Maybe Later - Black Leopard on Cushions

Maybe Later, 30x36 Oil on Canvas

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I love colour. Colour with a shot of black. Yummy. But this black leopard needed to really stand out and using a more limited palette achieved that. 

Limitations have a special role to play, they can provide focus and direction which may seem kind of a funny thing for me to say since my work ranges from whimsical illustration in 3 different mediums (scratchboard, acrylic and digital) to realistic oil painting to whimsical oil painting.  To see how focus and direction can be fun and not boring at all visit my brand new website which includes 4 different portfolios, different but very much connected through colour.

For those of you who followed this blog because of the still lifes I hope the shift away from realistic still life wasn't a disappointment. In fact, I hope the shift brought fun and pleasure. I've learned that exploration provides inspiration for other areas of one's art and is of great value. Stick around, I'm not done with still life just yet. Thank you for being part of my art circle. 

Available at the Daffodil Gallery

Cheetah and Pillows

The Art of Resting, Oil on Canvas, 30x24
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'The Art of Resting' was painted after a month or so of doing primarily still life. As much as I love the zen of still life the lure of playing with my imagination and going wild with colour is irresistible.

It's fascinating to see the links and threads of one's own creative life, to see how old unformed concepts connect to the present. Even though I have only been painting these whimsical cats, birds and flowers for a couple of years the idea for something along these lines was lurking about only as rough scribbles for illustrations in sketchbooks and bits of paper. An idea that was sketched out years ago and found in a file cabinet was the inspiration for this painting. Suddenly I'm grateful for my propensity to note everything and save those scraps of paper that litter the studio, you never know when an old idea will come to life.

Orange Wild Cat Oil Painting

Que Sera20x12, Oil on Canvas
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Another year has passed and with it some very good moments and along with some inevitable sad ones. We can't experience this great big wonderful life without having both, it's what gives life it's richness and depth. This painting is symbolic of our viewing of the past year, as we look back at the past and ahead to the future.

New Website and New Paintings

You Can't Handle the Truth
30x36
Oil/Canvas
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Yes, this blog is black! I know some web designers and critics detest black blogs and websites but my work seems to look better on black so when I decided to build a new website I decided to take a chance on black. I wanted my blog to match somewhat so had to make the switch to black here too.

As well as being completely rebuilt my website has a whole new category of paintings which you can see at www.cindyrevell.com, click on oil painting then click on whimsical. My apologies for not providing a direct link to the portfolio but I have yet to figure out how to make the URL specific to a particular page.

After contemplating a completely new look for my website and analyzing a lot of website templates I finally chose Big Black Bag who seemed to have the greatest amount of flexibility with the design and type of packages available. In terms of ease, unless you choose a template and not manipulate it too much it's probably pretty simple but the greater the manipulating of the design the greater the amount of work involved. Nevertheless I like the ability to make more than a simple template change. Big Black Bag’s customer service is fabulous.

I'm continuing with these cat paintings and find it exhilarating to use my imagination and tell a bit of a story, to play with my favorite colors, to explore size, and see how loose I can get. The picture doesn’t seem very loose but in real life they are.

No, I'm not giving up still life but I'm truly enjoying these new paintings and have so many ideas that I just need to let it play out and see what comes of it. I've found that art I've done in the past, like the fast studies, my illustration work, and motifs I explored about 15 years ago have an influence on my work. I can see the still lifes and these new paintings perhaps getting a bit closer to one another. I am loving it.