Play Boards and loosening up.

The first assignments on the course were to creat an inspiration board and a desire board.

It will be no surprise that my inspiration board included the landscape of Provence, trees, flowers, spring and wildlife. These are well represented in my current art.

My desires - well this was harder. What was it I really wanted - make better art obviously but on top of that I want a larger studio, I want to feel confident enough to enter shows including juried shows, loosen up on my landscapes but without loosing the feel of them. The idea behind this is that if we don't say these things they will never happen, but somehow saying them makes them more likely to happen.

Our first painting assignments was to create two boards (12x12inch) by just putting paint down and not overthinking everything or even thinking about it. We were to call them play boards. In effect this is a loosening up exercise and fun to do. I often overthink my paintings before I start, and changing those ideas as the painting progress is hard.

These are my Play Boards

The two boards have a different feeling to them and are designed to show that it doesn't matter how you start as they will be worked on later and covered over with paint.