Over the last few weeks I have began 6 smaller paintings as part of the Walking in the City (Venice) series.

The interviewer brought up something in our conversation that I had not really considered before, the contrast between the way in which I collect my inspiration and the way in which I compose my paintings.

For now, here’s some updates on Walking in the City: Venice. I was recently awarded the opportunity to install a solo exhibition of my work at the Mezzanine Gallery here in Wilmington.

The painting shown here (number 9 in the series) is titled, Clinking Glasses and American Top 40, dives further into the sights and sounds of my walk through the streets of Venice over a year ago now on July 23, 2023. This piece combines a peek at the water with various parts of cast shadows and architectural elements I was taking in on dry land.

When building the compositions and executing them at a larger scale, is there a degree of representation that makes the work more realistic than abstract? Does it matter? Should the degree of representation be consistent across the series?

Lately I’ve been rethinking the way I am titling the paintings in this series. With the framework of a single day as a way to narrow my inspiration collection and provide a bit of context for the viewer, I originally planned on naming each work with a time frame.

A few of the comments or questions that stuck with me were around the idea that the location was not necessary to know up front, the exhibition should include as much of the preliminary photos, writing, and sketches as possible, and the question of why I was focused on one day was discussed.

This is one of my favorites of the series so far. This composition allowed for opportunities to combine texture and flat areas as well as realistically rendered areas with more abstract areas, a true collage of observations.

I wanted to show a more process focused image for this post because the last few posts have been highlighting completed work. Each new canvas provides an exciting adventure where I am able to build out the idea I created in the study or sketch into a more comprehensive piece.

This painting came together fairly quickly and I enjoyed the combination of surface textures I was able to achieve while staying within a consistent palette.

I love how the liquid acrylic is bleeding together and the vibrancy that’s achieved even after the media has soaked into the canvas and dried.

Now that I’m in the swing of this new body of work, the process is feeling less experimental and more exciting! This is the second completed painting with numbers 3 and 4 coming very soon.

I built and stretched four 48 x 36 inch canvases to get me started with this body of work and completed the first painting this week. I am playing around with the combination of areas of watered-down acrylic on unprimed canvas and acrylic and spray paint on primed canvas.

So as a result of my experimenting, I have decided to return to my first love, my old reliable stretched canvas! With this decision, I feel that there is more freedom in scale and I have the ability to create various surface qualities using a combination of primed and unprimed areas within in the same painting. This will allow for the areas of structure to live alongside the more organic elements without a ton of resistance.

Great news! I met with Sara from the European Cultural Center and they have officially invited me to participate in the Personal Structures exhibition. Now, it’s time to raise the funds and make the work.

I have been experimenting with the idea of how to create wood panel cut outs to use as my substrate for this project. Using some scrap wood, the CNC machine that’s in our basement (more on that in a second), one trip to Home Depot, and the help of my wonderful husband I was able to get some great detail and clean cuts in these scaled down versions.

I created the first 5 sketches or studies for this project in watercolor and found myself being too fussy, too precious, too focused on realistic representation, and fighting with the media more than I was figuring out the compositions, which is usually the primary focus of my sketches. So after a sort of light bulb moment I realized that collage is the best method to use for these studies.

I am working on color sketches for my project. I decided to go about this part of my process a little differently for this body of work. First, I am grouping the inspiration images together on an Adobe Illustrator file in groups of 4.

Walking in the City is a body of work that tells the story of a single day walking in Venice, Italy through representational abstraction. With this blog, I plan to document my process of creating this work from start to finish, from the inspiration material shown in this post to the completed paintings being exhibited.