2:56 PM: as thunder rumbles in the distance, i'm stopping here for the day, gaze 26 is far from resolved, so tomorrow after our walk i'll resume work on it.
1:28 PM: i've been able to go back into gaze 26 and, as i said in last night's post, it is deconstructing, but continues to look like a variation on a fayum portrait. i added some writing across the image, which exists in the original. my variation says "irene, daughter of philip; may her soul ressurect forever....".
color is of special interest to me in this painting. at the moment, pale pinks, blues, ochres and greens dominate.
10:59 AM: gaze 21 has been hanging in our bedroom for the past few weeks, and this morning i decided it needed more work, in part as a result of our most excellent dialogue yesterday with ron & harwood in houston.
so i did a scrumble and worked into it....you will notice a few new elements, such as the rather pronounced eye which has appeared about mid-canvas, 3/4 of the way up, more emphasis on the necklace in the lower central quadrant and replacement of the mouth on the left by a graphite drawing. overall, the jumpiness of the transitions has smoothed out, and i've somewhat relaxed my attachment to the emphasis on the vertical bands of collaged off-white paper that created this departure from the rest of the series in the first place. curious to know if you agree that it's an improvement; your eye, on my opinion has more opportunity to rove across the picture plane, settling on key passages and resting there, hassle-free. click on one of the images to make it full screen, then toggle between the two to see what i mean.
i'll gaze at it as i renew work on the new gaze 26. here are before (left) & after (right) pics as it stands right now:
