1/8/2022 polyptych, canvas 12, day 1
2:30 PM: despite the below freezing temps (it was -16F on the valley floor this morning, and -3F at our house) mikela and I will walk up to the stupa in a little while, so i’m stopping a bit early today.
this morning I started work on the final painting in this 12 canvas suite, loosely inspired by the 2020 tokyo olympics celebration. thus far, i’m using diverse sources for this one: a dancing woman from the olympics celebration; a photo-collage of an interior, which I made in the ‘late ‘80’s, and came across this morning; and a fragment of an ancient greco-roman mosaic, one of many in my growing folder on this topic. how they will all join together in this early stage composition is still up in the air.
for the moment, I haven’t introduced any collage, so what you’re seeing in stage 1 has been created with oils and colored pencils.
at night before falling asleep, i’m reading a book which is a transcript of a conversation between the francis crémieux and the renowned early 20th century art dealer, khanweiler, who was the first to begin acquiring picasso’s work, as well as the work of other well known painters of the period. he sat over 30 times for this portrait picasso made of him in 1907.
i’m learning a lot from this conversation khanweiler had in the book “my galleries and painters.” and it’s slowly beginning to become part of my process of creating new work. i’ll say more about this later.