motion 28 at 4 pm
4 pm: motion 28 at the end of my painting day. feedback to myself: has interesting passages, but doesn't yet hang together.
1:10 PM: i stretched a new 36x38" canvas this morning & started work on the new motion 28. it's in that early stage i love so much, with lots of white space. i'm working in colored pencil & crayon, and have introduced oil paint at an earlier stage than usual.
i'll post more pics as work progresses.
2:19 PM: light rain is falling.better than no rain at all. leadbelly is singing you can't lose me cholly. i did a big scrape n' rub this morning, delighting in the physicality of it all, and energized by the prospect of thunderstorms.
i got down to the bits that wouldn't go away, leaving a scantily clad canvas which, if it could have, would have jumped up, wrapped itself in a towel and exited the studio, still wet hair loose about her shoulders.
it all took place on my work table, where various palette knives, old washcloths & big trowels moved vigorously across the linen, catching recently applied globs of titanium white oil paint & straeking them across the surface like a crazi skate boarder high on drugs.
they hang next to one another now in the dim, overcast-sky light. released from their darker, more pronounced marks and relieved to be free. at least for now, from my sweeping scrapes & scrubs, they are settling in to their new, subtle reality.
6:55 AM: motion 27-a will be returning to my studio later this morning. i'll see what i'm going to do, but i feel somewhat at a loss as to where to go from here. i might actually unstretch it & start over....again. returning from this 2 week trip to europe is not easy. sleep wise, i feel back to normal today, and it's been a full week since we got back. maybe nexttime we travel overseas i need to allow a week before jumping back into painting, and instead spend my time doing organizing stuff i put off when i'm in my flow with work.
4:18 PM: well, it didn't take long to bring motion 27-a back to the house, hang it & rapidly determine that it doesn't work. so, despite my seemingly convincing statement earlier this morning, i probbaly should not have messed with it. so tomorrow i'll bring it back to the studio & see what i can do to revive it and, ideally transform it into a better painting than it was when i started work this morning. as a reminder, here's what it looked like this morning. if you compare the 2 images below, showing yesterdays & todays versions, yesterdays version is a much more coherent, not to mention sensitive. but i don't regret what i did today. part of the learning curve.
i do feel that i can pull it off, especially since tomorrow if forecast to be about 10F cooler. harder to work in the heat, even with my swamp cooler.
3:15 PM: i worked on both motion 27 & 27-a in tandem today. not yet clear on the results, and it was a little painful to let go of yesterdays sensitive, bonnard-like version of motion 27-a, but i just had to do it.
BELOW is motion 27-a at the end of my painting day, and below that, motion 27.
motion 27-a at 3pm today
motion 27 at 3pm today
10:45 AM: yesterdays adventure felt a tad precious, after the fact. oh, the little cross hatching; the gradual build of delicate marks....no boldness.
DETAIL
so this morning i literally grabbed the failed, or so i thought motion 27 and dove into it, placing it flat on my work table & applying scoops of titanium zinc white with palette knives. my expressionist self came to life as i swirled the paint into shapes mimicking the roiling creek water, then scraped, then made bold tree branch marks with brushes, again scraping while delighting in my WTF attitude.
too much control is as deadly as too out of control. where the two meet, new shades of beauty may emerge, sometimes giving the controlling mind food for new ways of controlling the process! a process that won't be controlled because by it's nature, it is out of control.
what needs, however, to be understood by the uninitiated is that, underlying all this is the drawing. the value, the weight of ones marks all go back to the drawing, the draftsmanship. most kids have it. then they lose or forget it. then if they're lucky, the return to it, informed and enriched by the awareness and knowledge of the history of art.
motion 27-a 36x38", at the end of my painting day today
DETAIL
3:38 PM: it's been a long day. today is our 4th day home following our long return flight from france, via detroit. (cheaper tickets). i added a rock form a different image to break up the flatness of the green area in the center of the composition. you can see it in the image blow right. that didn't work. spent a lot of time & elbow grease removing it & playing around with other solutions, and ended up here. i'm way too bleary eyed to evaluate the painting right now. so it will be a july 4th event.
9:37 AM: so what's with the 27-a? that's to distinguish it from motion 27, which was discarded a few days ago; a rare event in this motion series.
on the left, ABOVE: the painting on day 1, yesterday. and on the right, how it looked as i began work this morning, half an hour ago. a new imagery has been introduced, with the rock shape in the left foreground breaking up the annoyingly straight line of the green & the shadows of 2 trees on the upper right adding, i think successfully, to the composition.
motion 27-a is beginning to reveal it's identity, as much to me as to you. i can't help but think of the stones 40 licks imagery when i gaze at the passage on the mid-left. a sub-conscious sexual reference?
