible versatility is so inspiring, and I’ve been using them for studies and underpaintings to give my oils a thin, fluid, unifying layer. It’s a pity that they have to be painted on a sturdy ground (no stretched canvas), but really it’s a small price to pay to have such a range of techniques which are possible with one medium.

Check out my Ebay Store Fall Art Show (six new original landscapes and additional items)

Thanks for looking at my art and check back in later to see more of what I’m working on.

More Knife Painting (in between landscape realism)

My artistic split personality continues, and I’ve been working on both abstracted knife paintings and landscapes lately. It’s not hard to explain the latter: realistic landscape and floral is very comforting and comfortable to me. It lays out right in front of me all of the things I love about the world around me. When I paint a lyrical landscape with beautiful sky and lovely color, my heart feels the joy and appreciates the beauty of my subject.

BUT…the knife paintings are something else. They are like eye candy to me, they are a diversion which is delightful and colorful, and which makes me feel young again.

“Stained Glass World”, 24” x 36”, is my latest fanciful knife painting. It is loaded with thick juicy color and scribbled paint pen lines which give it more pop. This is a detail of the right hand side of the painting.

I love swiping loads of color across a big canvas, and letting the colors barely mix on a knife is so satisfying. I feel that the pure colors are glowing and peeking through my strokes, and I don’t have to worry so much about having to work to keep my colors bright. All in all, knife painting is just a wonderful side jaunt for me, a tension reliever and a way to recapture the joy of painting. Below you can see how I load my knife as I start this particular painting.

It’s quite a challenge, however, to paint layers on top of one another once they’ve begun to dry. In this particular painting, I added extra color and definition by adding lots of bright linear elements with paint pens. I didn’t specifically upload video of that part of the painting process, but you can see the paint pen work if you look for the bold yellow in the cracks in the closeup below.

Knife painted strokes and paint pen marks jostle for room in this detail of my acrylic “Stained Glass World”, 24” x 36”

Here’s the finished painting below:

“Stained Glass World,” 24” x 26” Susan D. Kennedy

If you feel stuck in realism, or word art, or, well, stuck in any particular genre…buy a painting knife and get swiping! Incidentally, if you’d like to see this painting in my ebay store, it’s here.

Also, I’ve written a short 40-page eBook on exploring abstraction in painting, full of illustrations and a full step-by-step demo. If you’d like to flip through a preview of it, you can click “look inside” on its Kindle Store page.

or look at its listing here on my website. Thanks for looking!

A New Gallery for Me!

I’m so excited to share that a new gallery is representing me as of this fall 2019. Turning Leaf Gallery in Blue Ridge, Georgia is an amazing place where you can see the work of more than 60 artists - painters, potters, wood artists, fiber artists, artisans and sculptors. I didn’t know it was tucked in among the shops on the main street in Blue Ridge, stuffed with all kinds of wonderful art objects. Dean and Arlene Becken are the proprietors of this beautiful place, and I’m grateful that they will be giving my work a home.

So…these are some of the rural and mountain themed paintings which I’ll be taking there next week. They will have my newest and latest, and they’ll have my best pricing, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that a great gallery is worth its weight in gold.

Thank you, Dean and Arlene!

Everyone, check out their beautiful place in downtown Blue Ridge, and you can contact them at turningleaf@tds.net

Knife Painting Obsession

Whenever I go for one of my side interests, I jump in with both feet and with a (perhaps unhealthy) dose of obsession. This knife painting isn’t done, but I’m in love, yes, again, with my little old painting knife. Not to be confused with a palette knife.

I can’t get enough of a double- or triple-loaded knife!

I’m working on the painting below, and I think my next step is to drizzle on those transparent acrylic inks I’m in love with. It’s probably better to be a painter who plans, but it doesn’t seem to work out like that for me all the time.

This one is done in acrylic, on that wonderful, smooth watercolor canvas. I’ll never use regular canvas again!

If you’re interested in my tips and warmup exercises for abstract painting, check out my new ebook on acrylic painting on Amazon, and please leave a review (the link is at the end). It’s free on Amazon right now!

My New EBook on Abstracts

I write art eBooks as a hobby, and just finished my 40-page booklet on inspiration for (and prompts for) painting abstracts. I’m so happy! I love this style and expressiveness of abstraction, and even though I will probably always swing back and forth between abstraction and realism, I think you’ll really enjoy this book. Here is the book on Amazon and below is the Introduction. It’s frequently free, (and always is, to Kindle Unlimited subscribers). Also, please click on the link at the end of the book to give me an honest review.

Discovering Abstract Painting

How I Found a new Way to Paint in Oil and Acrylic

©2019 Susan D. Kennedy | Website | Ebooks

Chapter One – Three Springboards

Chapter Two – 7 Exercises

Chapter Three – Demonstration

All of the paintings used as illustrations in this eBook were done by the author, Susan Kennedy (me!)

