Artists are the visionaries of the future. Their creative passion is a constant reminder of our power to bring to life the unique gifts of our imagination that inspires the artist in all of us. Our path as creators is vital to our well being and evolution. Art is a sign on the way to what might be.
So you want to paint? It doesn’t matter how much experience you have. If you want to paint, go with the feeling of that desire. Do not let your mind convince you of all the reasons why you shouldn’t or can’t paint so that you never even pick up that brush. It is easier to paint a good picture than a bad one. The challenge is in having the will to go for it.
Start with a work on paper, not canvas. Work your way up to canvas as it’s a whole different animal and experience. It’s less traumatic to botch a work on paper than canvas, and the creative process does include botching now and then. Paper makes for an easier testing ground, and is less expensive. The use of the brush is also very different on paper than on canvas. Working with a brush and the fluidity of water is a nice gentle approach to painting. It will teach you a great deal before you move on to the thicker, denser paints. I worked in both watercolor and oil in art school, but chose to work in acrylics on paper for many years afterwards. I love the fluidity and flow of water in painting. I chose acrylics over watercolor because I liked the density of acrylics when mixed with water compared to the thinner watercolors. They make now, however, some really electric colors in watercolor that I just can’t match in acrylic; so sometimes I use those to really pop color. I especially love the spontaneity and ability to complete a painting in one sitting as opposed to weeks completing an oil painting. I never returned to oil until I discovered aqua oils eight years ago. I couldn’t resist using them knowing I could avoid the offensive smell of oil and turpentine, and simply mix them with water and a water based linseed oil. Finally, after more than twenty years out of art school, I could return to oil combined with my love of water.
Landscapes are wonderful to paint for many reasons. They connect us to nature in a deeper way through our visual studies, and they bring the beauty of nature indoors. When you really start to “see” nature, it will have many gifts for you. The trick is in actually seeing what you want to create because it is harder to see than it is to creatively express what you see. Your job, before you even pick up the brush, is to really “see” what is in front of you. You want to see the colors, the flow of shapes, the perspective, the lines, the composition and allow this visual to translate into a feeling for what you see. This is how you will infuse your painting with your own energy and interpretation that is unique to who you are and how you live. When I am really seeing what is laid out before me in nature, it often locks into my visual brain where it is vividly stored until I am ready to recall it. Sometimes I have to sketch it for fear of losing or forgetting what I am seeing. I have found that my best paintings result from those times I am able to effortlessly lock in a powerful vision of what I am seeing, and often have no sketches. And I have carried stored visions for years before they have manifested as paintings. The art of seeing comes with time and practice, and is a necessary prerequisite to the eventual art of expression.
Nature is constantly changing with a dynamic energy. The sky that is bright and cloud free suddenly becomes dark and foreboding; the leaves and grasses that were peacefully glowing in the evening light start dancing wildly in the wind; or the soft, muted colors of the fields quickly become bold and daring. Look for the shapes and the energy in the landscape that appeal to your eye and senses. A pleasing sensation is a sign guiding you to expression. A dynamic expression has complexity and depth; it is not flat and boring. You are looking for a composition that has movement even though it may be still, perspective that invites you into the landscape, intrigue of subject matter that reflects your unique vision and color that speaks to all the senses. Less is more, keep it simple. It can be complex yet still simple. Do not make it complicated and busy. Train your eye to see everything that is before you; scan the horizon and take in the colors, the shapes, the movement and the mood. Painting results from both seeing and feeling. This is the foundational work to beautiful landscape acrylic paintings.
Sketch loosely what you have seen on a nice piece of Arches watercolor paper, smooth or rough. Use a light drawing pencil, such as a #2 Hard. Do your sketch quickly, but obtain the flow of your desired composition.You are going to create a painting, not a drawing, so detail is not important. Get the basic shapes along with the positioning of everything in relation to one another. Now put your acrylic paints on a plate, mix colors you have seen and leave some of those pure and straight from the tube. Use a fair amount of water to get the first layers on, and cover the whole paper. Then you will go back in, and start to build the image with layers of more colors. When using acrylics on paper like watercolor, you want to work from light to dark. It is easy to keep darkening colors, and harder to lighten colors that have gotten too dark. This is when colors get muddy, and you want your colors to stay pure and bold when going darker. You are wanting to create depth with purity of color. Mix white, brown or black into your colors sparingly, and only when needed for a desired effect. Listen to the colors, and let them do the talking.
