9:42 PM: her left hand is pathetic! will fix tomorrow.
3:50 PM: we had 3 dinner guests, all dear friends. one of them used to do restoration in italy on major italian renaissance paintings. in other words, she has a very refined eye for painting. she sees. she had seen the grey series online, but was not prepared for what she encountered last night: a house full of 15 grey series paintings. it was extremely gratifying that when she saw them in person, she and our other two guests couldn't stop looking at them and commenting on them. so this was, in a very real sense, their first exposure to the world outside of just mikela and myself. we don't really see them any longer with that all important fresh eye.
i did see, at the end of the night, that neither grey 12, nor grey 21 are resolved. so back to the studio they went. today all day i've been working on grey 12, originally inspired by vermeer's girl with the red hat. she's gone, and in her place, a second version of his girl with a necklace. there's already one version of her, which was one of the earliest in the series. if you go to my grey page in the drop down menu, scroll down & you'll see the painting on the very bottom row.
as usual, i lost track of time, and before i knew it, 6 hours had elapsed. even a twenty-something would have sore feet after 6 hours of standing on a cement floor. i don't want to reveal my age (i gave a fake birth date on facebook) but my feet are, as they say killing me!
i feel no loss at the previous 3 images having bitten the dust. and i'll see, with my first glance tomorrow, what needs to happen with this new iteration. in the mean time, i did a little prep work on grey 21, and will dive back into that one once grey 12 is resolved.
by the way, i'm beginning to get that, when i attempt to make paintings in the grey series inspired by any painter other than vermeer, i fail miserably. i feel like, when i'm looking at vermeer, i'm seeing myself. i'm not yet sure what this means. one thought is that he is a painter's painter; or, as my mentor tsarouchis, who made his own variations on vermeer might have said "ο vermeer, παιδι μου, εναι, οπος ολοι οι ΜΕΓΑΛΟΙ ζοραφοι, αφηρημος!" (vermeer, as is true of all the great artists, is essentially an ABSTRACT painter!)