parade 49 68x18" oil on portrait linen as it looked at 3pm
2:58 pm: i may have completed parade 49, which is unexpected; i thought i would be more like saturday or sunday.
i was thinking yesterday about what i will call the expectation factor.
so what i mean by that is that we know this mother is about to put on her daughter's coat. and we'll be waiting for that to happen until this painting disintegrates beyond recognition, or is lost.
in vermeer's love letter, below, we experience that sense of expectation. is she asking her servant for an opinion of the letter she's holding? what's going on here? in parade 49, we know what's going on, but it's like a freeze-frame. the little girl's arms will definitely slip into the coat sleeves, just as we know the exchange about the letter will end and the servant will continue with her wash. but there's this sense of expectation. a vacuum. the little girl, as she holds her arm, is looking at something, dreaming about something. the woman with the lute is wondering, searching her servant's face for clues about her reaction to the contents of what has been called the love letter.
i think this moment frozen in time, filled with the sweetness of the mother daughter relationship, is a kind of bonus, the way i think of it, to the visual delights of pattern, color and painterly brush work that characterize this painting. as such, it's a kind of summing up of my career as an artist and my journey as a person. as can be said of all drawings and paintings produced by an artist, it's a self portrait.
9:19 am: about to meditate and correct a few actionlab chapters before heading to the studio to continue work on parade 49.
LOOKING BACK: yesterday i found this b&w photo of one of a series of oil paintings i made in the '70's in my athens studio. my studio looked over the ancient roman water clock called the tower of the winds because the sculptural representation of all the 8 winds can be found on the upper section of the 8 sided tower. this painting and the others in the series are now in private and museum collections in athens. i do have color transparencies of this and the many other paintings i made during that period, which i need to have digitized.