4:23 PM: i arrived late at the studio today due to an extended morning trail walk. i found lucien, as mikela & my friend wendy commented, way too busy, with all those reddish marks bouncing about. so now it has more coherence, but it's not htere yet. i'll dive back in tomorrow morning.
lucien /
lucien 38x36" collage & acrylic on canvas
1:16 PM: so i've abandoned the idea of a minoan series, or any series! if you are reading this, then you know that my process is unusual. but not that unusual! i could pontificate and elaborate ad nauseum, so i'll cut to the chase: this IS the artistic process. and, over the past year or two, it has increasingly been MY process. and yes, the gouache & oil interiors i was doing recently are part of that picture. but after a month of that, i found myself craving my helter skelter, grab&glue reality, which has been emerging and developing roughly since 2012.
DETAIL
that summer, i underwent proton beam therapy in houston for prostate cancer. our dear friends chris & anne invited us to stay at their guest house during those 2 months, which made all the difference in our experience during that time. we became part of the family, often eating together with the kids or simply hanging out. i became close with chris's dad louis. when he learned of my love for watches, he began, after our return to colorado, sending me large envelopes containing articles about watches and art. after reading them, many found their way into the collages i was making.
those collages began in that little above-garage apartment in houston. I got some supplies and began fooling around at the small desk in the front room, overlooking the main house. my playful child emerged as i worked every day on those collages, which combined painted shapes and marks with pieces of newspaper and other scraps i found laying about.
jump forward 5 years and here we are. so why lucien? this morning i was perusing my beautifully produced freud catalogue, from the 2012 exhibition: lucien freud portraits. my admiration and love for him and his work was rekindled. i was fortunate to have met him briefly in london in the '70's, and the intensity of his gaze is imprinted in my mind. and so, in keeping with my desire to be as much as possible in present time and have my work reflect what's going on in the moment, i re-titled the painting lucien.
minoan 1, stage 7 /
2 PM: the image has once again shifted in keeping with my process of layering images and collaged elements until she sings. the head of the bull, so central to ancient minoan iconoggraphy has once again come to the fore. in this case, the original was a late minoan vase, made in about 1450 BC and said to be from attica, in the collection of the metropolitan museum, nyc.
picasso, modigliani and henry moore are but a few of the artists inspired by the art of the minoan civilization. and it's easy to see why: the fluidity and boldness of the forms they created, the colors they employed......
minoan 1, stage 6 /
STAGE 6: minoan 1 38x36"
1:13 PM: i have to stop early today because we're heading over to saguache to help with organizing a get out the vote campaign so they can get the grant for their proposed, badly needed new school.
i knew i'd be scrumbling over yesterday's fifth stage of minoan 1. and this is where it's now at. i won't know till the morning whether this is a final version or there will be more layers. i was accompanied today by the extraordinary voice of maria callas. at her best, i believe she is an unsurpassed opera singer.
this figure, which is actually cycladic and not minoan, appears in stage 4 of the painting, as you can see in the photo below of all 6 stages thus far. clearly, by the faintly indicated breasts and vagina, this is a woman. but barely. the origins of this aesthetic, unique in the history of art, can only be guessed at. but if you've been fortunate enough to visit some of the cycladic islands, you may recognize the underlying energy. spare, timeless, quietly sensual. like vermeer, about whom i've spoken often during my gaze series blogs, cycladic art transcends it's time & is strikingly contemporary.
6 stages of minoan 1, with the earliest, may 29, on the left
minoan 1, day 3 /
1:14 PM: this morning we went on a magnificent, stunning trail walk. the aspens were very clearly presenting as interacting families. i was chanting the mourners kaddish in my head. sounds sombre, but the mourners kaddish is a profound and joyful affirmation of what is, and especially what we don't know is. of course we don't know 99.9% if it, really.
i entered the studio still vibrating from our walk, made my matcha tea and promptly went to work in a way only possible in those rare and unpredictable moments of ἄγνοια (ancient greek for "not knowing." it's the non-place where all is possible. all potential.
so from that space i altered yesterday's minoan image from a cycladic sculpture to a minoan bull. the minoan bull is sexy, irreverent, rhythmic. and innocent.
the bull is partially framed by clippings of 6 year old's paintings. he may well disappear tomorrow when, as i am wont to do, i scrumble over this image with something else minoan-inspired. or maybe not......
continuing gaze 37, re-named minoan 1 /
noon: i returned this morning to gaze 37, which has been re-named to minoan 1. whereas the gaze series portrayed large heads filling the canvas space, this new series will be focused on minoan art.
the surface of the painting, as with my gaze series is what one might call distressed. it consists of many layers of collage and painting, allowing snippets of newspaper articles, maps and other stray bits of paper to peek through, along with brush marks from earlier iterations. the viewer is presented with an ever morphing image , anchored by a dominant theme, in this case emerging from the ancient minoan world, where art and daily life melded in one stunningly beautiful, sensual reality.
mont st. michelle tweaked /
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 /
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 /
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 /
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.