In-progress, full & detail shots – Heart Fragment, Dec 2021
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Related blog post –
November 28, 2021 – My Most Viewed Image This Past Week @FineArtAmerica, Heart Fragment

Intro
A friendly warning, this particular post is chock full of image of work in-progress – full shots, detail shots, etc 😊 As probably should be the case, this being more a talky-about-me and my relationship with my art. Some introspective, some of wrestling with memories dealing with how I’ve felt about my art at differing times in my life, all in relation to where I think I am now.

My basic premise is, I’ve worked my way close to my earliest art memory, painting in 2nd grade to music, the whole class of us, courtesy of a lady I wish I’d written down her name. Her kindness and gentleness brought me as close to my own mother as any child could want ❤️

The premise itself is, I seem to have reached a point where what drives and satisfies me most with my art, figurative or abstract or any blend of the two, is a nurturing symbiosis between how my art piece appears from a distance and how it feels up close….

Here then is my attempt to convey that notion ☺️

There was a time, even as a child, but of course more so by my 30s in the 1980s, that wanting to sell my art was my focus.

Doing my art, that I took for granted.

I just wanted to smear paint, watch it do things, and when it felt right, it was done!

I sometimes wonder if I’m just working my way back to the “as the child” I was in 2nd grade, painting to music, and seeing what happened when I had a brush in my hand and paper to paint on, before I tried selling scraps of paper with my pictures to our neighbors a little later in elementary school, is where I’ll finally end up at, if I’m lucky enough to progress that long 😊

By the 1980s though, in my 30s, I needed to sell art to pay rent etc — but my focus, when I painted, was simply the process of seeing how the acrylic paint in those days acted when I brushed and pushed and pulled it with my brushes on canvases. No paper. Not then, with acrylics. And when I was done with a painting, was when I felt a stillness, a sense I couldn’t touch the image any way that wouldn’t off-balance it, making it feel like it needed more work.

Even when Sheila and I returned to Galveston for a year and a half, when we retired, and I placed work into the art league’s gallery there, folks I’d known back then, in the 80s, would look at my work, and I remember clearly as a starry still night, a lady saying, “He’s always done that. It feels so at peace.”

Though I didn’t really really understand what she meant, or saw – I was still just seeing a balance that brought me that stillness. Did I think that was “peace.” Sorta. But I also knew it still wasn’t what I was looking for. Not entirely anyways.

But what I’m sometimes seeing and feeling in my work now, is a different kind of balance, or stillness, or peace. It’s a conjoining of image seen from a distance, far or not too far, but where the general image is what catches the eye, and, when up close to the surface, another world.

The not-too-close image gave a hint or promise of stillness, peace or happiness. The close-up image though, the surface, teams with intricacies – swirling dipping clashing merging – universes, like through a telescope, like through a microscope.

Adan

And that balance, gives me peace. For now ❤️ 😊

Til the day, if I’m lucky, I can view my work again as a child, and simply feel the fuller connection from within myself, reaching through my hand through the brush to the surface, and when I step back, there’s some kind of magic for me there, that very much makes me at peace – but maybe, maybe this time, then, I may know why….

In progress, TV Dancer + 3 6×6 gallery wrap abstracts ©Felipe Adan Lerma, Dec 2021
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Related blog post for TV Dancer
November 20, 2021 – Working on Paintings; In-Progress : Night Dancer, or Possibly, Duet, Part 2

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Thanks so much everyone! Stay curious, stay creative! 💕

Adan

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Blog posts about my paintings here on my site can be browsed via this link 😊
https://felipeadanlerma.com/category/areas/arts-area/arts/paintings/

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— Felipe Adan Lerma (@FelipeAdanLerma) December 12, 2021

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