Aspirations: Beautiful color as from nature, a butterfly, a flower or the mountains at sunset but not rainbow bright as from an eight pack of crayons. Dreamlike and stylized images but not cartoonlike. Not flat space but thick, layered and atmospheric created from a variation of marks and values.

I have gotten interested in another series' direction which is a "Jacob's Ladder". This idea goes along with the "time travelers" from some of my earlier paintings. I hit on the idea while painting the "Florida Ladder" painting and was surprised how this very different visual followed the same thoughts as some of my previous paintings. These thoughts include different generations that pass simultaneously, as if time were compressed and had no linear boundries.

I participated in the first Haile Village Art Festival this past weekend. There were sixty local artists and that made it really fun, everyone seemed to know everyone in one way or another. It was brutally hot but the first two hours could not have been better. The local villagers came out walking with their children and/or dogs and were so pleasant. A great sense of community, a relaxing beautiful setting and true excitement about art.

Wassily Kandinsky. The Blue Mountain. 1908/09. Oil on canvas. 106 x 96.6 cm. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA.

Thinking about abstract compositions , I looked up the work of the master, Kandinsky. I was fascinated by his transitional work, the paintings that were moving from natural representation to abstraction. Kandinsky found complex compositions in nature, capturing buildings, trees, and people in a compressed space filling the picture plane. He simplified the individual forms and differentiated them with black outlines but the shapes were filled with texture and vivid color. Many things were complex in these paintings such as texture, color, line and composition but the forms were simple. He then carried over the same visual language and elements into his improvisations.

While I was sitting at the mall for a weekend art show, I wrote some directions I wanted my art to take. I thought I should record them here.
Subject matter not important, style and way of working is, how the artist views the world.
My style: loose, liquid, fast, detail at the last, random, natural, organic.
Set up compositions, have the painting work abstractly, exciting.
Layering, collage-like, transparencies.
Dynamic,eye catching, movement.
Soft to sharp, wet paint to calligraphic line.
Vivid color.

Next painting thought: A web of thick layered space from which three dimensional forms emerge. I want more dimension and illusion of space.

I think I like the detail cropping of both paintings better than seeing the entire paintings. Maybe I should think of being up close when I start the next painting. This is a more modernist approach to art. But then I struggle with making good compostions and having a focal point.

I finished "An Ode to a Pearl Morpho" I was obsessed about finishing it, not even listening to music while painting just working on it feverishly until it was done. My hope is that a viewer would see it first as a nice butterfly and then notice and be surprised by the images in the wings. I have trouble seeing it that way since I created it so I don't know if that is working.

This is the first of the tree paintings that I described on Monday.

This is a detail from the butterfly painting that is in progress. You can see how the butterfly markings are becoming faces.

Since this is my first posting it might be a little longer than subsequent ones but I will plunge into what is going on now and you can see my history on my web site www.carolbarber.com

I am interested in several new directions my art is taking me simultaneously. I have been struggling with making good compostions when I am painting in an improvistional manner. To remedy this, I felt I needed the painting to start with some type of defined boundary or structure. With Fish'N Fish I happened on making many fish within the image of a larger fish. Now I am doing a larger piece that is a butterfly and being more daring by making the markings of the butterfly form images from a free stream of consciousness (or subconscious, I'm not sure). There are lots of faces appearing in this painting. It is what I call dream painting when the images emerge from wet paint. This is also the first painting that I have done on Masonite and it is allowing me to create more textures such as with gesso. I enjoy allowing the thin liquid paint to puddle on the board and then pulling thick paint over the textures.
Following the same idea of beginning a painting with one dominant image, I have also begun some "tree spirit" paintings. I had a dream of forming the space around a tree into imagery such as birds and horses. But when I went down the street to sketch one of our beautiful Live Oak trees I was blown away by all of the imagery that I saw within the tree. It was as if a lady was standing in the middle and there were two faces guarding her on each side. It made me want to write about her which I have never done any creative writing. I was thinking about how long she has been standing there with no one noticing.
The colors are nice on the first tree painting but I believe I need to zoom in closer on the tree to make the overall painting's composition better.