day 3 of gaze 2 revision /  by Philip Tarlow

2:42: it's a bitterly cold, cloudy day, with snow falling above 10,000 ft. the storm will move out of the state tonight and tomorrow will be a partly sunny, relatively warmer day. 

although i accomplished a lot today, the painting still needs work. for one thing, the blue on the bottom portion is too dominant, and either needs to be pushed back or perhaps collages over. we'll see. the light should be better tomorrow, making it a lot easier to work.

i discovered yesterday that the progressive lenses in the glasses i'm wearing, which i ordered a few months after my cataract/glaucoma surgery, when my right eye had settled down, are the kind that block uv light. this means they make everything look warmer & yellower than it really is.  it's a huge drag, because in order to see the true colors of the painting i'm working on or adjusting on the screen, i have to remove my glasses, giving me a blurry but coloristically accurate image. 

way to cold & windy to walk up the creek today, so we'll wait till tomorrow.

 

 

 

                 YESTERDAY                                             TODAY

next stage of gaze 2 re-work /  by Philip Tarlow

2:04 PM: as the storm approaches and the wind picks up, i end my painting day & prepare for our afternoon adventure at north crestone creek. while painting, i listened to thelonoius monk playing nutty. a-h-h-...he reminded me that what i'm doing with these gaze paintings are all riffs, not unlike jazz riffs. that's the best way to describe them. vermeer provides the basic tune and you take off on it, depending on your mood, how you slept, if you had sex, how your pancakes turned out.....

this one, just now, conjures visions of pompeian frescoes frayed and rubbed, gritted over time to a spooky echo of late summer days in the south of italy. sensual, raw ochre sex. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12:49 PM: today, as we are expecting an early spring snowstorm, i moved into stage 2 of my re-work of gaze 2. much of what i'm doing in these re-works consists of applying what i learned in painting the entire series. that experience, plus an ever developing hand-eye coordination, provides me with new moves, new ways of playing with the image. as complexity increases, so does simplicity and lack of attachment to particularly beautiful or successful passages. i think this holds true no matter what form your art takes; music; dance; visual arts; architecture...

i'll continue working for another few hours, until 3, when we plan on taking out creek walk, which was aborted yesterday due to very high winds. we're calculating that, if we leave early for our walk; like about 3:15, the snow will not have started yet. i'll post pics when i end my painting day. had a wonderful viber call with dimitri & manio an hour ago. they were at the theatre (poreia) where manio had just acted her part & dimitri was having his hair done in preparation for going on stage.

re-work of gaze 2 commences / looking back-2010 /  by Philip Tarlow

5:22 PM: UPDATE:  we ended up not walking due to the very gusty, strong winds.

2:12 PM: in spite of the cold wind, we're going to walk up the creek trail in about an hour. the cold wind is gusting to about 35 MPH, but if we dress warmly, we should be fine, dressing warmly for mikela means a light fleece jacket, which she ends up removing half way up. 

i launched into my re-work of gaze 2 this morning. when you look at the earlier version, below, you may wonder why i didn't leave well enough alone. well, briefly, the bottom half wasn't working in the whole composition, and was more like filler, or dead space. at this early stage, it may seem rather awkward and ill conceived to you, but these are just the beginnings of my re-work, which undoubtedly will involve some collaging tomorrow,

 

 

 

 

 

 

11:11 AM: i was going through my highly disorganized files and came across this photo, shot on june 11, 2010. i am standing in front of a partially completed painting titled university, in oil on linen. it's based on photos i took of athens university the previous year, and was shown in my 2010 solo exhibition at skoufa gallery in athens.

i brought gaze 1 over to the house, where we'll live with it for a few days and i'll decide whether or not it needs more work. so today i'm going to focus on another early gaze painting, gaze 2, which you see on the left, which needs work. it too is inspired by vermeer's the lacemaker.

persisting with gaze 1 /  by Philip Tarlow

1:55 PM: i say persisting because i'm a bit exasperated with the nose & mouth in this painting. because she's looking down, her nose is foreshortened. it's very tricky not to make it look like she has a huge nose. but it also affects her mouth/ i may have to let it sit for a while & work on something else. yesterdays version is on the left; todays on the right. still not there. better, but not resolved. i think the bit of red i collaged onto the center area is a distinct improvement, compositionally.

