5:46 AM: off to edwards for actionlab meetings with the teachers in preparation for our fall pilots in the 2 schools there. then i'm taking mikela for a nice dinner in salida on the way home. back to work in the studio tomorrow. this was our sky last night, after the storms.
if you've never visited my story page, have a look.
6:43 pm: a sweet after dinner, post storm walk to spanish creek, which abuts our property to the north. the normally trickling creek was swollen and rushing with the spring snowmelt, and the light, after the cleansing rain was warm, clear. we feel energized in anticipation of tomorrow's all day meetings in edwards, a 3 hour drive. it will be a planning session in preparation for our fall pilot of actionlab360 in the 2 schools we've been working with this year.
12:40 PM: as my ongoing i-movie adventure continues and i wait my 5th tech support call in 2 days from apple, i'm about to re-stretch grey 23 to free up the 38x38" masonite backed stretcher bar for a companion piece painting to the fayum inspired painting in the grey series which you see here. it too will be based on a fayum prototype.
1:41 PM: today when i awoke i knew i had to bite the bullet and contact apple support to receive guidance on how the almost 500GB of i-Movie projects on my iMac desktop could be safely moved to an external drive to free up space on my 1000GB internal hard drive, which has been reduced to 17.5GB!
so far it's been far easier than i had feared it might be. right now 1 350GB folder is being exported to my seagate 5TB external drive. then apple support will call back at 3:30 to guide me through the rest of the process and finally trash the 500GB on my internal drive to free up the space. from now on, all i-Movie imports of media will go directly to my external drive.
more info than you wanted, i know. this by way of saying that, so far i haven't done any painting. but i'm about to stretch the canvases & will likely start a new painting: grey 24, either later today or in the morning.
the eastern sky and the fourteeners from our front door, 8:15pm
8:23 PM: GOODNIGHT, crestone!
grey 23 38x38" mixed media on canvas, at 2 pm
2:09 PM: mikela strolled over, at my request, and spotted a few areas that needed modification because they were drawing they eye to them, to the detriment of the whole composition. they were 2 areas of off white paper i had collaged on, which mostly worked as shapes but were too stark and needed to be pushed back. so i went back in and accomplished that. i think she was right, so here's where i'll leave it for today as i move on to the re-stretching i spoke about this morning. below are a couple of details.
12:19 PM: as i gazed at grey 23 on my studio wall, something was bugging me. it was too busy and had no real identity. so i dove back in, intuitively going for more white space and keeping my mind out of it by putting on shuffle on my ipod, which is on it's last legs. if you sctoll down a bit and compare this version with the one i posted about an hour ago, you'll see a vast improvement. it breathes now. all the diverse collaged elements contribute to a cohesive whole. it is, as it were, it's own animal...a head-dress-o-pod, lets call it. and, perhaps most important, something of vermeer's mystery has been translated, i like to think, into a contemporary vernacular.
11:25 AM: got to work early enough to make a few important additions to grey 23. it's now more integrated than it was when i ended my painting day yesterday. which means i can get on with the task of un-stretching and re-stretching, described in my earlier post, below. i plan on creating a companion piece for grey 23 and grey 21. all four are destined for gremillion & co. fine art in houston, where thry don't yet have any examples of my grey series.
7:45 AM: i'll be going back in to grey 23 today, and, i hope, doing some un-stretching and re-stretching to remove completed paintings form their masonite backing and stretch new canvas for the next round of the grey series. here's how my studio wall looked as i left for our trail walk yesterday. the paintings on the left & in the center will be re-stretched. on the right is grey 23, which i'll be working on shortly.
BELOW: this time every year our high desert cactus blossom. they don't last more than a few weeks and have a very special, subtle beauty.
3 PM: so here's where it's at. this is the end of my painting day, and shortly we'll be taking our trail walk. i think it's a little too busy right now; too much going on to distract the eye & keep it from roaming freely over the picture plane. but it's close. i'll do more tomorrow.
1:50 PM: i added a second face, but didn't like it, so i collaged another strip of paper over it and made a new one, simpler.
noon: a lighter touch on the images painted on the off-white strips is creating a surface more in the direction of what i want.; something alexkatzian, while maintaining the underpinnings of beautiful accident-prone marks pulsating just beneath the surface and the impenetrable mystery of vermeer's women, with their hats, earrings and hair decorations.
10 AM: up at 5:30, got to work nice and early on grey 23. all representational elements had been removed in it's last iteration a few days ago, and today is it's turn to enter a new phase of the grey series. vertical strips of paper have been collaged onto the surface. drawings have been made on these strips, which are my interpretation of slices of iconic vermeer paintings. i'm about to begin the next stage, relying on my gut to direct me. BELOW: on the left, grey 23 as it looked first thing this morning. center: white strips collaged on. right: drawings made on strips.
