Intensives Wrap-Up + First Painting For Sale!

As you may have already read, we’ve been very busy at The Vienna Academy of Visionary Art. We had two 6-day Intensive Workshops in the last two weeks – Spark in the Void and Thangka Painting.  Six days each wasn’t enough though, so we extended the workshops into this week.  Vera and Timea came to school on Monday and Tuesday to assist us with our various projects.  Beforehand, though, Timea gave us a very informative lecture on colour properties & mixing. Although we were using gouache and the colours we talked about were traditional Thangka colours, the information will be very useful for my work with acrylics, saving me a lot of money in the long run – instead of buying 30 different colours, I may buy half of that and mix my own.

The Mandala:

We only did a partial closing ceremony with this mandala (which included chanting to Padmasambhava)  as there are still a few finishing touches to make.  Although a lot of love, energy, mantras, and intentions have already been infused in this collaborative piece, we will empower it further when it’s completely done by writing Om Ah Hung in Tibetan on the back of the canvas, behind the figure at the forehead, throat, and heart chakras.  I’m truly in awe every time my eyes rest on this beautiful piece- it affects me on many levels.

Individual Projects

Students flowed between their various projects and the mandala during our two days of the Intensives Wrap-Up and some into Wednesday, this week’s studio day (for all Academy projects).

Finally Finished my First Painting!

Cosmic VisionIntroducing “Cosmic Vision” – 50cm x 70 cm (19.7″ x 27.6″); acrylics on deep profile gallery-wrapped canvas. SOLD.  

Those of you who have known me for a while know that when I paint, I usually work on about 5-10 paintings at a time, 12-16 hours a day, for days or weeks at a time.  I get into the flow and unless I’m working with thick layers of gels/mediums that take weeks to dry (especially in humid Newfoundland), I stay in that flow until they’re finished.  Then I take time off to take care of other aspects of the business or do other things until the next painting marathon.  That’s the groove I work best in.  It’s a truly connected state of mind and spirit (some may say obsessive, but I prefer meditative) and it feeds my soul.  It’s been challenging, therefore, for me to start a whole bunch of projects here at the Academy and never get around to finishing them – whether it’s because it takes weeks for layers of oil paint to dry before I can glaze again or because we’re going from one class to another, one project to another.  We spend 8 hours a day at least 5 days a week at school, but I hadn’t completed one painting in 5.5 months!  Well now I have!  Yay!  It feels great.  On Wednesday, I applied a final UV protective archival varnish to “Cosmic Vision” – a piece that’s very much in my style, but integrates some of what I’ve been learning, especially about transparency, glazing over whites, dimensionality, and brush work.  I spent most of 5 days working on this piece with short lunch breaks and occasional visits to the mandala. To follow up on what I wrote about this painting in a previous post, it was infused with sacred ritual, energy, and intentions (something I’ve done with my artwork for years)- but this time it was also empowered by writing OM in Sanskrit in the back of the circle and Om Ah Hung in Tibetan in the back of the Buddha.

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