Color is full of the most possibilities in its spectrum that is made infinite by the mixing of colors. Buy yourself a color wheel if you are new to mixing colors as you want to learn, and master, the art of color. It will call you to develop a sense and sensitivity to mixing the perfect shades. When it comes to creating the brilliancy of your painting, it is in the opposition of cool colors with warm colors, and the subdued colors with bright colors. There is nothing like a pale, soft gray opposing a lemon yellow and a beautiful, rich violet. The secret to capturing the sensation of light is in the use of color. Painters who are masters of light are also masters of color.
See the landscape before you, see the colors that speak to you and let them express your vision. Your beautiful landscape acrylic paintings will reflect all the beauty you have inside that can see and appreciate all the beauty outside and around you.
Painted canvas rugs are practical floor coverings called floorcloths, and provide a trendy, modern option to area rugs. With the use of these, you can spash color and design as floor art across every room in your home.
Floorcloths were greatly appreciated in earlier times for their appealing qualities of durability and easy care. Constructed of heavy weight canvas in cotton duck, they are sealed for water and stain resistance requiring only a damp mop to clean. They are the perfect hypo-allergenic solution to the dust and chemicals that are prone in wool and other fiber rugs. They are also resistant to insect and animal damage. In winter, they can provide a layer of warmth from drafty cold floors, and be a cool touch to barefeet in summer. Many years of boots and paws will not wear them out. No cleaning costs are needed while they can be easily repaired and repainted.
Every room in your home can be enhanced with the versatile use of floorcloths. Use them to withstand dirt and wear in your entry as a welcoming accent. Brighten your kitchen while enjoying total easy care and maintenance. Splashes of water will not affect their colorful use in the bath. Decorate your living room around a big, bold design. They provide a practical yet elegant solution for under a dining table. Protect your office floor from a desk rolling chair with this durable option. They make great mats to under your pet’s food and water bowls. They will survive in your kids rooms despite all kinds of wild romp and mess. They are perfect for your beach house and a barefoot summer, and will ease the cold floor next to your bed in winter. They will work as a thin doormat when other doormats are too thick. Decorate your screened or covered porch with a lush, floral design for summer.
In the 1920s, floorcloths were used to protect floors from ash and grease, and were thus called oil cloths. They became one of the many hand-crafted victims of the Industrial Revolution despite their long use and popularity. The newest industrial materials quickly replaced most handmade crafts. Thanks to the growing interest of historic preservation and restoration in the fifties and sixties, floorcloths re-emerged as an authentic craft.
Today the home decor trend towards both the functional and eclectic is bringing back the popularity of floorcloths. They are also being designated by the go green movement as a superb green living product that helps reduce carbon footprints. These non-chemically treated canvas rugs are the best solution for the environmentally sensitive. The appealing blend of art and craft can be found in these creative floor coverings. Art on your floor that can be walked on, and withstand the test of time, is a curiously different craft. It calls us to a deeper, creative connection to the ground beneath out feet. Though the inspiration may come from above, it finds its practical use on your floor. These wonderfully artistic, simple, durable, eclectic designs bring us back to earth.
http://www.free-press-release.com/news-your-color-adventure-begins-at-studio-bliss-1271964125.html
(Free-Press-Release.com) April 22, 2010 — The ability to paint beautiful works of art is a journey that can sometimes take a lifetime. Art is, after all, an inevitable result of growth. And a work of art is never a finality, but always the suggestion of more to come. It reveals the impression of its creator who is engaged in living fully, and sensitively expressing the messages that speak to the soul. Art is the manifestation of living deeply, and a reflection of that depth. The paintings of artist Annie Horkan speak to the quality of growth, and a passion for beauty.
Studio Bliss was created back in 1992 when the artist was living in her native home of Virginia. She discovered that her farm was at one time an area called Bliss, Virginia, and part of the Free State that offered refuge to escaping slaves. Thus her studio was named. Along the way, Horkan would begin to integrate the spiritual connotation associated with bliss. Inspired by the late Joseph Campbell, the artist adopted his words of wisdom to “follow your bliss” as her mantra for both living and painting.
Horkan began painting in 1977 after changing her major from Environmental Science to Fine Art at the University of Virginia. The change was a choice enforced upon her after flunking calculus, a necessary requirement for her major, for the third time. She wandered over to the Art department to console with a friend, jumped into a watercolor class, picked up a brush and has never put it down after the teacher used her painting as a good example. Though she had been encouraged several years earlier by one of the region’s most important post-war sculptors, Anne Truitt, to pursue her gift as a colorist, Horkan’s father discouraged an art career. It would be years later before her father acknowledged her talent and chosen path.
