EASEL TIDES: GAIL M. ALLEN'S PAINTING JOURNAL

Gail Allen is a classically trained artist living in New Hampshire, USA, who sculpts, paints and creates custom designed landscapes, murals and event products.
Please click here to view my painting gallery site:
Gail M. Allen Fine Art

If you like my work, but are not ready to purchase a painting,
you may purchase fine art prints or cards with my paintings on them at my site: Gail Allen Contemporary Fine Art (Print and Card Shop)

Sunday, August 1, 2010

AIR painting- Elemental Series

Shown here is my third painting in the contemporary, symbolic Elemental Series. The painting titled AIR is my submission to this week's "Gone With the Wind" Challenge theme for The Artists Challenge. Again, as with the other two paintings previously shown, (FIRE and WATER), I have researched and woven the symbolic elements together to create this image.
How do you portray air? Space, aura, atmosphere, breathing, feathers of birds, clouds, angels and winged insects like ladybugs all are symbolic of air. Air is indicative of the mental plane; thought, logic, language, communication, the abstract, and the intellect. The keyword associated with air is life. It is principally considered to be masculine, and the angel associated with air is Raphael.
The painting is a complicated composition. With this piece, I needed to create the illusion of space. My intent was to have a mask of sorts, floating in space that you were looking through - at clouds floating by.  The mask is blowing air toward the viewer - so is it really a mask? Superimposed over the larger ladybug "mask", in a very textured layer, is an angel with wings outstretched. These wings are also part of the eyes which are made up of peacock feathers.
All of these layers contribute to relate my interpretation of this element. My reasoning behind this approach, as I have stated before, is to engage people in looking at a deeper level at the images before them - creating questions in their mind.  Which layer do you look at first? Is there still something else that you may not be seeing? It creates a push pull effect, both visually and intellectually. I want to make people question what they see. What is reality and what is illusion?

2 comments:

-Don said...

Well, I saw the mask element first. Are you surprised? :-) Then I started taking in all the other wonderful elements you employed to make this cool piece.

As soon as I saw your title for this one it made total sense to me.

Love it.

-Don

Gail Allen Fine Art said...

Thanks Don for visiting and for your comment. I had fun with this one....It's quite hard in the photo to see the angel overlay. I'll be trying to get a better photo done to put on my gallery site.
The challenge for me in doing these is to keep the images in each of the layers suggestive enough so as to make people connect with them.