OrangeIris Creative Blog

Dive a Little Deeper

Welcome to the Orange Iris Creative blog! Here, I will share a little about the processes and meanings behind my paintings as well as thoughts and ideas I am working through. I have kept an art journal that I will draw from as I begin posting some of my previous paintings and we will go from there!

A Quick Collage

As I was setting up my foot zoning space I wanted to have just a little bit of bright color. I had a fun little random abstract painting session setting up a few gelli prints so that I could collage them together and make a cohesive little set to hang in that space. I included some botanical elements as a reminder of the essential oils and just had fun with color and shape.

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Days of Creation

The Days of Creation make their way through this painting working from bottom to top as the earth evolves. In the beginning there was light. Days of Creation is divided into 6 parts, starting from the bottom section of the painting and progressing upward one day at a time following the pattern found in Genesis. There are many hidden treasures to search for, especially once the animals are formed. Can you find a dolphin, crab, monkey, snake, cat, elephant, and lamb? Any other hidden surprises?

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Circle Game

Circle game is based on the song of the same title by Joni Mitchell. I first learned it at girl scout camp as a kid and have loved it ever since. I sang it to my kids sometimes as a bedtime song and my youngest boy really latched on to it. He wanted me to sing it to him every night. When we had a babysitter part of the routine was to have them play the song so that he could sleep. This painting has many, many layers and went through a lot of changes, which seems pretty appropriate as it is about the passage of time and the changes we all go through as we grow. I couldn't seem to come to a final stage until I talked about it with my painting class. My instructor suggested that I do something bold with it and asked if I wanted it to become a finished piece. I really did! I had been picturing a spiral as I meditated on it and the black lines came to be from that image. Things to look for: lyrics from the song, my son holding an insect in a jar, dragonfly wings, carousel poles, references to time.

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Sealing the Nations

The original concept for this painting was to create a crocheted tablecloth look by writing tiny names. The background was formed with this in mind and you can still see hints of the background in the final piece, but they are very subtle now. I am including a process photo so that you can see those names. The colorful strips represent people from all kinds of cultures and nations. They come together in the center (intentionally imperfect) circle where they are united as hands on an altar, all of the circular pieces representing a sleeve attached to a hand in the rectangular box. This was painted in May of 2023.

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Mom's Chickadee

My mom called a couple of days ago to tell me about something she had learned. There were four things, I believe, but so far I’m grasping onto just one. She said that it is important for our bodies to know where they are in time and space, so every morning we should go out during the sunrise and look east, staring into the brightest part of the sky. I really love this idea. It gives me a time and place to be grounded first thing in the morning. I can see more energy around me at this time of day. This morning I listened to a little bird close by. There were many singing birds this morning, but one was very close and caught my attention. It sang, and then it sang in a totally different way, and then again in a totally different way. I think I heard about 6 different voices come from that little bird. I don’t think I realized that little birds had so many different voices. Some sweet and happy, some guttural and angsty. Some as if calling out for a friend: here I am, come find me.

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Juicy Orange

Juicy Orange is the first painting that I did in a fabulous class I took with Kellie Day. She only has everyone paint the same subject matter once, for the very first painting, and I was THRILLED when that subject matter was an ORANGE! I hadn't painted for years with the exception of one painting that I did of an orange slice at a friend's home. 

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Personal Art History

This blog is to record what is happening in my world as I create, to record the stories that bring my paintings into being.