Lesley Fountain Studio

...we never, ever, finish there. I had a delightful weekend in the company of these three lovely women in my Intuitive Painting Two Day Intensive workshop.  I experimented with something new this time around, and had all of us begin with the exact same colour palette for the first four layers, and access to exactly the same tools and mark making items. As usual there was a wonderful mess on every table, a sure sign that creativity is brewing. Yes, that is corn. No, it's not lunch. And as I suspected, the canvases, even with the same colour palette and tools, varied wildly from person to person by the fourth layer.   (Sometimes you gotta get down when creating!)  Birds and hearts paved the way for houses and bicycles Sometimes fish show up, and you just have to deal with it! On day two we all worked hard, finessing the last minute touches on our paintings (plural for my students, singular for me - I never even touched my second canvas, so lost ...

Before - Nocturnal Dreaming - 2012 After - There is Music in the Spacing of the Spheres - 2018 Quite often as I am painting I think about the similarities between life and art, and never more than when I am working on a do-over.  I have discussed in other blog posts the concept of "when a painting is finished" and shown several examples of paintings of mine that have fallen prey to the do-over, sometimes years after they were "finished" (the first time).  As in life and card games, each of us players must constantly hold, play, and discard.  What gets held in the hand, what gets laid on the table, what goes onto the discard pile - for every one of us, every day, these "keep, play, discard" choices are made.  In a lifetime, we make millions of them, many of them unconsciously. In art, as in life, we also continuously keep, play, discard.  As artists, our styles, palettes and subject matter morph and change; in response to events in our ...

  Alchemist of Change Freedom From Within Last week I took the painting Alchemist of Change  that I had painted six years ago and transformed it. It even got a new name: Freedom From Within. My style and color palette has changed over the years, and I felt it was time for this piece to change too. One of the things that is hard to do, in life and in painting, is let go. There were several elements in this painting I was very attached to - the birdcage, the bird, and the words embedded in the bottom right corner. These were two quotes that really resonated with me at the time that I painted the original piece: Let your history be the alchemist of change and A diamond is a piece of coal made clear under pressure It was very difficult for me to let go of those words. I struggled with working around them for hours, but in the end I let them go, and welcomed the changes that letting go brought to the newly transformed piece. Besides, they are still there, jus...