Struggles with Inspiration

Way back in December, I asked my friend Monica if she wanted any kind of artwork from me.
Funnily enough, she said YES. . .I was actually kind of surprised. Usually when I ask people that, they say uh. . .yeah sure.  .what are you going to paint/make for me. However, Mon had something specific in mind.

What she wanted was paintings of a wine bottle and a martini glass to hang in the kitchen of her apartment.
Her only requests were that the background be sort of modern looking.

Geez. . .way to take the fun out of it for me. If there is one thing I'm not, it's a modern artist. I have extreme difficulty with painting clean and straight, which is at least one aspect of modernism.  Now, post-modern, that I can do. I'm all about messy painting. In fact, I don't feel like I've truly made an artwork unless I end up with some of the medium staining my hands.

 

But, this was Monica asking. I had to attempt to create what she wanted. If in part, because she spent a great deal of money acquiring my "Nightmare Before Christmas" hand painted Toms for my Christmas gift!

 

So, I started out with two canvases. I decided to try angled lines, much like can be seen in this Martini Glass painting I found online.

 

Ugh. . .I do like this piece, but WHY, WHY would I torture myself with something so NON-JAMIE? 
I couldn't paint this unless I had a final examination grade hanging over my head. I haven't had that kind of perfectionist pressure for about six years now, so I don't know why I was deluding myself into thinking that I could pull off something this tediously clean.

I persevered, though. Covered both of those canvases with diagonal, multi-colored lines, none of which were perfectly straight.
Then they sat. . . .and sat. . .and sat.
They tortured me.
The artist Jamie personality was refusing to go anywhere near them unless I did something to change the plan into something that was more "Me".

I let the problem simmer in the back of my mind for four months. Eventually something came through.
What if I covered the lines with one of my squiggles? I'd done several of these pieces back in college, they'd even managed to get displayed in an end of the year Fine Art Student Showing at UCF.  I could then put the wine bottle and martini glass on top of that pattern.

Nuts, right? If anything, I'd have to purchase new canvases in the event that it ended up being a disaster.

 

 As you can see, I drew the squiggle on top of the lines first with a yellow colored pencil. Then, I began the mind bendingly boring part of painting every-other shape white. Actually, I love doing things like this. Especially when I have a good book to read/listen to, which I did. Checked out the Dean Koontz audio book "Lightning" from the library.  Exhilarating!

However, I got both canvases painted with their white shapes and thought "I'll never be able to get the martini glass and wine bottle to pop on top of all that noise". So, I had to let the canvases sit AGAIN.

 

Neat huh? If it had bee a painting for me, I'd have left it like that. But, had to keep on keeping on.

I had the idea of toning down the white with a darker color, maybe a simple wash over the top. Something told me to keep thinking about it. Why I thought to purchase metallic blue and lavender paints, I'll never know. 

Here's what they looked like when I tried them on the white pattern.

Now that I had the base of the painting done, I now had the task of creating the wine bottle and martini glass. I had already made the decision that both would be made out of foam core and would be glued on top of the canvas.

Sorry, the pic is blurry, taken with my phone camera.

I cut them out before painting, because the paint can be scratched by the exacto blade. Here's the wine bottle painting in progress. I employed the technique of under-painting for both the bottle and the glass. That's part of what I love about acrylic paints. You get the thickness and richness of oil paints, but can still employ the wonder of transparent washes like watercolor.

Also I wanted to trace the shape of each onto the canvas. In order to make each pop even more, I had decided to paint a pure black "shadow" underneath them. Here's the finished wine bottle painting.

And the finished martini glass. . .

 

And the two together. . .

 

Fancy this?

I got the harebrained idea a little while ago that I wanted to dress up the area around the entrance to my yard. The problem was that the ground there is very hard from years of the clay road washing into that area. Also, my current water hose does not reach that far, so any plants that I planted would have to be somewhat drought tolerant.

Also, I have very little money to dedicate to such a project.

So. . .here's what I came up with:

I divided some of my African Iris that were in another flower bed.

Then I picked up two large bulbines from Wal-Mart.

I might add that it was EXTREMELY difficult to plant the iris. The ground was so hard that when I finally got done digging the holes, my shoulder (injured back in August) was KILLING ME. Therein, I let the flowerbed simmer for a few days while I iced both my shoulder and back.

Now my dilemma was what to use as a border around the bed. I wanted it to look kinda funky, because my yard is full of quirky art and cool plants. I looked on Google for unique flower bed border ideas, and this was one of the images that came up:

Those are mostly wine bottles, and I knew I'd never be able to drink anywhere near enough wine to save bottles for a full border of them. Well, maybe, but it'd take years and years.

So I mulled over it for a while.

I was lying in bed early one morning trying to convince myself to get up and take a shower, when it hit me. 
What if I didn't use all bottles?
What if I used some stone and some glassware?

I had some patio stones already in my yard, left there by a previous tenant. They were large enough that I would only need a few bottles to use as spacers. But I didn't want to use just any old bottle, beer or wine.
I wanted to use blue bottles. Which meant. . . .

Just so you know, I did not have Bud Light Platinum bottles just sitting around my house. Had to go buy some. Even then, it still didn't end up being enough, so I had to go buy more. But, two runs to Walgreens was enough.

I dug a trench around the plantings (the digging was done after about three days of rain. . .softer clay by then) and plunked in the stones so that half was left above ground. In between each I placed a blue bottle (sticky labels removed) neck-end down into the dirt. This left the thicker body part sticking up out of the ground, and VOILA. . .

I'm still working on ideas for more yard dressing. I might even paint some patterns on those stones.
But, it's a start that I'm excited about.

Now if only the cold weather would go away so I could really get some dirt-digging on!