Horkan’s early work embodies a deep emotional connection to the simplicity and beauty found in daily life. Her media for these innocent, spontaneous and color filled expressions is acrylic on paper. Her works on paper clearly reveal her ability to be joyfully present. But Horkan’s later work becomes a testimony to another more complex side. The quality of her growth results in a powerful combination of her innate sensitivity to natural beauty, years of technical refinement and a visionary’s quest for truth and a higher order of understanding. Her push into a new, challenging, visionary territory followed a pivotal trip to Peru where she studied and traveled with a shaman, and opened to a new inner dimension. She was no longer dependent upon merely the external world for her inspiration, but now could journey into the depths of the internal realms for new vision. Her newest paintings represent a stunning combination of her ability to be fully present in her observations while infusing them with transcendent vision.
Whether Horkan is embodying the artistic tradition of temporal gaze in joyfully creating a floral vision of just cut flowers, or diving deep into an inner vision full of mystery, her paintings consistently present a remarkable use of color. She admits she is completely obsessed with color. ” Color is life,” she says, and remarks it is what gets her out of bed in the morning. But lately, she has taken a break from painting to completely rebuild both of her art websites. She has also spent much of this last year studying and learning internet marketing as a means to bring her sites back to life with more exposure. Her goal is to sell primarily from her sites as an alternative to the slow economy, and the crunch on many art galleries.?She also hopes to help other artists utilize the powerful marketing tool of the internet.
Both of her sites, studiobliss.com and floorcloths.com, have been rebuilt in easy to navigate WordPress formats. All of her images are individual posts allowing for each image to stand alone with bold size and crisp, clear color. The studiobliss site presents over 200 original paintings, all of them available as giclée prints on either paper or canvas. Most of the images on the site represent her work from the last twenty years. Horkan says she has a large body of early work that dates back to 1977 that may get added to the site in the future. She is excited about the new addition to this site with her Blissfull Blog that includes six categories of her passionate interests. Her blog has been created to provide you with valuable and interesting information, as well as some quality products, and she will soon be including her own videos. She invites you to join her newsletter, and post comments on her blog.
Horkan has been painting canvas rugs, also known as floorcloths, since 1990. Her site has had a first page Google presence for many years. The site presents a large collection of diverse and imaginative designs to suit everyone. Floorcloths combine both art and function. Horkan gets to exercise her love for both color and design in their creation, and provide a practical, yet artistic, solution for the home. They are easy care, hypo-allergenic, extremely durable and offer unlimited versatile use in the home. Horkan does not believe floorcloths have hit the big time yet. She says there are so many consumers out there who have never heard of them nor ever seen them. It is just a matter of getting the word out about these artful, practical and versatile solutions for the home before they could become a hot, new trend.
Studio Bliss is located in the beautiful, magical high desert of New Mexico outside Santa Fe, the city different. Horkan relocated here 13 years ago, but still visits Virginia regularly. Like many artists who live here, she was drawn by the exquisite light and the mystery in this land of enchantment. She travels frequently, especially down to the ocean for a much needed change from the dry desert. But when she is not traveling, she is working. She hears the words of Anne Truitt, her most influential teacher, echoing from the past, ” The most demanding part as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own intimate sensitivity.” Painting along that nerve is not always easy. Horkan persists, a prolific painter, confident and passionate with an astounding gift for color. To see art, to appreciate art, to understand art, to love art is to journey with the artist on their mysterious and devoted path of growth and the promise of more to come.??Annie Horkan has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, owned and operated three art galleries and was chosen in 2000 as one of eighty artists for The New Mexico Millennium Art Collection book. She is now dedicated to her art career full time.
I would like to introduce to you my first book that I wrote in 2007-2008. I was living at the time in a beautiful,serene mountain sanctuary that both inspired me and offered me the time to reflect and write. These words just poured forth like a summer rain, and I went with the flow. It is a spiritual book that one of my girlfriends described as ” a river of deep, innocent wisdom.” I would like to write more again, particularly an art book, when the time allows. Writing helps me untangle and make sense of my thoughts, and anchor my beliefs in a drifting sea. The written word becomes a voice for eternity.
My story is the journey into this big life, a dancing, fragile, green woman with connection to beauty and color, rich in soul, embracing everything ethic and old, who celebrates children and delights in the small things. It is a search for the sacred union in all life.
The painting below was inspired from my book.
My book is for sale at the cost of $10.00 through PayPal. You do not need an account with PayPal to purchase it. Simply use a credit or debit card, and after purchase, you will be directed to a page where you can download the book as a pdf onto your computer.
Please forgive any grammatical errors or typos as the book has not been professionally edited to date. I intend to have that done in the future. For now, I simply wanted to get if off the shelf and share it.
I hope you will enjoy it,
Annie
ps- the beautiful cover for my book was designed by my ex-husband, John Ryan.
