Realistic Abstracts

I just received a book I ordered form Amazon.com titled ‘Realistic Abstracts” by Kees van Aalst. The title is a bit of a contradiction in terms, but it is a lovely little book with a wonderful section on design. As a southern American, I have a little difficulty with Kees wording, but as a reader of images, I manage to understand what he is saying when I compare the illustrations with the words.

I am eager to play with some of Kees suggestions, but they will have to wait for now. I have a writing project that is joyfully consuming all of my time. I have been told (I know “have been” is a passive voice, is there anything wrong with that?) not to mention my project to anyone, as it will take the steam out of my sails. I hope that I have not said too much as it is, but I wanted to offer my excuse for not posting that often.

Yupo Revisited

'Mending'  watercolor on Yupo  15"x 24" Eva Macie ©  

At the risk of becoming a bore about my eye surgery, I will update you about it. In brief, I am mending, but because of some issues I am unhappy with, such as flickering, reflections and a change in the appearance of my eye, I cancelled the surgery on the other one. I have an appointment in July to reevaluate my decision.

I do not have any new art to post so I am showing an older painting I did on Yupo which I recently made some minor revisions. Maybe it is my state of mind, but the colors are not very pleasing to me. I desaturated the color in Photoshop and I think I prefer the grayscale version better. At least the values and the composition work for me. Artists today are so fortunate to be able to use software to do this. In my younger days, the only option we had to view the painting in gray scale was with red and green cellophane (acetate) to see the values or take a picture and wait a week for it to be developed! I cannot imagine where I would be as an artist today if I had all the tools I have now or even the materials such as Yupo.

Beautiful day today and I have errands to do. There is another big storm headed our way, which always upsets me. We have so many big trees next to the house and I have had two fall since I’ve been here. Not sure, what all of the awful recent natural catastrophes are all about, but maybe the Aztecs knew something when their calendar ended in 2012. *0*