She was capable of seeing all kinds of imaginary things.
She is also something that I saw when I looked at a page in my journal with random paint spattered on it.  There is actually a name for this phenomenon: Pareidolia.  It's the ability to see significance in random stimulus.  It's common to see faces and I see them everywhere, along with figures and houses or cities.  This capability apparently developed as a way of making the random chaos of the world more intelligible.  I like following it where it leads into a world perhaps less intelligible. It's also a lot of fun!

This is one of those happy pieces that just seem to paint itself.  For a few days I couldn't think of what to paint, but once I thought of the horse, everyone else came along for the party.  The tea is actually gold mica flakes.  I love those things.  I think I'll go get some tea now, the green, not the gold variety!

Dreams are so interesting because one event flows into another without the usual restraints of time or space.  They are fluid!  Oh my mind is racing off on a tangent...our bodies are 60 to 75% water and our minds are 80 to 90% subconscious...  Is there a connection???  I can't wait to see what other artists have done with the word "fluid" for Illustration Friday.

Back to the here and now, this is my new mixed media painting about dreaming.  I've quoted Robert Louis Stevenson's poem, "The Land of Nod".  I've nearly finished a second painting on the background I showed in my previous post.  Just putting on the varnish: )

You may have noticed that I've finally figured out how to put a watermark on my image.  I've been meaning to do this for at least a year.  It was surprisingly easy to do with GIMP and instructions from ScottPhotographics.

It's been a while, but I'm finally working on some new paintings.  They start out like this, with the paper flying and not much planning.  After the paper is glued on with a mixture of white glue and water, kind of like paper mache,  I always have trouble continuing because I hate to cover up the lovely papers.  However, I soon get over it.  I've got some ideas of what I want to paint percolating.
Tomorrow I'm going away to a family wedding out of town so I won't be commenting or posting anywhere for a few days.  I'll hopefully have more to show next week : )

I must admit that I'm not very good at withstanding suspense.  When I read a book, I read the first pages and then the ending.  Then, I can relax and read the middle part.  I enjoy finding out how the ending is arrived at.  I'm no good with suspenseful movies unless someone has "spoiled" the ending for me.  Yup, I'm a total wimp.  This is a quick sketch in my art journal of my daughter, who can stand suspense in her books.  I like to use up paint from my palette by scraping it on blank pages and then I come back later and draw over them and lastly add random words I have found in magazines.  This technique makes for some wonderfully strange pages!  

Lately I've been working on a series of linocut prints of small towns.  "Working" is probably not the right term.  "Obsessing" is probably more correct.  There are sixteen of these little compilations and they are all different!  I have been happily lost in decisions about which paper, with which colours, with which buildings...and so on.  I've finally gotten them all more or less done and I realized that now they all have to be photographed and listed in my shop.  This reminds me of the question, "How do you eat an elephant?"  Of course, I would never eat an elephant!  But the answer is: One bite at a time.  So I will be introducing them to my shop one at a time and I'll show some of them here too: )
Next week I'm going to tear myself away from the linocuts for a little while because I have some new panels on which to do some mixed media painting.  Yay!