nose job /  by Philip Tarlow

2:07 pm: it's getting pretty dark out there, so i'm stopping early for the day. i did some more tweaking to gaze 1, working mostly in the areas around the lower face; nose & mouth. the painting now has a somewhat festive air; kind of like miro meets vermeer. at the same time, as one facebook friend observed, it is a moving image, all the more so because of the contrast between the lacemaker's focused, almost meditative air and the playfulness of the colorful biomorphic shapes flying about. my lesson, always, is that the integrity of the picture plane matters above all. vermeer's painterly brilliance, combined with his tender observation of the everyday, serve as my inspiration.

gaze 1 38x38" at 1 pm today

1:05 PM: one of my greek facebook friends agreed with mikela that the nose on gaze 1 needed work. so this morning, aside from other minor tweaks to the painting, i worked on her nose. it's definitely better, but i still think there's room for improvement.

so i'll continue working, probably for another 2 hours. heavy snow was falling this morning, and will begin again later in the day into tonight. giving us a foot or more of new snow above 11,000 ft.

technicolor! /  by Philip Tarlow

1:31 PM: when the artist himself gets bored with a painting, you know it's time to shift gears. mikela came over earlier & critiqued the nose. i was just tired of trying to get her nose right. what happened i suddenly wondered, to painting? while gaze 1 is still not there, i am no longer bored! remember technicolor? and how new and shocking it was when hollywood transitioned from b&w to color? how gaudy it seemed? you don't have to go that far back. remember when the new yorker introduced color? now that seemed like a radical, even sacrilegeous move!

closer but not yet there with gaze 1 /  by Philip Tarlow

2:36 PM: gaze 1 is now closer to resolution. almost there but not quite. if you look at the progression, below, over the past 3 days, i think you'll find the painting finding it's identity. 

i'm cleaning my brushes & preparing for another walk up the creek.

 

 

 

 

 

more work on gaze 1 today /  by Philip Tarlow

12:34 PM: THE ZING FACTOR: what is that? perhaps listening to led zeppelin's dazed & confused from their bbc sessions, disk 2 is what did it. and what is it? the words enlivening; dynamic; sexy; ambiguously painterly all come to mind. and i mean sexy in the way my greek friend's snails, which he posted yesterday on FB, are sexy.they exclaim: "hey, just because i'm tiny & silent doesn't mean i don't have a soul, don't have a voice!" i knocked myself out over the past 1.5 hours, so i think i'll have some oatmeal & eat it while looking at gaze 1 on the easel. the more i look at details of vermeer's paintings, the more i am humbled, dazed & confused.

the blue i'm pointing to in the photo below, by the way, came about after flipping one on my matisse books open at random and remembering how he can use blue & pink like nobody else.

11 AM: i'm about to launch back in to the revised gaze 1, which you see on the right in this studio shot i just took. once i've progressed, i'll post updates. right now, looking at it, i see a richness of subtle colors but lack of zing. something's brewing....let me go squeeze my colors onto the palette &.....

short day /  by Philip Tarlow

12:32 PM: gotta go to salida soon, so this was a short day. even so, a lot was accomplished, and here's the current state of gaze 1. i'll offer more commentary on what happened once we're back.

collaging gaze 1 /  by Philip Tarlow

3PM: at 2pm, true to the forecast, clouds moved in, it got darker & began raining. i kept working, but since then it's gotten progressively darker, so i'm stopping here for the day. gaze 1 is certainly not resolved, but i'm liking this layered, ambiguous quality emerging from the road i seem to be heading down. if i had purchased this painting in it's current state, i would very likely be making new discoveries daily. right now, as i look at gaze 1 hanging next to 2 other paintings in the series, there is less vermeer, more tarlow.i am feeling less and less compelled to recreate the original, and more drawn to riff on a theme, as i have said in earlier blogs.

if you look closely at the detail below, you will discern the ghost image of the earlier version in the center of her forehead. 

 

12:54 PM: finished collaging for the moment & about to begin painting. it's still in a formative stage, but has already gained more complexity & visual interest. for my greek friends, on the top left you will notice a cropped portrait of nelly.

 

 

 

 

 

11:38 AM: here's what gaze 1 looked like on the easel this morning when i entered my studio. i'm about to do some collaging, followed by more painting in acrylic. pics will be posted as i progress.