Series 32 Artworks
Series 32 Artworks
Series 32 Artworks
This is where I began my recent career as a visual artist. My father, who was an Abstract Expressionist painter, passed away just before I retired from teaching. So upon retiring, I found myself wanting to do some artworks to honor my dad and his work. He had a history of including numbers, letters, and words in his work, so I fixed on the number 32; the number of years I had taught at Spicewood Elementary in Austin, TX. So I began my Series 32; Artworks exploring all the possibilities of the number 32, both as a mathematical symbol and as a visual form. I was incorporating some compositional aspects of my father’s work into how I approached these new pieces and blending it my other influences; Folk Art, Pop Art, and Expressionist Art. I had gathered many materials during my years as an educator, and with the skills I had learned from my father and my years making props and scenery as a fine arts educator, I began to use found objects and hardware to construct unique structures to paint on. As I worked on these artworks, I developed these concepts about my creative process:
- Seeing the visual possibilities in objects and material in terms of color, shape, and texture.
- Letting the creative process determine part or all of the outcome.
- Finding beauty and joy in unexpected places/forms.
- Being unafraid of mistakes.
- Giving objects and fragments that could easily be discarded a new life and purpose.
- Allowing a narrative to develop organically from the pieces.
abstract, found objects, green, purple, metal, wood, wire