3:51pm update: i'm just now adjusting the images of the latest version of parade 36 to load. i got a late start today, as usually happens after we return from travel, but it was a good day. i'm moving very cautiously, with the knowledge that, once the white spaces are filled in, it can't be reversed. those spaces allow the painting to breathe, but if there are too many, they tend to throw off the balance of the composition. i love sketchiness, and have written about how and where it appears throughout the history of art. the passage i'm working on in this photo is a good example, and i deliberately left the jacket with the wiggles.
BELOW: parade 36 in it's current state, at the end of my work day. details will follow shortly.
the beard in a rubens portrait in the metropolitan museum, NYC
if you click on the details below and make them full screen, you'll get a much better sense of the deliberate "sketchiness" i refer to. throughout the history of art, those artists who personify the "painterly," such as hals or rubens, have revelled in any opportunity to allow gestural brush strokes the freedom to exist above and beyond what they are meant to represent. for hals, it was often a sleeve; for rubens, perhaps the curly beard you see in this rubens portrait at the MET.
11am update: yesterday morning we had an actionlab team meeting at the element in denver. one of our team members brought his son asher, who we hadn't yet met. we were amazed at how asher kept himself occupied during our 2+hour meeting and didn't once complain.
more interesting to me were the 2 drawings he made; one on the white board, one on a large post-it pad, which you can see below. when i came back into my studio this morning i immediately tacked it to the wall and studied it.
yep, asher's drawing matches all my thoughts and feelings about kid's art before the schools get their hands on them. it clearly illustrates their personal mark-making, coloristic and spaitial sensibility, and it almost always exhibits elements of what adults would call genius.
gallery goers having their first experience of abstract art often utter the stock phrase "my kid could do that." and they are right. but their kid could probably do it better! i believe kids have access to their vast, subconscious inner library of aboriginal mark making, as well as to the entire history of art, before adults intervene.
a few hours have gone by since i placed asher's drawing on my studio wall, and i'm still delighted by it, and continue to see animal and human references and be fascinated by the journey his line takes, where he chooses to emphasize a shape or color and how he uses the space. BELOW asher's drawing, a painting by cy twombly hanging in the tate gallery, london.
i'm a little late getting started on parade 36, so i'll get to it and post updated images later this afternoon. on row 2 is the current state of the painting, based on a photo from above of the MET museum interior.
