Reuel Arts

The making of Self-Solace Wind
I painted this piece between 4:30 and 7 am at the end of an all-night painting all session. I love the still hours before dawn when the promise of the coming light is invisible but imminent. I'm usually "meaningfully exhausted" when I'm still up at that time of day. On this particular early morning I painted a hill, a tree and the sky. I let the colors bleed, almost dry, then bleed again except for the space around the tree which I decided to leave because I liked the glow which is to me the promise of dawn, the hint of clean air in a stale room. Hope in the midst of the mundane, the stifling or the painful.

Process:
This painting sat for months after I started it. When I returned to it I realized it was a painting about space and light. The tree branches on the right are really intricate spaces surrounded by gold washes. The waterfall, the mist and much of the left of the painting are white space -- light revealed by inaction. I left the painting as unfinished because there were unpainted areas. Looking at it now I think the painting is more about the spaces between the brush strokes than the strokes themselves. The imagination flourishes and creation happens in the mysterious places between hard work, order and discipline. Without some work to break it up, the space remains impermeable. Too much work and the mystery is invisible. This becomes clear in working with watercolor.

Joy Visage
This painting is an exploration of pattern and a glimpse into the world Seledor (www.seledor.com). I let the paint bleed, arrange itself and dry and then formed my patterns around those shapes. The glowing hand-like shape in the left foreground is a bulbous tree, native to the temperate and tropical regions of the planet.