Wednesday, January 4, 2012

The Plan for 2012

(click on image to enlarge)

The Eagle and the Bear face off at Lake Louise
Watercolour and gouache (and ice)
©2012 Charlene Brown

Here's how I think I did with respect to following my plan for 2011:
As usual, I tried to paint more spontaneously and to move away from representational painting… and as usual, I didn’t make much progress in ‘abstracting’ landscapes, but was quite happy with some of the ‘stylized’ paintings I completed during a cruise on the Danube and Rhine Rivers in October.
In addition to the river cruise paintings and several paintings of Honduras, my travel journaling included getting a good start on a really big project I’d been putting off since 2000!  It’s an illustrated journal of our two-month Retirement Grand Tour of Europe on our way back to Canada from Dubai. I used several painted postcards I retrieved from people to whom I’d sent them back in 2000, completed six new paintings for this journal, then I added some photos from the trip. I've completed a 28 page draft, with 45 pictures so far, which you can glance through here if you like…
I’ve participated in a couple of great group blogs, completing 11Virtual Paintouts in 2011, and sending and receiving dozens of hand-painted postcards on APostcard From My Walk.  
I completed a project about poster production, MakingArt with Impact, involving a combination of computer collage and lettering.

And here’s the plan for 2012:
I hope to continue shifting away from representative landscapes toward more stylized (and rearranged) paintings, beginning with ‘The Eagle and the Bear face off at Lake Louise.’
I’m planning to continue travel journaling (and, of course, traveling) as much as I can. Eventually I hope to take the trip to Israel I mentioned in ‘My Plan for 2011’ that somehow became a trip to Honduras, but that won’t be this year -- my travel plans for this year include some of the most spectacularly beautiful parts of Canada and the United States.
I love group projects such as Virtual Paintout, Sketchercise, and Plein Air Artists, and hope to increase my participation in these.
I plan to do more computer collage, and possibly video painting, involving background paintings of Canadian landscapes.