Colorful and then some more colorful with a whole lot of bold and bright mixed in.
That’s one way to describe the work of Cheryl Kovacs of Palm Coast.
She’s chosen the word “blazing” as an adjective placed ahead of “color” in the naming of her home-based studio, Blazing Colors Studio.
“I got the name of my company because when I close my eyes, I see nothing but bright colors and sparkles,” Kovacs said. “It makes me want to paint with bright, bright colors and embellish anything I can with glitter and this and that – you know, other sparkly things to make the paintings pop.”
Indeed, Kovacs paintings do pop.
Her mermaid paintings feature various shades of blue, green and pink on the body and tails. In a seashore locale, the houses and apartment buildings have bright white squares to mimic indoor lighting expanding outward to brighten the nighttime scene from shore as white dots represent stars illuminating against the blue and greenish hue of the sky. Another painting of three sea turtles uses black dots to bring out “the pop” in the picture.
Lately, Kovacs has discovered the artistic method of paint pouring.
Acrylicpainting.com describes it as a process in which an artist mixes acrylic paints and pours them on to the canvas or other surface creating abstract designs. Artists add other liquids such as Floetrol, distilled water, and drops of silicone to change the flow dynamic of the paint. The artist then moves the paint around with a popsicle or a brush or picks up one end of the surface and jiggles the paint around.
Kovacs likes to pick up each side of a surface and gently move it around watching how the paint moves and settles. These often become the backgrounds for the creation of other non-abstract scenes.
One of her most recent paint pours became the inspiration for a painting featuring a woman wearing a fiery red skirt.
“When you paint pour things just come out in the painting that you didn’t plan on,” Kovacs explains. “Once the paint dries, a lot of designs and things come out of the pour. It is pretty amazing.”
The fiery red dress painting began as a paint pour mixture of red, white, blue and yellow. And then, once it dried, Kovacs saw the skirt and knew what she wanted to add to it.
“She is dancing,” Kovacs said of the woman wearing the fiery red skirt. “It is a lot of fun and a little complicated to do paint pour. But whatever comes out in the paint is where we see things to add to it.”
Kovacs, a retired phlebotomist and EKG specialist, is a self-taught painter.
She watched hours upon hours of videos to learn the craft. She’s been selling artwork for nearly a decade.
She was about ten years of age when her parents handed her a Bible at church to keep her occupied and she drew a SpongeBob picture in the back of it.
“To this day, I still have that picture,” she said with a laugh in her voice. “My first picture. Probably not what my parents had in mind.”
Her paternal grandmother was an artist.
Kovacs thinks that lineage may be where she gets her artistic abilities from.
“She died before I was old enough to know her,” Kovacs said with a hint of regret. “But I think she left me that little spark of a gift because I really love art. Period.”
Sitting by her kitchen sink is her favorite place to paint.
“I don’t have a specific place like a studio yet,” she said. “I like to be in the kitchen because I am close to the sink to wash my brushes out as I work.”
Kovacs work is on display in Bunnell at the Cornerstone Business Development Center located at 608 E. Moody Boulevard.
— Amy Armstrong
