Tangled Garden painting finished!

Tangled Garden Painting, 18" x 24" compressed charcoal, watercolour pencils, a touch of acrylic but mostly oils on triple-primed 100% cotton canvas sheet.

My Tangled Garden painting is finished. Or is it? I painted without have any pre-conceived notions about how I wanted the final piece to be and so I am having to accept what has transpired under my paint brush. Yet it works in the video of this painting's process that I have been concurrently working on. Can't believe I've been painting this painting for over a week! Usually I'm done in a half a day's hours, with some tinkering later.

Taking you back though memory lane below. :) And I'll subject you to a video of the process of this painting in the next week or few weeks too! Enjoy!

Tangled Garden, close to 900 views since Jan 25th as of this moment (unheard of for a loong videopoem featuring original poems - most videopoems maybe reach 100 views in a year), is a slow art film of a triptych of earth poems, Surreal, mythopoetic, a rhizoma of images, metaphors, explorations, philosophies (with English subtitles). -A Floral Opera (2011) -In the Hands of the Garden Gods (1979) -Slipstream, the Tangled Garden (2006) (with impromptu speaking between the poems, which each end with ~~~ in the subtitles): http://youtu.be/OG37qWh4rTM

"Green Goddess" Papier-Mâché Masque

Chthonic goddess of the greening earth. Wrinkled, like tree bark, painted, an exotic glade. Process, the recycling of Nature, life emerging from death. An organic art. The mask's fronds as if growing out of the forest floor in the Spring. Papier-mache, mulch: paper, or leaves. The face as landscape; the face carrying the landscape with it. Flower colours framing her face; the iridescence of insects, sheen of dragonfly. Feathery wings, plumed serpent, vestiges of living vines. A vision of a Nature spirit, Summer Solstice, a Midsummer Night's Dream. Shaman of the forest. Tutelary guide in the rainforest. Jungle of the imagination. Then the Surreality of the sky-blue mask on the greening gold fields of her face: I offer you a masked mask.




Or go to Picasa and see all the photos, and a larger slideshow:

Green Goddess Masque - Process

Above, photos documenting the inception and evolving masque, which were posted at Rubies In Crystal as I did them, now collected in a slideshow. There may be more added depending on when and how photos from the Buddha Groove emerge from various cameras that were flashing that Halloween night.

Below, a slideshow documenting the stages of painting the masque:



Or go to Picasa and see all the photos, and a larger slideshow:

Green Goddess Masque - Paint Sequence

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With thanks to my longtime friend, Christopher Reibling, painter, writer, violin player, and  Bill Brouard, a digital artist who I know through Facebook, for images (Chris's over 20 years ago-a photograph of a papier-mache mask he had made of a green goddess with ribbons; Bill's recent) that helped to inspire the form of this masque. Also hundreds of paintings and statues of Green Tara... who surely formed the impetus for this piece. Along with a dream I had 2 or 3 decades ago of a chthonic earth goddess rising out of the forest floor, out of the plant material of which she is composed... at the time I called her the green garden goddess, but she's here, in this mask.

In June 2011, I danced in the woods wearing this masque, and created a video poem:


direct link: "Green Goddess" Masque (a dance in the woods)




          

"Green Goddess" Papier-Mâché Masque: In Her Element

Despite myself (my perfectionism, desire to always do better), I am delighted with this masque.


(Note: I've uploaded a much larger image this time. If you click on the image and then click again, you can better see some of the detail.)

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*Note: To see the finished masque, as well as two short slideshows of the process of making it, go here: Green Goddess Papier-mache Masque.

                                 

"Green Goddess" Papier-Mâché Masque: Painted and Varnished

I'm still in that stage between painting and seeing what I've done. The foil impression of the face in the painted version is something I am getting used to, though of course I wasn't aiming for a life-like masque. Both images are fairly close to the actual coloration and feel of the masque, though the upper one, originally taken under daylight bulbs, which brightened the colour too much, has been brought to its colours through post-photographic filters, while the lower one wasn't. By the time I realized photographing in natural light gave the truest colours, it was too dark.

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*Note: To see the finished masque, as well as two short slideshows of the process of making it, go here: Green Goddess Papier-mache Masque.