Introduction

Abstract Painting means many things to many people. Usually people mean “very loosely painted” or “expressionist” or “non-representational” when they say, “Abstract Painting”. At times, I use “abstract” with these different meanings even though they are not mutually exclusive, and I believe that what they have in common is a desire on the part of the artist to give color, composition, or feeling a higher

This painting, titled “Courage, Dear Heart,” is a story of hope and journey through difficulty, with better times ahead. Its title refers to Aslan’s words to Lucy in The Dawn Treader.

priority, over literal representation of a subject.

After an extended time (almost 25 years) working in realism, I reached a place in which I was painting the same things again and again and they became less meaningful to me. I’m not sure why this happened; maybe it had to do with teaching realism and doing the same demonstrations again and again. Maybe it was that I had become lazy and bored and didn’t look for fresh work.

At any rate, I began to feel that painting realistic florals and landscapes was simply another form of, well - photography. I felt (in my own case) that I was merely reporting on what things looked like instead of telling a story or an interpretation of reality with my brushstrokes.

My interest in abstraction led me down many artistic side roads, and in this painting, I was experimenting with paint pens and markers to color an acrylic abstract.

I turned to abstraction, and here I hope to describe things which began to inspire me in painting abstracts. I hope that these ways of thinking can help you, too.

I’ll share my thoughts about getting an idea for an abstract from nature (an “abstracted landscape”)…

from thought or feeling (an abstract expressionist painting)…

or simply from a desire to explore exciting colors and textures (what I might call a decorative abstract).

These have all been abstract starting-points I have explored in the last ten years, after many years of focusing exclusively on realism (which, by the way,I have come to love again).

Perhaps your abstract paintings will flow from one of these three “springboards.” Whatever your painting path, give yourself time to practice: you wouldn’t expect to become a computer instructor or a judo expert in a week! It is the same with painting. Many of my students from the past were very impatient with their progress and gave up easily when a given painting turned out differently than they had imagined. I encourage you to accept a slow journey and intermittent progress as part of the process of becoming a painter!

This painting is one of my abstracts which fits into an “imaginary landscape” category. I love creating a sense of distance and a rich palette of colors to make the viewer wonder about where this place is and what is happening there

This eBook has three chapters. In chapter one I will discuss the three “springboards” or starting points for my own abstracts, which may help to think about abstracts in a coherent way. In chapter two I’ll show you my seven exercises designed to give inspiration and experience with painting in abstract ways.

You will see some of the knife painting strokes I used to paint this scene  in chapter two of this book.

Some of the exercises in this second chapter choose one of these three abstract categories.

In chapter three I will show you a fun repurposing project: I take an old textured painting which I didn’t wish to finish – and painted an abstracted landscape on top of it with acrylics and acrylic inks.

There is a video link at the beginning of that chapter which takes you to a YouTube video of the painting of this abstract. Below the link is a breakdown of my steps, with photos of the painting as it progresses.

Maybe there is an old guy who likes rusted things inside of me

This is one of my favorite objects in my house. Somehow I acquired it after my father-in-law died. I believe it was a surplus first-aid kit which was retired from his workplace, and it’s filled with ancient bandages, salves and swabs. I look at its rusted case and I wonder: did Ron ever use it? What are the stories it could tell? But mostly I just admire its cool rusted case. I’ve used tweaked images of it in some of my digital collages, and for some reason its image seems poignant and metaphorical. Don’t we all want to have a handy kit which can heal wounds and give us a way to tackle out-of-control situations? Humans are amazing in their capacity to meet the scary realities of life with plans of attack.

Ah, more fodder for art.

Below you can see one of the collages this first aid kit found its way into.

Digital Collage from my old First Aid Kit and with Bird Cutouts from friends in Holguin.

I'm pleased to share our Bidding Owl webpage to raise funds for The Cuba Art Mission Team!

This is so cool; a few friends and I, most of us artists, are able to go back to Cuba this summer, and we're trying to help raise funds for most of our friends in an Holguin congregation to an art festival in Santa Clara.  I was so inspired to have been there and to hear them speak about their art! If you're interested in bidding on any of the items, you could click on "Buy it Now" and mail a check made out to The Vine Community Church with "Cuba Team" in the memo line. Or, you could work out with me how to pay for it by donating online to the cuba team at www.thevinecc.com/give. I'll ship any of them to anyone in the U.S. at my own expense!

Here is where you can find the silent auction listings of this and other painting by myself and other artists: 

Bidding Owl Silent Auction items for Cuba Team

Mixing things up a little with Paint Pens

I've been obsessed with acrylic paint pens lately...I've discovered Montana and Liquitex artists' paint pens, and have been using them for everything I can think of in a painting: line, of course, to accent or create focal points, and misty smudges to create an atmosphere or lay a bit of a pale background for some later washes, drips of acrylic ink, or strokes with watercolor brush pens. 

I know for sure my Dad’s inside of me

I have always been drawn to beautiful skies, fields, roads and hills; it's as if they call me. I think it's actually my Dad calling to me. I remember my Dad pulling the family station wagon over in order to see a beautiful farmland vista, to get us to pick a huge bunch of red clover blossoms on a highway median, or to let us stroke the nose of a horse standing by a roadside fence. He always would boom out, "Look at the sky, kids!" as we drove along. Nothing escaped his artist's eye. The back roads were always the preferred route, because they offered the serene, the lovely, the unspoiled and the homely.

