Planets and Foil by Kelly Eddington (2012)

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Description Keeping me busy for a couple of weeks: marbles on a crumpled sheet of foil. I had originally planned to paint marbles on a mirror, but obviously that was an exercise in futility as the marbles wouldn't stop rolling around. I thought the foil was a nice compromise: it was still mirror-like, but I was able to make little nests for each marble. The reflections were a lot more interesting than those on a flat mirror, and, of course, tougher to paint.This painting is as large as I can go at 21'x29', and the individual marbles were so big my husband Jeff and I started to think of them as planets. (There are indeed nine of them if you still count Pluto, and how can you not?) So instead of calling this 'Marbles and Foil,' Jeff suggested I title it 'Planets and Foil.' Good idea, Jeff! Painting at the speed of one marble per day, I gloried in the weirdness of the marbles'/planets' swirls and sparkly bits. This painting was an absolute joy and I love it a lot.Jeff's daughter let me use some of her marbles for this, including the one I started to think of as Jupiter, the large orange and purple one on the left side. This had an unusually reflective surface and took two and a half days to finish. The foil under it was really complex as well.

Kelly Eddington, Monroe City, MO
Member Since February 2012
Artist Statement Ever since I was a child messing around with a terrible paint set from K-mart, I have been obsessed with controlling pigment suspended in water. Now I paint with beautiful, hand-made watercolors along with brushes ranging from high-end to dirt cheap, but the obsession remains. I create large, highly realistic portraits, still lifes, and landscapes using the most unpredictable, unstable, and unforgiving medium known to man. My paintings are time-consuming and sometimes backbreaking. I have always tried to take watercolor as far as it can go, and as a result my work resembles oil paintings in terms of color richness and detail. Hearing my viewers say, “THAT’S a watercolor?” always makes me smile.

I was an art teacher in two Illinois public high schools for seventeen years. Anyone who has ever been an art teacher with a limited budget knows that it is a profession that stretches a person's creativity to the absolute limit. Effective art teachers must know their subject inside and out and strive to develop their own artistic visions as they teach others. I feel that teaching has made me a better artist. I used to devote each year's "off-season" to creating my meticulous watercolors, and now I’m happy to produce them year round and offer them as prints on Imagekind!