mont st. michelle tweaked /  by Philip Tarlow

3:45 PM: yesterday i sent dimitri, who is currently vacationing in andros with the kids, a photo of the mont st. michelle gouache. he responded saying he felt it needed a bit more work. he has an excellent eye, cultured by years of watching his grandmother niki karagatsi & i make paintings & critique one another's work. and he was spot on.

                                  8/14/17 trail drawing

i got to work late, after an extended walk up the trail this morning to the "big rock," where i made a small pencil drawing. as i launched in to this gouache, i was afraid of doing too much & spoiling it's delicate balance. but it worked. now it pops more, and looks quite handsome in the white frame i've placed it in, with an off white mat.

mount st. michelle gouache /  by Philip Tarlow

3:42: today i took a break form gaze 37 to paint this small (14x4") gouache based upon a photo collage i made at mount st. michelle, paris in 1994. i've been eyeing this photo collage for quite some time, and decided this morning that it's time had arrived. i may turn this into an oil on portrait linen in the future. i love the intimacy and warmth of this image of 2 diners at a beautiful parisian restaurant. it's dripping with that particular ambiance only the french can create.

continued work on gaze 37 /  by Philip Tarlow

gaze 37  38x36", at the end of the day

3PM: today i did some more work on gaze 37. yesterday it had a distinctly minoan theme; today, more subtle.

if you look carefully, there are two distinct minoan elements. on the left, the outlines of a standing minoan sculpture, and on the right, a large stone head with the only feature being the nose in the center of the face.

right now, as i gaze at it from my desk, it reads well, with just enough movement to allow the eye to roam the surface bit by bit and enough tonal richness to satisfy ones aesthetic palette. somehow it brings to mind francis bacon, although that's not at all my intention, nor is he one of my favorite artists. 

 

so what do you see when you look at the progression below? certainly less realist elements, more abstraction. i would add: more coherence. while the mind and eye are trying to decipher what's going on in todays version, they are not able to declare success in affirming "that's a minoan fisherman with his catch," or " that's the hands & pitcher from vermeer's milkmaid." we are adrift. adrift in a sea of implied and ambiguous signs & symbols. 

 

 

 

 

BELOW: progress of gaze 37 over the past 4 days

gaze 37 /  by Philip Tarlow

1:55 PM: so i'm fulfilling my promise (to myself) of a few days ago and have begun re-working gaze 37, 38x36." in it's last incarnation, the imagery derived from a detail of vermeer's the milkmaid. today i drew from ancient minoan imagery, harkening back to a commission i executed for a client in houston a few years ago, with a minoan theme. BELOW left: gaze 37 as it looked before todays intervention. and on the right, how it looked moments ago.

as you can discern from this detail of the painting, there are, as with all the other 36 paintings in my gaze series, collaged maps & other bits of paper, mostly cut into biomorphic shapes, patterning deriving from scrapings and pressing patterned materials onto the still wet acrylics, and very free brush strokes deliniating, in this case, a minoan fisherman with his catch. i'm excited to be back in this arena, as i had predicted, and we'll see where it goes from here. but you can understand, when looking at this one and compare it to the interiors i've been painting over the past few months, where i'm at. i mean, the ambiguity, the whole body engagement.....it's me right now in august, 2017.

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