Cricketts Inky Art Blot

I'm working on the peacock paintings at the moment and some relief prints. I am slowly filling in the shapes and colors of the paintings, starting from the top and working down with each color. I'm grouping them with my 8 color reduction cut relief print. Also a feather linocut and painting, both in their early stages. The linocuts below are variation experiments based on the imagery above. It still feels like I am a long way to completion, but hopefully they will pull together fast at the detail stage.

Moving on slowly but surely. I am having fun mixing up the paint. There is something very sensual about paint mixing and the smell of linseed oil is simply heaven! It is difficult to see progress, but I am hoping that the paintings will all come together quickly towards the end. In other news, the pond is now full :-) but full of sticks and blossom after the heavy winds last night :-(

I don't know why, but I go back and forth over whether my work will be good enough to show. Maybe this is what every artist feels or maybe it is me being unbalanced. I have always been this way. When I was still a student in art school, I burnt pretty much an entire years work thinking it sucked and smashed the ceramic sculptures I had to hand. Lucky for me, half the sculptures were in storage at the school. I had not documented the paintings and wish to this day that I had. I don't know if it is nostalgia, but I think back to that work and think it was the best I have ever done. Too bad, too sad as my kids say. Next month is NadaDada and I am nowhere near finished. Actually, not one single piece is finished. Why am I so lame at deadlines? I wonder if it is possible to fill 2 rooms of a gallery with just a month to go. I have been thinking of different ways to fill the room, or to paint abstracts that could be knocked out fast... My integrity is better than that I hope, bu...

After the face disaster, I started a new painting. This painting will be a sister to the fish zeppelin and will be a fish submarine! They are both obviously inspired by Jules Verne, but also the collages of Braque and Schwitters. It is still in the first stage, but the composition is pretty much down. The other painting in the series that I worked on today is of Lady Penelope's carpet bag. It also has the same composition treatments of the last few paintings and prints that I am currently working on. I used to paint one oil painting at a time, waiting days between each color before resuming work. This was very boring and I often abandoned work before completion. Now I try to work on two or three paintings at once. Working in oil paint on a number of paintings at once, helps keep the inspiration strong and encourages style similarities between each. This time around, I have 5 on the go, yay!

I got myself out of a rut that was setting in by painting a Monty Pythonesque fish zeppelin. It's coming along nicely and is probably my favorite painting of this series of work so far. I posted a fish snippet onto Milliande to get a little feedback, so it will be interesting to see what the folks there think. I have not finished, but I am certainly done for the night :-) Whilst working on this, I have had a second painting on the go to keep me busy while the paint is drying. Location: Twin Lakes Studio

I signed up for Nadadada 2012 at Wildflower Village earlier this week. I have been spending time sketching and playing with the colour wheel, coming up with plans for this exhibition that shows in June. I was originally going to paint a series of temples, starting with Stonehenge and ending with a Burning Man temple. Since playing in the sketchbook, I have changed my mind and will now probably do a mixture of painting and printmaking of a more frivolous nature. The scenery outside the studio window was very drab and grey today. The pond has now fully dried up and snow in on the forcast. Perhaps that will keep me in the studio working as I come up with my plans.

My name is Carole-Ann Ricketts, I am an artist living in Reno, Nevada, USA. I am British and lived and studied in England for most of my life. I travelled quite a lot over the years and my experiences have always influenced my paintings and other works.This year I have decided to take the bull by the horns and work on what has always been my weakest area: Printmaking. Having been something of a disaster zone in any print room I have encountered, I am looking forward to seeing if my misadventures are now a thing of the past. I don't know much about blogging but I will give it a shot. I will try and keep it professional, but chances are I will end up waffling about what my cats ate or what my kids did at school. Anyway, my goals for the year are loose, I want to concentrate on printmaking, but if the need arises, I will paint or do whatever else the muse would have me do. Along the printmaking path, I hope to get some work in exhibitions and participate in some collaborations. I ...