watercolor painting: Solidarity

Yay!  More artwork.  These paintings I've been doing are really the first time I've ever used watercolors, so this one is the first watercolor landscape-ish thing I think I've done since maybe middle school art class.  I like it!  There's lots of things I find wrong with the composition and I want to work more on refining my techniques, but watercolors as a medium are losing the scary imposingness that I've always associated with them.

I also feel like I'm channeling my mother when I paint with watercolors, especially since I'm using her paints.  Watercolor was one of mom's favorite mediums and I spent a lot of time as a kid watching her paint beautiful landscapes, and fiddling around with watercolors on my own little projects getting frustrated at how annoyingly unforgiving they were.  So, never having felt particularly excited by painting as a medium, here I am with tons and tons of sketches and doodles sitting filling up my life and my brain, screaming at me to make them into paintings.

I used to mostly be a photographer because frankly, I hated drawing.  I felt like I could never satisfyingly draw realistic landscapes, or representation of anything realistic.  Being able to paint and draw now comes very much from a place of letting go of expectations.  The less I think while working on a piece, the better.  When I do, I usually have to be in a near trance/meditation state.  The less I'm thinking, the more clean and sure my hand is in making lines.  I gotta figure out a little bit how to plan and execute more cohesiveness in my composition though.

The one thing I know for sure is, I gotta do more!!!