Pandemic and craziness in the world!

Everyone has something to say about the strange year of 2020. Like most people, it's been a crazy year for me! I've been busy in spite of the pandemic and haven't been able to paint much for a couple of months.

I haven't posted my recent work this year but since I'm painting again, I decided to do it today. Here are some of my new paintings completed this year before June.

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Small acrylic paintings on paper

Cubism

I became interested in Cubism after I first left art studies and was struggling to find my path and style as an artist.  I went back to take a life drawing class and became interested in cubism at that time.  I learned that Paul Cezanne was the artist that first inspired Cubism.  Although, it was Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso who took the style further and were credited with inventing the movement. 

Paul Cezanne

Braque and Picasso were rivals but they were also friends who worked together.  Picasso said, "we worked so closely together that I couldn't tell his work from mine".  

Georges Braque

Pablo Picasso

After I finished with the life drawing class I started working on cubist drawings.  

At this time, I did not do very many oil paintings.  I did several portraits in oil but focused primarily on drawing. Many years later, I moved into Cubist paintings. 

This painting is fairly recent.  It took many years to develop my own style of Cubism.  Each artist has a style that motivates them to continue to paint.  For me, Cubism has been that style.  It's a very analytical approach to art that has many different paths and avenues of exploration.  That's the main reason that I find it fascinating enough to still paint.  There's always some new path to approach form and color with Cubism which keeps me interested.  For me, there's the added desire to work with color relationships, along with the cubist method of analyzing form. 

  

Crazy Cubist Art: Back to my roots

I'm going back to the art I did decades ago.  Although, I have continued to turn out crazy faces, I've primarily focused on landscape for many years. I plan to mostly focus on abstract people in coming months.
Abstract art is always controversial.  For me, it's the spectrum of art...realistic to nothing and somewhere in all that is the style I like to do. 
I would not have guessed that I would love abstract art so when I started out in art but over time I loved the colors and the shapes that I could create.
Examples of three recent crazy abstract works on canvas along with quotes by well-known people.

Cubism: Crazy Faces

"Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the bewildered."

quote by Al Capp

"They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things." 

quote by Constantin Brancusi

Abstract woman

"Abstract art has come into being as a necessary expression of the feelings and thoughts of our age; it has added new dimensions to creative painting."

Quote by Leonard Brooks

Cubist Woman: colorful Crazy cubist art

"You can't look at abstract art without thinking."

Quote by Patricia Cole-Ferullo

"I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it."

Quote by Chuck Close

"Abstract art is the land of the unknown.  Arriving there, the artist thinks, 

What now?"

Quote by Charlotte Rossmann

and finally...

"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours."

Quote by Bob Dylan

New Cubist Crazy Faces

 New Cubist Crazy Faces and Quotes ...

David Hockey: "Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it."

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Salvador Dali 

Vincent Van Gogh: "If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced."

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”  Francis Bacon 

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." Picasso

Marc Chagall: "Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love."

“To create one’s own world takes courage.” Georgia O’Keeffe 

“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” 
Alberto Giacometti 

“Every good painter paints what he is.” Jackson Pollock 

“Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.” Rene Magritte 
Art by Charlotte

Painting with Zen and Cubism

Cubist Still Life Oil Painting on Canvas

Colorful Abstract Cubist Still life Painting

Shapes and colors that come together when I'm dreaming but still awake. 

"There is no music allowed..."

"How can I do that?"

Alone, no noise

Painting with cubism and zen.