the Dawn of a New Day
Process meets the moment to create a new painting layered in hope.
A couple months ago I set a date to have another live painting demonstration on YouTube. It was my 3rd such event since April, as I’ve been trying to embrace this platform and finding new ways to connect with my audience in the absence of traditional art shows. While admittedly, my online live painting audience is small, I’ve truly enjoyed being able to share my work in this way.
Thank you to the folks who’ve stopped in and said “hello” or asked a question or two. It’s truly a pleasure to hang out online with you for one of my painting sessions!
So, I picked a Saturday afternoon for post-election, thinking that things may be settled down at that point, and people would enjoy a little fun art making play time to pass a lazy afternoon away.
Little did I know at the time that we would have an election lasting days and it wouldn’t be until the morning I was to have my live painting event that we’d find out the results and champagne bottles would be popping the world over.
We popped a bottle of apple cider ourselves, with our 18-year-old, in a double toast moment as we were also celebrating her first college acceptance letter. Yay!
Needless to say, it was a bit of a dizzy moment to jump into a new painting and I certainly felt the joy of the moment in the whimsy of the painting, even if I struggled for a couple days after the event to add the details and properly finish the painting.
Originally the painting was planned as a simple little floral garden tribute using techniques I used the previous summer in a night time poppy painting making use of stamps and stencils to create texture and layers of color.
This painting was such a joyous one to paint that I thought it would be nice to explore that process again.
I started out the new live painting slowly, stamping the entire surface with hand carved rubber stamps of floral and feather shapes. As a bonus detail, I had also placed small animal stencil cutouts on the paper to keep texture off those pieces for detailing later.
The small bunny and birds were a last minute inspiration from perusing my summer of flowers photos - which include plenty of birds and even a few bunnies - and gave me an opportunity to try a different technique for drawing details into the painting.
I used light colors with plans of staining the paper afterward for a slight variation between background and stamp, similar to how I did the first night time poppy painting.
Of course, I didn’t stick with my original plan for long. The painting quickly followed its own path, and I feel like the emotions of the day started to fill the page with an explosion of colorful flowers and delicate feathery leaves gratefully reaching upward with the warmth of a dawning day.
As I worked, the layers felt like my thoughts weaving to and fro across the paper. The little birds were witness to the day, with the little bunny carefully considering the safety of venturing out. My feelings were finding their way through the process as the bunny considers - Can it be? Is it real? Is it finally time to once again come together in the open spaces of the wildflower meadow?
I became very attached to these layers, and the bunny. I usually work very hard to keep an emotional distance in order to freely and objectively move about a painting, but I didn’t want to (or couldn’t) do that this time. I wanted to keep these layers and these memories as a joyful reminder of the day and this moment.
I continued shaping the painting with new colors and more stamps, making sure as I added layers I didn’t overshadow the ones that came before. I then spent the next couple of days finding more ways to bring the colors, shapes, and movement together into a complete and whole painting. I am grateful for this time to process not just the painting but the emotions the moment elicited in me as well. And while the changes may seem minor from beginning to end, I can see each layer as it moves forward in time, weaves in and out, and brings us to what I truly feel is the Dawn of a New Day.
I hope you enjoy! And to see this painting in the making, feel free to check out my YouTube time lapse video HERE.
What a glorious painting. It truly does capture the joy of hope renewed.