This year I decided to create a Heart a day for the A to Z Blog Challenge. This was a fun project, and I am very happy with the painting that I finished during April.My "So Many Hearts Dancing in the Air" will soon be on display at Crossroads Art Center in Richmond, Virginia. This painting shows visually the significance of the words we use and upon which we reflect. My painting starts with an Aching Heart, continues on with Broken, Cheating, Dramatic, Fragile, Reckless, Shattered, and more all the way through the alphabet. Most of the hearts represent an emotion.
As a romance author, I wanted to choose words that reflected the emotions I might use when writing a story or a book. Some of the letters did not have a word that worked for a heart, so, in those cases, I sometimes chose a color, like "U" is for Ultramarine Blue and "Y" is for Yellow. Since yellow is a favorite color of mine and represents sunshine, I didn't think until later how Yellow could also represent the heart of a coward. In my painting, the Yellow Heart is that of a bright and cheerful person.
To the right, I show some of the pages from the sketchbook I used as I planned my painting. Each day I posted in my blog the new acrylic heart I created on the canvas. The quick drawings from the sketchbook are done with pencil and soft pastel sticks. They gave me an idea of what I wanted to paint on the canvas, but often the ideas changed when my brush touched down and started to spread the delicious wet paint. The color took over.
That's similar to what happens sometimes when I write a book.The characters take over and do something completely unplanned.
I believe my finished painting demonstrates the importance of the words we choose as we write and as we speak. Here is "So Many Hearts Dancing in the Air" as produced during the A to Z Blog Challenge in April.
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| "So Many Hearts Dancing in the Air" acrylic/mixed media on canvas ©Mary Montague Sikes |
My original plan for this year's A to Z Blog Challenge was to create a travel blog each day. I love to travel and then to write about some segment of the trip. I even added a TR to my Notes Along the Way entry. But then, I thought about how much fun it was in 2013 to create my Animals A to Z and to have a new painting every day. I loved what happened with those spontaneous little paintings that eventually developed into their own art show. Then, last year, I created a painting exhibition for Farrah Ferand, the heroine of my novel, Evening of the Dragonfly. Because I sometimes made a painting in two parts, I finished with only 19 paintings from the 2015 Challenge. They turned into a show as well and became a part of a book signing for more than one occasion.