3:32 PM: calling it a day; about to wash my brushes & go for a walk with mikela up north crestone creek trail. as with most of the paintings in this series, this one has a subtlety and atmosphere that simply cannot be reproduced. i'll see tomorrow if more work is needed. right now, i'm exhausted!
i may have mentioned this in one of my posts, but my ideal for this series is to show the entire series in a gallery either in amsterdam, berlin or munich. i've shown in amsterdam, but never in germany. right now, i'm researching to determine which galleries might work.
BELOW: details of grey 14
1:41 PM: current state; still painting
12:04 PM: continuing work on the new grey 14, i began the day with a scrumble* and am now taking a short lunch break as i continue to work. i've learned a lot from making variations on this detail of vermeer's the art of painting. i love painting her crown of leaves. the title of this series will change. it began as grey, which goes all the way back to late november 2015, when we returned from my solo show in houston and i launched into a series of paintings where grey was dominant. those then morphed into the current "grey" series, but i'll have to find a new name, since they are all inspired by vermeer, and almost all are faces that dominate the picture surface.
scrumbling: a word i made up to describe the process of loosly applying a wash of off white to the entire surface, and then scraping/rubbing/dragging the palette knife over the surface while it's still wet, then painting back into it. the eye, rather than getting stuck on the details, such as her lips or hat, moves smoothly across the picture plane. there is more choice, more freedom on the part of the viewer to alight here or there. the mind/eye fills in suggested details as it fabricates it's own meanings. one has the capacity to dream more easily, while at the same time being able to notice and appreciate the painterly passages as painterliness.
BELOW: left: scrumbling the surface, right: current state, at noon
