today i began work on a newly stretched canvas: tree 2, 68x18" unlike tree 1, which is painted on a siena ground, tree 2 is being painted on a white ground. so it's much more stark as an image. the fire scars on the trunk are almost painful to look at, perhaps reminding us of human disfiguration. technically, as with all my work, the foremost quality is painterliness, a gestural, calligraphic approach that is very much who i am as a visual artist and as a human, and harkens back, i sometimes think, to past lives in ancient china, where my buddies and i made music, paintings, calligraphy and poems in the wildly beautiful mountains, while drinking the local wine. a lively but dangerous time it was, with the looming possibility of falling out of favor with the latest ruler and facing possibly dire consequences; banishment or worse.
BELOW: 4 stages of tree 2
