Friday, Saturday, then I leave Hambidge on Sunday

It's quite hard to believe that my time here is almost over. I feel that I've gotten work done--at least pushed a lot of paint around. I think I have potential tapestries among the images that have developed over the past month. I'm still working but on small things. My time of stapling up big unstretched canvas to the wall and taking to it with a house painting brush is over.

During the past week I've worked with dogwood leaves, simplified and stylized. I posted about the problems with the large ones earlier. I'm going to show some of the stages these two have gone through. There were more steps but I didn't photograph each time I stopped working on them.

First, both of them can be seen side by side on the wall, each about 52" square. Most of the time I'd work with one and then with the other using the same paint mixtures. This was how they looked about 10 days ago.

I'll show the left side one first, the one with the large leaves.

And its last stage below is the way I'm leaving this one and I think it has potential to be a tapestry. I like the simplicity and boldness of the design but there's lots of room for doing things with yarn to enliven the background. The lines of the veins also have potential for eccentric weft or soumak. I've got a warp on the large loom just waiting for a tapestry to begin... maybe this is the one.

Then the multiple dogwood one that also went through many, many changes... and it's gone through the most radical change of the two of them.

When I did this... added the pinkish-violet light background I was so upset. So I let it sit overnight and I was determined to make big changes with it the next morning.

First I thought I'd just wipe out everything but there were a few parts of it I really liked. After having a long walk I decided to first mask out areas to save as I painted over the whole thing. I liked about a 20" square near the bottom so it got covered with paper held in place by tape. A few other selected areas had strips of the blue masking tape applied to them as well.

Then I mixed the brightest yellow green I could and painted over it all. I added matte medium so the mixture was a bit transparent. I also drew into the yellow green paint with chalk while it was still wet using dogwood stems and leaves as the inspiration.

And this is the final version... it's hard to photograph it--with either the lights on or off the brightness is a bit overwhelming.