7:06 PM: hanging whatever painting i'm working on our east wall, where we can get 60 feet back, usually works. what we saw immediately was that, it needs some accents, some pop. tomorrow...
1:38 pm: the second image has been introduced on the lower right, but still seems a bit like a non sequitur.
i felt the original image on the upper left, inspired by vermeer's the love letter, was too good to mess with. but you can't really isolate one area of the picture plane and work on it without adjusting the rest so that the two become one image. i do like the seeming enigma posed by the two women; one casting her gaze up and out of the picture plane, while the other, inspired by vermeer's model in the art of painting, looks down and away.
as for the relative softness; the lack of sharp definition characteristic of the rest of the gaze series, in yesterday's post i speculate on whether this has to do with clouded vision in my right eye due to a developing cataract. i just posted this painting to my home page and my gaze page, which gave me the opportunity to compare it with the rest. it immediately struck me how much softer & atmospheric this one is. as a result, my eye glides more smoothly over the surface, stopping here and there, not because of an abrupt transition, but rather to simply enjoy the painterly qualities of a given passage.
gaze 35 at 11:20 am with a drawing for a second image on the lower right
11:49 AM: it dawned on me, following my own dictum, that the picture plane rules, what's stopping me from introducing a second (vermeer) image into the mix? do that's what i'm about to do; lets see how it turns out.