Why do anything? These sketches I do, why? Leaving that question as unknowable, the easier (easy is significant here) question is why do digital sketches?

1. Its easier to erase.

2. They don’t take time to dry.

3. They are easy to store.

4. Its easier to clean up after painting.

If that sounds silly, its not. That is why I’ve come back to digital after giving acrylics a good go. I love the real stuff, but I could not fit it into my life. And there is more:

5. They can be shared widely, easily.

6. They can be printed in different sizes.

7. They can be tweaked easily.

8. I can do them any time anywhere. In bed for example.

9. It is easy to change the background colour.

And here is the clincher:

10. All the reproductions are originals!

Postage Stamps, Abstract Expressionism and Joan Mitchell:

The ten artists included in the stamp series are Hans Hoffman, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Joan Mitchell. Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) is the only woman in the group, though her contemporaries Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner certainly could have found their way to abstract stamp glory as well. Joan Mitchell, however, is a great choice, a unique talent and appealing conversationalist as transcribed here in a 1986 interview with Linda Nochlin. Joan was born in Chicago, went East to Smith College and while there watched Rufino Tamayo paint a fresco in the art library; she returned to Chicago to study at the Art Institute, sojourned to New York then traveled to Mexico and Paris, Cuba and Haiti, then back to New York, though France would eventually become her home base.

Joan Mitchell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was a ‘Second Generation’ Abstract Expressionist painter. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler she was one of her era’s few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her paintings and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections across America and Europe.

Charlotte Park: Abstract Expresionist Paintings, 1950-63 – Hamptons.com:

Charlotte Park: Abstract Expresionist Paintings, 1950-63

By Exhibition May 25 – June 26, 2006

Charlotte Park Untitled, ca. 1951 Oil and gouache on muslin, 22 x 30 inches Signed lower right: C. Park

Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to present Charlotte Park: Abstract Expresionist Paintings, 1950-63. Curated by the noted art critic and scholar Ronny Cohen, this exhibition presents the most extensive survey of the Abstract Expressionist art of Park to date, featuring her paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the early 1960s. Many of the works have rarely or never been on view, providing new ways of considering the artist and her oeuvre. A brochure by Cohen discussing Park, her work, and her relationship within the context of the Abstract Expressionist movement accompanies the exhibition.

Park’s dynamic all-over style of composition, with its rich repertory of abstract shapes and bold imaginings, made its appearance in the early 1950s. From the beginning she put her own personal stamp on Abstract Expressionism, demonstrating through her art how profoundly well she understood the character of the movement and its means for reshaping reality and for discovering the essence of form and content. The irregular shapes appearing initially in Park’s works have as a general antecedent, the animated forms in the emergent Abstract Expressionist paintings of the late 1940s, such as those of Mark Rothko. Eventually Park evolved these shapes into a central feature of her painterly vocabulary, and the paintings in gouache that she created in the mid-1950s, in which references to nature on eastern Long Island appear, are revealing of the emblematic kinds of meaning with which she endowed her art. The wavy lines and twisty organic shapes in her works can be seen as the marks of a lively and commanding gestural hand, while the way that these forms sweep across the brilliant surfaces of a number of her gouaches of the mid-1950s can also be taken as the fascinatingly reductive signs of the ocean, bay, and countryside of Long Island.

Saw the video today: The Man in the Hat. I loved it. Made the image with a snap from the TV screen. I think I like it because I have been to his gallery a few times. I’ve met Peter. I would love him to sell my prints!