When I first started this latest series of Art-o-mat paintings, I wanted to GO-GO-GO! And just crank out a series as fast as possible, experiment a lot and hopefully develop some as an artist. In the end, it took me SIX YEARS to finally send the series out. I started out experimenting and just trying to be quick and casual, these are only $5 paintings after all.
Whenever I think about these pieces I like to imagine and hope that the purchaser is STOKED and feels like they won the jackpot and definitely got way more than their $5 worth, and I started worrying that if I was going too free and easy that people would be bummed. I definitely went back and reworked a bunch of the early paintings and redid some of them entirely. Halfway through I realized I was finding much more enjoyment working on pieces that may take longer, and in the end looking back I realized that I had 3 mini series within the collection of 50.
These grass quote paintings weren’t original to this series, as I’ve been making these for years in many different sizes and mediums even. Though, the very first ever painting in this style was painted on a small canvas, but for the Found Art Tuesday project.
Also, not original to this series, I had a number of these grass portrait paintings.
Then, in the final 10/50, I returned to my Art-o-mat II series, where I made collages and then made paintings of those. In that previous series all the collages were made from printed and commercially decorated papers. My style has changed now, and I try to stick to my own decorated papers (usually pulled from gelatin prints and my own handcut paper stencils), and I made 10 paintings from those collages. The canvas paintings are above and the original collages in my sketchbook are below for reference.
