You Gotta Bee Bad, Bold, Wiser

I finished a new mixed media piece this week. It's been an interesting time experimenting with found objects and different media again. It's really reinvigorated my love of playing around with art and imagery.

A few months ago I found this picture frame that my neighbors were throwing out. It was missing some of its glass panes and some of its backings. At first, I thought I was going to make new backings for the frame and then still add photos or mementos to it, but my art brain had a different plan:

For several weeks it sat around with just the new pastel cosmic backings put in. Next I added the geometric black and white designs to the pre-existing backings. I had been playing around with small quick pen and ink drawings and these characters with honeycomb eyes kept popping up in them. I thought it might work if I drew it out with sharpie on the glass panes that were still there. This is probably what took the longest, since I didn't really have a plan and hadn't done a mock up of it.

Because of the missing middle glass pane, I couldn't draw anything there and it felt blank once I was done laying the image out. Adding the necklace brought it some much needed life.

Last were the circles. They were the trickiest. I wanted to break up some of the designs and some of the negative space, but without glass in all the frames, I was worried anything I added, either with paint or fabric, which were my initial ideas, would be too opaque. I thought if I took gel medium and made some circles on a page, then painted on top and washed away the paper that it might create some translucent circles of color and it did! They were kind of tricky to work with, but I'm happy with how they came out and what they added to the piece.

You Gotta Bee (2018) is for sale. Let me know if you're interested.