Panachrandos Monastery, Andros oil on linen, 2010
this morning i walked up north crestone creek trail & returned at 10, so i'm just now meditating, and will get to my studio late; around noon. i'm feeling a wave of change, and we'll see how that manifests once i'm in the space.
3 PM: as with gaze 21, which i worked on yesterday gaze 23 had too many dam dots. i was a bit tired today, so i'm not as happy with what i did as i was yesterday. maybe i'll be fresher in the morning.. manio's gaze, captivating and mysterious as it is continues to escape me. more importatnly however, the picture surface dos not yet sing.
2:27 PM: un-dotting. yep, there were just too many of those dam dots in gaze 23, so i painted back into the face & hair, made changes to the background color and removed the yellow highlights on her shirt. I've now concluded that dan & mikela's feedback was spot on. and that's what friends (and lovers) are for.
you've got to know when to stop. and that time of day has arrived. so i'll clean up & continue editing unit 5 of the curriculum.
BELOW: before (left) and after today's changes:
7:49 AM: our friend dan stayed with us this weekend. he was here for the music festival, and as so often happens, we deepened our friendship by just having space to hang out in the evenings & mornings & learn a bit more about one another. dan and i have a plan for a joint book about our lives, so as he was leaving this morning, we agreed to each take a next step in that project before we meet again sometime next month. dan is what you might call a VSB (very sweet being).
both he and mikela agreed that i'm taking the little dot thing a bit too far in these latest paintings, so these two will be returning to the studio today for revision. i'll post updates as they occur.
8:24 PM: after seeing these over at the house, it's clear they both need a lot more work.so tomorrow morning i'll jump back in. Good night Crestone/Baca!
3 PM: gaze 21 & 28 at the end of my painting day. it's very interesting to see brother and sister together on my studio wall. to gaze at their gazes. i don't know yet whether i'll do more. probably. we'll see in the morning. the overall texture & patterning on these two most recent gaze series paintings is a new development. i had said, maybe a month ago, that i want to guard against the tendency for the dots to become a mindless gimmick. i don't think, honestly, that's what is happening. the fact that these are my grandkids is definitely a factor in the evolution of these two paintings. i emphatically do not want them to become portraits of my grandkids. but, like it or not, they do reflect philip & manio's particular facial characteristics. it was at first hard for me to go over the earlier more representational stages the way i've done with the rest of the series. so i waited a few days, gained some distance and then dove in, playing with the surface in the way i so love.
12:38 PM: here's gaze 28 before and after the work i've done thus far today:
work continues; more pics & updates as they become available.
10:19 AM: today i plan on working on both these paintings of my grandkids philip & manio: gaze 28 & gaze 21. dimitri & i are finalizing plans for them to meet us in NYC next june, when they'll get their us citizenship & experience the usa for the very first time. very exciting!
day off: i rarely take days off. off from what? but this weekend is different. our friend dan is staying with us; he's here for the Crestone Music Festival, for which he's on the board. Mikela can't go because of the pinched nerve in her back, but i'll be joining him in an hour.
we'll be distributing flyers about colorado amendment 69, which we'll be voting on nov.8th. it provides affordable, high quality health care for every coloradan. the health insurance companies and drug companies have thus far poured $70 million into distributing disinformation designed to dissuade people for voting yes.
BELOW: a comparison of an early gaze series painting; gaze 8, with a new one, still in progress; gaze 21. the little dots you see on the left are actually the weave of the canvas showing through, whereas on the right they're larger and have been deliberately created in the most recent layer of this many-layered painting.
1:52 PM: today i'm in a playful mood, with lots of energy surging through my body, although not quite as much as phelps, who we watched last night in absolute amazement as he struggled to emerge from the pool after garnering even more gold medals.
i worked on there 3 paintings, moving from one to the other like a dancer. i have to go out in a little while, so this may be it for today. from top to bottom, BELOW: gaze 21 (manio); gaze 23; and gaze 28 (philip) all 3 have been filled with colored dots in a manner that might suggest pixilation; tack on whatever meaning you like, but, as always, the integrity of the picture plane plus that x-factor are what count. as with all paintings, they must be seen in person to know if they work or not.
i'll continue work on these 3 tomorrow morning. adios!
4 PM: i've been wanting to paint my grand daughter, manio since i completed my grandson, philip. "when will he paint me?" she asked her dad recently. so i'm painting over gaze 21, which i conider a failed painting, and this is day one of the new gaze 21, which will be a portrait of manio, my beautiful grand daughter.
1:31 PM: sometimes a one day break is beneficial, as it is proving to be with gaze 23. after one day away from my studio, i came in this morning & got right to work on changes i needed to make that were not at all obvious 2 days ago. i think it helped not having it hanging in the house & not looking at it at all.
i discovered that the black & white 19th c. photo i have been using didn't have enough information, or some of the information it does have, the shadows in particular, are simply too sketchy and not enough. so i began referring to a couple of fayum portraits in euphrosyne doxiadi's book, which helped enormously with subtleties of flesh tones and transitions.
in addition, i introduced a yellow tone into her previously blue/white scarf, which i think creates a good balance to the browns of her hair. that said, without the mysteriously suggestive elements of the under-paintings and collaged elements peeking through, this painting could not exist. take for example the hint of green in the collaged map to our left of her head. in person, it introduces a note without which the entire picture surface would be far less resonant.
this morning i walked up the trail. it was, as always, a huge surge of energy.
it's been way too long, and i miss going up with mikela. but the pinched nerve in her back makes it too painful for her to even think about right now.
so here are some pics i shot; i'm way too wiped out to do any painting, and it's too late in the day. so i'm editing a few actionlab360 curriculum chapters & i'll call it a day. i do intend on making a few changes to gaze 23 before launching into a new painting tomorrow.
noon: i have a short studio day because of an actionlab360 meeting in moffat this afternoon. so i got to work very quickly upon arriving in the studio. it was a gorgeous morning; temps fell to 47 last night, so it was crisp and clear as only the san luis valley can be. exquisite light.
i lightened her up, worked on her lipds and eyes and added a multi-colored necklace. i made this up, since the image of the native american teenage girl i'm working form is a 19th c. b&w. i'll leave it as is for now, since we have to leave soon, and i'll see how it seems to me upon first gaze tomorrow morning. i can say she's a strong presence here in the studio, and looking at this one next to gaze 28, based upon a photo of my grandson philip, it makes me want to go back into that one and mix it up; it's a bit too sharp & clear, and the entire surface needs some abandoned messy interventions.
3:06 PM: a few critical softening tweaks & i'm done for the day. as usual, i'll bring gaze 23 to the house & see how it holds up with it's family of gaze paintings.
if you scroll down to my 12:56 post, you can compare the two.
12:56 PM: i was getting very tired of the image i've been drawing from: vermeer's girl with a flute. so this morning i painted over it, riffing on a 19th c. b&w photo of a native american teen with a feather in her hair. her gaze is piercing, and one can only imagine what it's reflecting about her life during that tragic time in the life of surviving native american tribes throughout the continent.
the underlying series of images lend great depth to the current incarnation of this painting, which thus far has flowed from my brush effortlessly and with the guidance we can never predict.
