Just perfect my friend!!!

This is lovely, and fantastic work, Carol! I just adore all the textures on it.

very nice!!

Outstanding work. God bless.

Beautiful!!!

superb

Fabulous! ... more wonderful dragonflies, created in that special way that only you know how. hugs Jane xx

First, this piece swims in a stunning predominance-of-verticals---a technique which, if I recall, isn't something you post very often. (At least here.) Yet, you've cropped it horizontally, which balances the verticals beautifully; and makes this feel like a 'cross-section'. The dragonflies add to your horizontal feel, splayed across the frame as they are, thus adding to the balance even more.

This is like a stained glass panel, and it's exquisite.

Re the inks: I know, from your words, that you go by intuition as much as plan, which always sounds so easy (to the newcomer), but which takes as much concentration and being 'in the moment' as doing it any other way. You have this way of letting the inks, with their characteristic 'blobs' and bunching-up of colors, guide you as much as you guide them. I've said this elsewhere, I think, but it's like what actors call "listening" while acting: Their job is to listen to the other actors as much as speaking to them. In other words, they get so much from letting the other characters guide them to their role. To do that, they have to be intimately attuned to everyone in the play---a whole other discipline added to their usual technique and discipline of learning a character, shaping it, articulating it, etc. This piece feels like you listened to the ink intimately: So many segments feel like they grow organically out of the ink's very nature, which meant you were listening to the ink (so to speak), paying very close attention. The dragonflies' heads and bodies are loaded with ink-blobs, the way bead-chains are loaded with beads. You've turned their beads and blobs and chains into exquisite, living creatures. Further, while most of the dragonflies are placed horizontally---harmonizing with your crop---you've angled some of them, breaking into the horizontal (and vertical) feeling of the piece. Which makes them wonderfully intrusive, and subtly so.

Their wings are like stained glass---not only in the actual outlining (corresponding to the lead between each pane of a stained glass panel), but in your watercolor-like applications of hue. They bleed and spill: There's a lot going on in those panes. And you maintain clarity with all this: That is, the piece doesn't become a big 'din' of blurbs and blobs, etc: Every section and creature has a crystalline presence. That's something I notice in a lot of your painting: For all the visual activity in some of your pieces, nothing is muddled, nothing lost; whatever you need to stand out, stands out. (This is something I have a terrible time with, so I can appreciate it when it's done consummately.) And the stalks (in your "wild garden") are beautifully colored, and filled with yet more dots and spheres, and lots of grain and dripping lines...In fact, the whole piece feels like a mix of lots of tiny cells that all make up a huge ecosystem, while also making a big Tiffany-like stained glass panel, doused in pinks and accented with greens, browns, whites, etc, all of which feel alive. You have a very living relationship with color, I think. It must guide you the way your inks do.

Finally, your longitudinal crop makes it not only a 'panel', but an exquisite decorative leaf---as in a book leaf, where we imagine a whole collection of these in a book, or separated by tissue paper and stored in a box (as in the old silk album paintings from China). And the uppermost dragonfly has bejeweled wings, like a full set of stained glass all to itself; and some of your stems burgeon out, like the knots and furls of trees. Such variety! Why am I saying so much about a relatively small piece? Well, because it's chock full of riches, it brings to mind so much of what you do with this strange medium---ornery and self-propelled as it is---the poetry you coax out of it---even as it may fight you and try to divert you---and how much beauty you can pack into a relatively small space. In a word, Gorgeous.

Mark, thanks so much for your delightful and very insightful comment. I'm so glad you like this. The painting was a kind of journey into madness. I can't tell you how many times I left it because it was driving me nuts, only to come back again and again. Some works are like that, especially with those wild inks. I start out thinking I'm going one way and they take me another way, and it is an adventure that is often overwhelming and maddening when I try to control too much. Imagine being lost inside all those colors, and textures, and blobs, and stems and shapes. Finally the tangle of everything came into focus and I'm glad I stuck with it because I actually ended up loving the final work. The original piece is very large and vertical, and there was so much in the work that I could crop it in many ways to highlight more detail, and it became many different paintings within one.