Choose your words.

I read voraciously as a child and teenager, and disappeared so many a time into different worlds that I inhabited with my favorite characters. I loved the power of the written word; each carefully constructed phrase or sentence by the author, when put together into the whole, dramatically coloured your perception of the book -- consciously or not. I understood early on the nuances of spoken language, especially when it came to the selection of how we chose to describe certain events or express our emotions. (For example, I dislike the word 'fine' and almost never use it to convey how I'm feeling. Actually, if I say something is 'fine', I probably hate it or at the very least don't care for it. And if I'm 'fine', I'm actually pissed. Ask my husband. He knows.)

With my respect for the English language and my love for its lexicon, I do not fail to see the irony when it comes to describing my own art. I'm not sure if this is a common theme amongst artists, but the majority of the time, I can firmly state that I vacillate on a scale of "I hate it" to "I don't hate it". It's not so much that I'm trying to be self-deprecating. I realize that I'm involved with a creative process and that sometimes, it's painful. Perhaps it's that I'm used to turning a critical eye on these pieces -- I always think about how I could have made it better, or what I could've done differently. In part, this is probably what drives me to keep painting. It's that elusive pursuit of possible [self deemed] perfection that is so tantalizing. 

I bought some mixed papers a while back as an idea to create some art pieces with them. One of them came out pretty well -- I cut out some free form shapes and applied an acrylic medium wash to the backs in order to adhere them to canvas, and painted over them. All in all, I was fairly pleased with Dreams. 

The one I'm working on now is with this handmade paper with a lot of texture. It's fairly heavy in weight, and due to parts of it being translucent and having holes, I "glued" it to regular painting paper with acrylic medium. 

Well, other than it being a bitch to work with, I also didn't realize fully that in order to appreciate more texture, you have to change the way you apply the paint. If you use thicker paint, it will not apply as evenly, and the natural colour of the paper will show through more prominently. If you use a softer wash of colour, it softens the texture somewhat, but then the pattern of the paper is more apparent. Thus I have to figure out which is the lesser evil, and how I want to work with the paper.

My friend Janell works with paper and mixed media and collage a lot in her art work, and she once told me that if a paper is too pretty, it becomes harder to work with. I had no idea what she was talking about until now.

I've experimented a bit so far and I can quite emphatically state that I HATE it. It reminds me of JLo's infamous Versace dress.

I'm going to sleep on it and decide what to do with it tomorrow. Unless it magically disappears overnight.