NELVIA'SART.COM

                                                             Borrowed Time                                                                 15.5."x12"                                                                    Pastel Yes, I do get itchy when I go for any length of time and don't do something with pastels.  Still my first love as far as mediums go.  But I thought this was something I wanted to do especially as a direct impact of our visit to the zoo.  As I mentioned we did a trip to the Birmingham, AL Zoo and they do an excellent job of educating on animal conservation and the part zoos today play.  It was appalling how many species are going extinct or no longer exist in the wild, due to droughts, over population, destruction of habitat, etc. Now, I am usually not much of a political or cause type individual, but I felt compelled to make this emotions and human-like behavior statement, it simply came together and demanded to be painted.   These animals need

                                                           Flamingo-esque                                                                 11"x14"                                                                 Acrylic I know the title is kind of funky, but the post that she has makes me think of a flamingo dancer.  They are always to dramatic I definitely have to find a picture to do of one, all those ruffles and attitude. This is trying to do a minimal background.  I had a bottle of Spanish wine that had a wrap of plastic mesh.  So when I sacrificed and drank it I cut the mesh off thinking I might be able to use it to make a design by putting the paint on it and then pressing onto the support.  Well it didn't exactly work the way I wanted it to but it did end giving a nice illusion of movement for the background. Now back to the painting I have been working on and to finish the design of the new one I want to do next. Thanks for stopping by and have a great w

                                                                         Galactic Lion                                                                             10"x8"                                                                            Acrylic Well since I haven't been in painting shape, we decided to take trip to Birmingham, AL.  It is a pleasant drive, even though the roads leave a lot to be desired, lots of construction,  miles barreled off with nothing much getting done and still not a great road in  many spots to ride on.  But it is a short drive and we really enjoy both their zoo and botanical garden, as well as several restaurants.  It is much easier to navigate there than Atlanta traffic. While at the zoo, we hit a cooler day and the lions, who sleep or rest about 21 hours a day, were sort of awake.   The male, I think his name is  Kwanzaa,  who was sprawled out decided to sit up and we walked right up to the window separating us, he didn't re

                                                                  Centerline                                                                      11"14"                                                                     Acrylic Centerline is the next of my performers series.  It is actually hard to believe this is #13 and I still have a few more I want to do.  I guess they say the right amount for a series is 20-25 pictures so I am on a good track to have a nice width for the series and probably it will end up about half dancers and half musicians.  It still amazes me also how quickly some of these have come out. I enjoy doing these abstract painting backgrounds.   It usually takes me a day to do the background.   It also is kind of relaxing too to just put the paint on and then try to manipulate it around.  Most of these patterns were blown with a straw rather than a hair dryer.  I like this look as it can give you marbleization, blown splatters and interesting pai

                                                                     Spanish Guitar                                                                           14"x11"                                                                           Acrylic Well first off I want to thank Carla and Stephen for giving me the encouragement and support to get this piece brought to completion.   Been fighting with it for over a week now and certainly totally repainted the background guitar at least four times. I am sure glad that acrylic is so flexible and can go light over dark and dark over light so many times, doing that also contributed to giving the guitar different wood tone effects.  After changing the size, shape, where the center hole hit, etc. so many times before I  thought it looked like correct proportions and composition I was ready to set it aside for a while. But, talked with one of my friends in Canda, Carla and hubby, Steve, from PMP, we talk via FaceTime frequen

                                                                    Oh Baby, Baby                                                                          11"x14"                                                                          Acrylic Well there was a purpose to this piece besides the fact that I loved the look of this little guy.   He looks to me like he is already practicing stalking and on the hunt.  Of course, he probably really is just curious as they have no fear at that age. I wanted to see if I could pull some of the energy and looser brushwork that I found in my performers pieces and translate that into use with my animals.   Since I have been on instagram I have seen so  many wonderful and talented folks who do animals really, really well, that it drives me to try to do more than just recreate the perfect look and try to imbibe some life into the piece.  That means that they aren't perfect, static or you see every hair in place.   I worked on th

Contemplation 14"x17" Acrylic Here is another in the performer series.  Not sure where she found a porthole window like this, but thought it was pretty neat.  Well this one was done with a vision and a big prayer.  I had to believe in the fact that I would like it after I put phthalo blue washes over my grisaille.  I liked it really well just with the grisaille and figured if I had to I could go back over the blue washes with the grays again.  But now I do like how she kind of glows, and I especially like here against the darkest dark of the  lower  background. Then I was pretty tentative with my first saturation of the phthalo blue, and figured, in for a penny, in for a pound.   I went over it several more times with heavier washes to achieve the finished painting.     Hope you like it.  Thanks for stopping by. Grisaille before washes were applied

                                                                    Rumba                                                                     9"x12"                                                                    Acrylic Well been a busy week.  We had a few cooler days and I took advantage of them to get the garden final trim, pine straw spread, weeds sprayed/pulled and generally ready to be a closed garden for the season.  Yes, we are supposed to get some effects from yet another hurricane - the second impact in 6-8 weeks.  This time supposed to be less rain and wind and rain.  Since we need the rain, please bring it on. I have been asked how many of these am I going to do, and still have about 8-10 in the planning stages.  Anyway I have a lot of ideas running around in my mind and had a completely different background planned for this.  But I really like this energetic and sexy dance, the rumba, and felt it needed a more robust background.  So I have the spotlight

                                                                       Triangular                                                                          12"12"                                                                          Pastel Well today was just a fun day and trying my street performers out in pastel on black Artagain paper.  I was getting itchy as I haven't painted with chalk now in quite a while.  Actually the inspiration for this piece is I am going to try to get featured in an instagram account, weekly_art_comp. This weeks challenge is about geometry.  Well got to admit that I wasn't the brightest bulb in this math class.  But I figured that most of the entries are going to being those fabulous mandalas and other really structured pictures.  I don't do those kinds of things as I find them a bit too tedious and I just don't have the patience level for them. But as I looked at this reference picture that I pulled for street performe

                                                              Tango Criollo                                                                    9"x12"                                                                   Acrylic We thought I would use the cardstock that I made for the piano man.  I took a piece of cardstock and ran it through the printer to get the music on it.  I couldn't figure out exactly how to utilize it in that piece.  So thought I'd put this couple on it.  Since it is on cardstock and I glued it to a sheet of watercolor paper I am pretty sure it is not longer archival.  But was worth it to see what kind of an effect it would give.   I do like the drama of the dancers poses, while I can't dance this dance i do enjoy watching it. Thanks for taking a look.

Piano Man  18"x14" Acrylic Here is the next in the performers series.  Well I think I am finally done fighting with this piece.  I want to thank Diane who told me I couldn't start over and had to figure out how to try to salvage it.  Going to show the stages I went through because originally I fell back to what I always try to do, be  more realistic.   I just didn't have a clear plan for this one and just kept adding and changing on the fly.   Hope at the end though I finally got it right.  The biggest struggle with this one was trying to get movement and some life into the picture.  The piano and player are pretty stagnant, so I decided to add the dog.  Believe it or not I think putting the water bottle in on top of the knapsack also helped.   Here is where I started out, was going similar to the reference photo putting him in the park outside with lots of people walking by.  But boy I sure didn't like where it was going and felt it was way to dark