He is why I am an artist, and why I will always come back to painting landscape. We've driven together along back roads on Edisto Island and seen the sight I painted below...

And he's in the back of my mind when I paint a scene like this one:

Never stop loving the view, Dad. I love you!

__________

Thanks for checking in, and let me know what you've been working on!

You can see some clearance paintings for sale on ebay here; and check here to see my Etsy sketchroom site, with digital downloads of painted photographs, sketches and more to come. Incidentally, my youtube art videos are here.

Learning a lot about painting

It's been such a rich vocation and avocation, being an artist. From selling paintings to gifting friends, decorating and abusing my walls to teaching art, turning my back on art and taking it back up up...it's apparent that I'm obsessed. And I've finally realized that I need to go back to school. I want to turn my back on painting what will please and turn toward painting what has inspired me. 

I want to work on art which incorporates poetry and communicates love and joy. I hope you enjoy seeing ways that I've been experimenting with texture and line in order to tell stories or create a mood.

Hopefully I'll post the sometimes unfinished work which is on my easel or lap, and show you how the experiments are coming along. Below you can see something I'm working on which features a base painting of acrylic inks and mediums slathered and dripped on top of an old painting. I'm in the process now of drawing on it with Montana and Liquitex acrylic paint pens. I'm CRAZY about these pens!  

It’s a blast doodling and smudging on the surface of a painting with paint pens and markers.

Thanks for checking in, and let me know what you've been working on!

You can see some clearance paintings for sale on ebay here; and check here to see my Etsy sketchroom site, with digital downloads of painted photographs, sketches and more to come. Incidentally, my youtube art videos are here.

McConnell's Mill Interior

Here's a bit I wrote about my painted photographs of historical sites:

__________________

This is one of my "painted" photos of my treasured places of Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

Interior of McConnell's Mill, Pennsylvania

I'm sorting through a decade of photos, and some of them stand out as shimmering and otherworldly. I love the ones which include old wood, statues, buildings, windows, ruins, brick...anything which speaks to the viewer about the hopes and dreams of the people who built these things.

Particularly dear to my heart are places which house old machines. You can almost hear shouts and the grind of belts and gears as ghosts from the past reenact the life this place once had.

Thanks for looking, and for joining me as I figure out what my art means to me, and what I want to say.

You can see the posterized art photograph here on Etsy, and I have it cropped to various aspect ratios, should you be interested in purchasing the photo (of course, the copyright info does not appear on purchased .jpg files).

www.sketchroom.etsy.com

www.susankennedy.com

MAKING ART ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS

We've been going through a lot of learning about mental illness in our family, and it's certainly not pleasant. I hope that as more light is shined on various forms of mental illness, that it will become a condition which is treated with the care and dignity of other illnesses.

This painting is a digital collage of many images: a digital version of a watercolor of mine, and photos of various places which have been important in a loved one's life. I hope that it shows both the tragedy of schizophrenia when it destroys families, and hope for the future. Maybe some day a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or depression will not be the horrible sentence that it is these days.

www.susankennedy.com

www.sketchroom.etsy.com

This digital collage tells a story about a loved one struggling with schizophrenia, and incorporates some places and themes significant in her life. 

Thanks for checking in, and let me know what you've been working on!

You can see some clearance paintings for sale on ebay here; and check here to see my Etsy sketchroom site, with digital downloads of painted photographs, sketches and more to come. Incidentally, my youtube art videos are here.

Junkyard Reverie

This is a repost from a blog I had  a year or so ago....I'm starting over with a  squarespace blog and thought I'd give the context of my last few posts first!

_____________

About a year ago I got a job - other than teaching art, selling art, or working part-time retail. If you want to know what I discovered about my art, I'll tell you: the confidence imparted by a place in a creative industry, and the slightly more secure financial spot inspired me to instantly drop the paintings and projects which did not inspire me. I was done...painting what I apparently didn't want to paint.

I hadn't been aware that I wasn't so interested anymore in realism. I had been saying for five or ten years that I was enjoying exploring abstraction in my paintings, but I hadn't admitted that realism or even impressionism wasn't inspiring me any more as a means to grab my attention, or that of my viewer.

What is grabbing my attention now? Paintings, photography and even cartooning which have a story. It's obvious to any art student who has paid attention to her teachers that art requires a story, but I had gotten lost in a couple of decades of selling paintings and accepting commissions. My art had become "what can I paint for you?"

I still love realist art and impressionist art, because when I see a painting that has an amazing story or composition I have that much more respect for the talents of the artist. But for me, the artistic process has started all over again in an artistic childhood. I'm exploring color and a toolbox of techniques including painting knives when I'm using oils or acrylics, and filters and adjustments when I'm sifting through my photographs. I hope to describe my artistic journey a bit more in this blog and in the art I create.

Thanks for taking a look, and I hope you enjoy examining what inspires you visually and why.

Susan

www.sketchroom.etsy.com

www.susankennedy.com

This posterized photo is from a memorable walk through a delightful architectural salvage place.