1:30 PM: i worked extensively on grey 21 this morning. first i attached the white strips of paper you see. i had no idea why i was doing that, but i can remember paying attention every morning in our entryway as i walked past a small collage on paper i made 3 or 4 months ago, which is framed and hanging. in it, i had experimented with the same concept: vertical strips of white paper.
once i had collaged them onto the canvas, i had no idea what i was going to do next. i began with the first one on the left. on an easel directly to my left are some large print outs i made of vermeer faces. they were overlapping, and thus were cut off , leaving a narrow band of the image vertically. so that's how it started. now i'm going to put my attention on grey 23.
7:33 AM: BELOW are shots of the evolution of grey 21. today, more work will be done, starting around 10am. the sequence below begins chronologically on the upper left.
2:52 PM: stopping for the day; we might be able to walk up the trail and avoid the approaching storms, if we leave early. here is grey 21, also in the process of deconstruction.
to be continued tomorrow.
1:49 PM: as the clouds roll in for yet another possible round of storms, i have spent a very productive day thus far engaged in deconstruction. i have deconstructed grey 23 to the point where all representational elements have been purged. what remains, for the moment, is what most would label as an abstract painting. one of my visions for a successful painting is that it be like a great desert: juicy, delicious in taste and texture.
i would not. if i had to attach a label, i'd call it an exciting painting. a suggestive painting. a painting by a guy who knows how to draw. i think i may leave it like this for today, and move on to grey 21, also in the process of deconstruction. visit my grey page to figure out which one that is. it's no longer what you're seeing on that page.
detail of the new grey 23
7:08 AM: i'm hoping to get to work early today; we got up an hour early, thinking it was 6:30 when it was actually 5:30. so i'd like to get a lot done, including figuring out my i-movie problem of getting the i-movie library off my desktop so i can free up the 100GB of space it's taking up. i already moved the library to 2 external drives; i just need to make sure i can access it successfully before taking the big step of putting it in the trash and re-starting my desk top.
here's detail of grey 23, which i started yesterday:
as for the 2 canvases i'm going to re-stretch, they are still stretched over board to facilitate collaging. now that both 32x32" paintings are complete, i want to free up those board backed stretcher bars so i can stretch new canvas onto them.
BELOW: the 2 paintings to be re-stretched: grey 21 & grey 22
3:36 PM: an early stage of grey 23, which i started after tweaking grey 15 and grey 22. remember titian's 1509 painting, a man with a quilted sleeve ?
oh, how titian must have enjoyed painting that quilted sleeve!
11:18 AM: both grey 22 and grey 15 have been tweaked successfully. i felt that i needed my freshest energy for this, so i dove straight in, before my matcha tea or anything. and i was right. my instinct is sharpest when i enter my studio after a good nights sleep. BELOW are the 2 paintings post-tweak.
what did i do? grey 15 on the left: the hand was re-worked and the black area just to the left of the hand was pushed back, as well as adding some textural elements and light grey brush strokes; enought so that it no longer grabs your eye as soon as you view the painting. and the highlights in that beautiful hair piece were highlighted a bit more.
grey 22, on the right: the rectangular black element above her head was broken up with a bit of collaged green map, and some textural elements were introduced, allowing that dark area above her head to integrate with the rest of the composition. her pearl necklace was brought out, so that it becomes a more important part of the whole play of dots of light.
7:33 AM: in gazing at grey 22 temporarily hanging on our east living room wall, i can see a few tweaks are needed. not a lot; mainly breaking up the black rectangle above her head, which is a bit too monochromatic and blockish.
as well, grey 15, below right, could use a few adjustments, so both are going to the studio with me for some tune-up. if i can get to work early enough, i maybe able to begin grey 23 as well. i am slowly preparing internally for the presentation i'll be putting together for the director of a gallery in aachen, germany, to whom i have a good introduction.
3:17 PM: end of painting day; i made some very good changes, i believe:
1:06 PM: current state of grey 22. it has found it's identity; i ended up including more of the lower portion of the face than i had intended, for compositional purposes.
".....deKooning reversed the relationship of image and painterly surface yet again; the image is outside, on top,and the painterly is inside, beneath." john elderfield in his book, deKooning, a retrospective
12:08 PM: there's something liberating about painting flat on the table. here i'm waiting for it to dry under my big-ass ceiling fan so i can continue working. (i had to say to myself "i before e, except after c" thanks ms lee.
i was reading about deKooning's women during my lunch break. "an abstraction that is also a representation, its plastic and descriptive painterliness being descriptive of form in space-and also of space as form, as bodily form." thanks john elderfield. kind of describes my situation to a T!
10:35 AM: i have the painting flat on a table and am working that way for a while.......
2:43 PM: i'm definitely going to work more on it tomorrow. i knew that all along. so i'm stopping early, in the hope that if we go for our walk around 3:15 we can beat out the thunderstorms that appear to be coming.
1:44 PM: the first layer of collage has happened. i'm enjoying looking at it in this state. as usual, my mind cuts in and says "hey, why not just leave it as is? it's so fresh; so whimsical......." and, indeed, i may stop early and give it a chance to exist, whether i work back into it or not.
11:23 AM: the first marks on this 32x32" canvas have occurred. as usual, the process will be fully documented HERE!
