The conventional wisdom is to only post your best work online. But, I painted this last week and want to *look* at it. One way for me to look is post the image here. This is a mixed media painting on a sheet Thai Unryu Mulberry paper (24 x 37 inches). The texture in this painting is due to the qualities of the paper and add further interest in this artwork. I painted this one in several layers beginning with watercolor paint, then gouache and then acrylic. The transparent yellow overlaps the dark to create what is known as a Verdaccio tone, which is a rich earthy green. Verdaccio is an anciently used paint tone traditionally created by mixing yellow ochre with black. In this case I created the verdaccio with an overlay of transparent yellow rather than mixing the two colors together. The geometric forms in this painting derive from paper lanterns that I constructed from my old watercolor paintings. One summer, I created one lantern each day (it took about one hour to make one lantern)–that was my goal. After a few weeks I had no more watercolor paintings to cut up for lantern-making. I lit my paper lanterns with candles outdoors in my garden to photograph at night. A few years later I deconstructed the lanterns and began incorporating them into my paintings in various ways.
Lantern 1, mixed media on Thai Unryu paper, 24 x 37 inches, artist Marie Kazalia
