revisiting my 8/7 gouache interior /  by Philip Tarlow

DETAIL of the gouache interior after my changes

2:03 PM: my intention today was to begin working in acrylic & collage, as i said i would yesterday. but something unexpected happened, which led me to do some more work on the gouache interior i made on 8/7. 

i received a FB message form my old friend charles in miami, wondering if the photo collage i was working from was of his house. i wasn't sure, actually, so i sent him a photo of the photo collage, and it actually was his miami home! when i looked at the gouache i had mad emore critically, i saw that some changes needed to be made. so i dove back in, and i think now it's a far better painting. BELOW are the 2 versions; see if you can discern what the changes are that i made. today's version is on the RIGHT. make them full screen images by clicking on them, then go back & forth by clicking the right arrow and you'll see what's different. do you think it's improved?

from oil to acrylic & collage /  by Philip Tarlow

4:40 PM: after returning from my eye appointment in alamosa, i've decided to listen to what my gut has been telling me for weeks, ever since i launched into the interior series. whenever i return to the house from the studio and encounter one of my gaze series paintings in the entryway, i actually feel a longing for the freedoms working on that series afforded me.

what do i mean by that? look for a moment at this detail of a gaze series painting: the calligraphic marks in the hair; the integration of collaged maps, a collaged piece of brown paper and the image painted in acrylic and scrumbled (a word i made up to describe my process of repeatedly scraping over the freshly painted surface and painting back into it).

imagine the physicality of all this. on my feet, now painting, now collaging, now scraping...imagine the adventure and unpredictability. i never knew when i entered my studio what would happen, where the process would take me. it's hard to go back once you've been there. the gaze series experience allowed me to integrate all of the skills i had built up over decades: my work in egg tempera, watercolor, oil, collage. my plein air paintings, my paintings of construction workers, my studies based on chinese and japanese calligraphy....

so i'm at a crossroads. i'm going to follow my gut and dive back in to making paintings, large and small, in acrylic and collage. however they won't be limited to the large faces of my gaze series. i am not an abstract painter, so they won't be abstractions. they will be based upon some form of recognizable imagery. that's all i can say right now, and that's a lot!  

gouache study for oil interior 7 /  by Philip Tarlow

3:10 PM: today, while an intense thunderstorm was raging outside my studio, i made an 10x8" study in gouache on paper for my next interior oil. i plan on making a few more, until i find the right composition.

i am focused on getting to a point of utter simplification, where 3 or 4 shapes integrate with the colors and drawing in such a way that the eye receives them as a fully formed event, and is not obliged to interpret or in any way think about what this is it is perceiving. it unquestioningly accepts and receives the image in an instant. kind of like the description of a dictatorship, isn't it?

it's not there yet. tomorrow i have an eye appointment, so i'll resume work on these studies on wednesday.

oil interior 6 completed /  by Philip Tarlow

11:39 AM:  after checking out oil interior 6 at the house last night & this morning, i brought it back to my studio for a few final tweaks. having completed those, i signed & dated the painting & am ready to move on. this painting in particular will, i feel gain immeasurably with the right frame. as soon as i can make that happen, i'll post pics. in the mean time, here is the completed painting with some interesting crops.

moving towards completion of oil interior 6 /  by Philip Tarlow

3:09 PM: i painted for a full day today until, around 2pm, it clouded over & got hard to see the colors. in addition, i've noticed following my glaucoma/cataract surgery and my partial loss of peripheral vision, that some blurriness begins to occur when i get tired. today, that was about 3 hours into painting. it interferes with my painting and with the adjustments i make to pics of my latest work, which is annoying but so far has not kept me from working.

BELOW: oil interior 6 yesterday, on the left, and today.

today was significant in that i almost completely eliminated unwanted white areas of canvas, allowing the eye to gaze at the painting and see it as a coherent whole., perhaps for the first time since i started this painting, as i'm adjusting and cropping pics I just shot the latest state, i'm getting ideas for blowing up areas of a completed painting and using them for new ones. the crop you see here, for example, is one of them.

oil interior 6 continued... /  by Philip Tarlow

2:30 PM:  we had an important teacher meeting yesterday & when it was over, it was really too late to start working. morning first thing always best. so now oil interior 6 is nearing completion. the final strokes are always the most interesting and the most critical. so i have to proceed with caution, while at the same time not holding back. we'll see how it goes in the morning. today a lot of the remaining white canvas is gone, so it's easier to envision the completed painting.

when i look at late matisse interiors and observe the boldness and certainty of his marks, i feel i still have a long way to go to unleash my own boldness on anything near that level. but when i look back at past paintings of interiors, i definitely see progress in that direction. painting from life rather than photographs is a big part of it. i dream of a studio filled with beautifully patterned materials, mirrors and fresh flowers.....

BELOW: yesterday on the left; today: right

oil interior 6 /  by Philip Tarlow

oil interior 6  32x32"  as it looked at the end of my painting day today

3 PM: stopping here for the day, as the skies darken and our daily monsoonal treat arrives. this particular interior, it's colors and patterns, is like a gift. 

1:21 PM: i've been continuing work on oil interior 6 this morning & am taking my lunch break. it's an extremely enjoyable painting to work on, and i'm taking it slow in part to savor each brush stroke. i'll resume & post more pics after lunch. 

oil interior 6 /  by Philip Tarlow

3:19 PM: oil interior 6 at the end of my painting day. i'm very excited about this one, especially now thjat my grandkids' eyes are following it in greece. they inspire me to go further.

 

 

 

 

2:15 PM: here's stage 1; i'm still painting & i have about another hour of juice. more pics soon!

 

 

 

 

 

1:26 PM: i'm just completing the drawing for oil interior 6, 32x32" and will start painting shortly.

the image is drawn from a photo collage i made in the 90's of the interior of the home of 2 friends who lived in crestone at the time: d&z.

gouache interior 9 /  by Philip Tarlow

3:07 PM: today i started a small gouache as a study for oil interior 6. i'll complete it tomorrow, and perhaps make a second one to work out the composition which, in this one, is starting to look too busy. it will be more lively coloristically than the last few, and cropped more tightly than the earlier oil interiors. less descriptive, more patterned. i'm tempted to jump right into the already stretched 32x32' canvas tomorrow. but i know in my kishkes that i need to work out the color relationships, shapes and overall composition first.

to tweak: /  by Philip Tarlow

12:34 PM: to tweak: to make usually small adjustments in or to.

in a painting, as with a race car engine, these small adjustments can make all the difference. in the case of oil interior 5, the tweak involved my realization that 80% of the composition consists of objects and bodies seen in a mirror. whereas the flower patterned paper on the bottom, the barber's arm on the left & the bottle on the left are "real," the rest of the composition is seen in a large barber shop mirror; it's a reflection. no matter how clear the mirror image, it is always more or less dimmer and hazier than the original, depending on the quality of the mirror and how dust & smudge free it is. once i adjusted for that, the painting became far easier to read. the mirror images got slightly pushed back. now, if you compare yesterdays version on the left with todays on the right, the eye immediately and automatically reads the mirrored images as exactly what they are; reflections.

i have always loved mirrors and have been wanting one in my studio for 20 years! one day, we'll visit an antique store in denver, find the right tall mirror & bring it back to crestone. and you, my friends, will have played a role in making that happen!