Patti Edmon Artist

After many months of painting (a few hundred) faces, she is my new favorite. Hours of practice have taught valuable lessons - like letting go while still holding a paint brush. An exhilarating freedom, a precise imprecision, which I've admired in many works of art. Finding the truth in my voice while residing in that place called 'flow.' There is much to be said for living in the moment, no worry, anxiety, guilt or regret. I watch a squirrel hiding a walnut on our back porch. Hear the kids playing next door, showing off their first kindergarten drawings with their wild imaginations and plans for who they will become. Then passing through a vibrant downtown on a post-card perfect drive to the barn, such gratification as the foal is now filly, albeit still close to mom. So why don't we all adopt this way of being? Ask and most adults rattle off the exponential reasons why they are so exhausted, splintered from busy busy days, dealing with the hectic that is life....

Aside from making books, painting faces still occupies most of my studio time. I've expanded my repertoire to include even more layers of paints, sprays, ink, tons of paper; I've done 3-dimensional on cradled canvas, canvas boxes and experimented with a few new texturing techniques. Molding paste, fabric, found objects and other stuff, the possibilities are endless. Early in June, I entered these two gals in More & More, a competition defining mixed media, juried by the Senior Curator at the Huntington Museum of Art. The 200 entries from across the country were narrowed to the 38 selected for the exhibit. I was blown away when I got the email saying that both faces (9x12) were among those chosen.     I had an opportunity to chat with the judge during the artist's reception and I (bravely? naively?) asked her why she chose mine. She liked the pieces visually and was impressed by the lengthy materials list. And that's not the real kicker! When my husband w...

Got an anonymous comment (four to be exact) on my last post about how vanilla my title was and that I really should add more content. Then anonymous went on to say I should visit Yahoo (not that yahoo, for sure!), and so on. I love reading those - the bad grammar, broken sentences, what a hoot! As I've continued to paint faces on a daily basis, I believe I've (finally) turned a corner. After complaining to my husband that they all my faces looked like a variation on the same theme, I realized that's because I've been using the same approach. And, Jim told me I really needed to loosen up before another, truer voice would appear. How true! Instead of starting off with torn bits of pages I'd painted, I went with black gesso, such a stark difference. Then I added color(s) and then scribbled on the background to show some character and hopefully a bit of the black. Below is the beginning of the painting I posted last week - fairly bizarre ...

Though the frequency of my blog posts suggests otherwise, I've been working in the studio nearly every day for an hour, or three on a good day. I've been painting... faces. Still. I seem to have come up with a 'face' but I don't think I've really broken through the surface. It is truly difficult to really let go, be counterintuitive, dig beneath the rubble of what is and is not good and/or acceptable. But I'm not going to stop.  I don't know about you, but every so often I see an artist's work and a voice screams up from the depths - I want to paint like that. Of course, copying, imitating never works but it does give me hope. Reason to keep going, to be relentless and never, ever give up. Maybe this process is like evolution... never really fast enough but silent wheels turning. My studio is adorned by at least 50 face paintings, started after the Misty Mawn workshop late last September, and many influenced by ...

Good News: Quotes Illustrated, by the fabulous  Lesley Riley , has been published! I am very honored to be included in this incredible collection (thanks Lesley), so if you're interested it's on Amazon or you can email me for details. The Art Every Day icon was on my blog for the second half of November, which is also when I last posted. It isn't that I did work on art every day, it's just that, well, I'm in workshop mode. Ever since I left  Random Arts  in September, I've been in a painting frenzy! A two-day workshop with  Misty Mawn  was a great start but I needed more, wanted to expand my brushes... Stay tuned for more tomorrow!

After living with the feeling that I'd gone as far as I could with faces, I discovered the next challenge - color. And texture. Incorporating some of my texturing techniques and creating layers - with varying degrees of visibility - opened a whole new channel in this process.  I felt a little bored, maybe frustrated when I finished the series of 45 faces (ha, for me that's a huge series), and it worried me. I fretted, during an illness-flare week I stewed, trying to reason my way through the Big R (resistance, thanks Steven Pressfield ). I caught phrases running through my head like, "I'm not a real artist, I can only get to point X," and "why am I doing this anyway, there are so many more experienced, far more talented face makers out there..." Not quite fast enough to silence them - yet - but I'll bet anyone reading this knows just what I'm talking about - monkey mind! Then I saw a post on a friend's Facebook page an...

I had just found my groove... using my photography and writing to create mixed-media pages. Then I went to Random Arts (the coolest place ever) for a painting workshop. Being familiar with paint and loving Saluda seemed like good enough reasons to go.  Like I said, I hadn't painted a single face before. Ever. I suppose it's logical, then, to return and do nothing in the studio except paint faces. Forty-two to be exact. And I'm still not completely sure why I'm doing it, just trusting that there doesn't have to be a solid reason other than the fact that I'm creating and learning. These are posted in order of occurrence. I've felt like a beginner since I started making art. Every time a finish a series using one voice, I switch languages (thanks to Lesley Riley for that metaphor!). But this bender has been one of the biggest surprises of all considering that I've never ever been inspired to paint faces before t...