New artwork: First Vision XVII. This is a bit more abstract than most of what I’ve done before, but I like it and I’m planning to do more in this style. (And yes, inspired by Rothko.)
Blog: #art
New artwork: Through the Veil.
New artwork: I Am a Child of God V. A reference to the Primary song. The rectangles represent (bottom to top), a child, its mortal parents, and our Heavenly Parents. (Figured it was time to do a more abstract version of this idea. It ended up also alluding to Hearts of the Children IV and Hearts of the Children V.)
My process for this style, for what it’s worth: mock up the design in Figma, export an SVG, open it in Inkscape, use the roughen and simplify filters, export a PNG, open it in Procreate, select the rectangles, paint the streaks within the rectangles, export a PNG, texture in Affinity Photo as usual.
New artwork: There Am I.
Pleased to announce that my painting Behold My Beloved Son is now the cover art for Seven Gospels: The Many Lives of Christ in the Book of Mormon, a new book by Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch, published by Deseret Book.
Happy to announce that I have a piece of art recently published in Wayfare issue 2. It’s based on my illustration that accompanies Jennifer Finlayson-Fife’s chapter in In the Image of Our Heavenly Parents on celebrating each other’s strengths (chapter 2).
I also made an alternate version that we didn’t end up running for space reasons:
January 2024 update: the article is now online and both images are included.
New artwork: Deliverance to the Captives. (If I’d known that all I needed to do to get through that art block was to blog about it, I would have written yesterday’s post weeks ago!)
For the past couple months I’ve been wrangling some artist’s block. (Thus the lack of new work.) I’ve come up with a decent number of ideas, but whenever I start working on one, it begins to rot and slough off before my inner eye. (Uncomfortably visceral metaphor in preparation for Halloween: check.)
I hope I’m near the end of this particular hiatus, but part of me can’t help but wonder if I’ve stumbled into the final block, the one that never goes away, the end of making art for me. And yes, I wonder this every time I get blocked. A precarious path, this is.
I see myself as building a corpus of work, not as guaranteeing a constant stream of new things. I care about stock; flow is incidental. So in a sense I’m okay with projects coming to an end (as we’ve seen with Mormon Artist, Mormon Texts Project, etc.). I’m a seasonal maker. And perhaps this season — the artmaking one — has concluded, making way for something else, something new.
But maybe it isn’t over yet. Maybe I just need to work harder and push through the block like a professional. Or maybe I need to change style or process or subject. Or maybe all I need is another month off to let my brain finish recharging or healing or whatever it does in these fallow periods.
I don’t know what happens next.
New artwork: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
New artwork: Through a Glass, Darkly.
