Saturday, January 11, 2014

Trail on Lost Dog Hill

Click here to view or purchase available Stooshinoff works.

 
Lost Dog Hill in the deep of winter, 11 x 15 inches, acrylic and pencil on unprimed, archival paper. After days of freezing temperatures, today it's lightly raining and melting...but very slowly.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Remember........

Click here to view or purchase available Stooshinoff works



January Evening, 2014, the coldest days of the year so far, 11 x 15 acrylic and pencil on gessoed Whatman paper (sold).

It helps to make 1000s of pictures. This is a continuum. It helps to remember past days and painting sessions from all areas of earlier experience. In this case, I was remembering a work session from ages ago. I was a student at the University of Saskatchewan. It was winter....very cold....I was in 2nd or 3rd year fine arts. It was a fairly arduous journey to get from where I lived to my workspace on campus. To put in evening painting sessions after classes you had to really want to get there! I always preferred to work on the floor, and I sometimes would work on 2-3 pictures at a time. Sometimes paint was poured. Very little was predetermined in the picture, and anything could change quickly. Even then, visual surprise was always searched for. In the evenings, there was usually no-one in the studio...maybe me and one other person, maybe one professor....you could count on some very pleasant solitude and maybe some insight from the other person if you went in search of it. I remember learning things in those evening sessions....understanding one or two things about painting. But mostly I remember how fresh the experience felt. It can help to remember......


Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Elizabeth O'Reilly



 
For a long time now, I've been very impressed by the work of Elizabeth O'Reilly, both the small oils and the collages made with cut up watercolour sections. It is this old idea of seeing the world very figuratively, but also understanding and showing so eloquently, that everything is a wonderful abstract arrangement. And of course, there is also the idea that small paintings are just fine...in fact, they may be bigger, than big paintings.