DETAIL: motion 27-a at 2:30.
2:19 PM: this is it for today. the trick tomorrow will be to keep it fresh, with lots of space, but with a compelling point of focus. this cannot be planned, but is most likely to occur early in the day, when my energy is fresh & the temperatures low. most important, i always need to remember to listen to the painting itself; what it wants, when it's feeling resolved.
motion 27-a 36X38", at 12;30 PM
12:30 PM: here's the current state of motion 27-a. clearly, it's a work in progress. it's starting to get hot,so i'll see how much more i can do before i stop; probably and hour more.
DETAILS: left & below
10:12 AM: early stage of motion 27-a. it's like an animal of some sort growing appendages, organs, scales...
9:11 AM: it's still relatively cool; current outside temp is 67, so i'm getting to work right away on motion 27-a. the previous motion 27, which i started before our trip to france and continued until yesterday, was a failure. so rather than struggle any more with it, i scrapped it and am starting fresh. the nature of the new direction of my motion series is such that they can't be overworked. they need to be one motion. one event. and if i lose my connection to that mark-making event, it's over.
pics of the stages of work will be posted as they become available.
DETAIL of motion 27 as it looked at 3 pm
2:40 PM: here's where i'm stopping for the day. about an hour ago the painting had become too heavy & congested, so i did a scrub with solvent and now, as you can see below on the right, it's too light & lacking a focal point. which gives me something to sleep on! lets see what happens tomorrow.
in this detail on the right i think there are some successful passages, but the entire painting needs to sing, and that has not yet happened.
it may be that i needed to do some warm up exercises before jumping into this one the day after a 2 week break & 36+ hours of travel with no sleep.
12:45 pm: continuing work on motion 27
at work on motion 27 this morning
11:18 AM: i got a good nights sleep & am 75% through my jet lag, so it's much easier to work today. i flipped the canvas upside down, which i sometimes do to shake things up & introduce new imagery. more pics & commentary as the day progresses.
motion 27 36x38", as it looked at 2 pm
DETAIL: motion 27 at 2pm today
2:17 PM: trying not to pay too much attention to this, but it's 10:19 pm in paris, so my eyelids are heavy & i can feel sleep coming on. at any rate, i did make some progress on motion 27 today, although i wasn't at the top of my game. the new direction this series has taken since i completed motion 25 on may 22 has been a long time in the making. the new motion paintings incorporate all that i learned in making the previous ones, but as well all that i learned and am still learning from my plein air gouaches & oils. looking at vuillard in the musée quai d'orsay, i confirmed my belief in the slow but steady unfolding of my process as a painter. it's never a straight line, but if you look for them, signs appear along one's trajectory indicating deeper and deeper levels of self discovery; clearer and clearer indications that one's pictorial language is developing. in general, galleries and critics are not helpful in this evolution, mostly preferring that an artist's work remain predictable. predictability=death as far as i'm concerned.
day 1: motion 23, 36x38"
12:06 PM:back from france & switzerland last night, and our bodies are still on french time. before leaving on the 13th, i started motion 23, with the knowledge that i'd have something to work on as soon as we returned. i don't know if i'm up for it, but i'll give it a try & see what happens.
motion 22 on 5/5/18 (left) and yesterday
yesterday,as i was starting the under-drawing for motion 27, my eye was drawn again & again to motion 22. it felt unresolved. my eye wandered aimlessly about the surface, encountering some compelling pssages. but the whole composition seemed dispersed, with no real focal point. once i dived back in, i was hooked. one thing led to another & i began feeling the energy of a new painting, albeit one grounded in the essential elements of the may 5th version. i applied what i had learned in the interim, and something new emerged which, for the moment, seems like a far mroe compelling painting.
motion 22 revision at 2:30 pm
i did considerable work today on my revision of motion 22. first i went over the entire painting with a thin wash of diluted white oil color. then i scraped the surface vigorously, then i worked into it with oil pastel, oil paint & crayon. i'll have to wait until after our trip to evluate the results, but i do feel it's an improvement form the earlier version from a month ago.
at work on motion 22 revisions, 1pm
1pm: i decided to leave the new motion 27 & continue revisions to motion 22, which is essentially being reinvented. here i'm using white oil paint to break up the space with watery marks.
8:09 AM: yesterday afternoon my mentee, k., came over arounf 2:30 to continue our adventure. the plan was for him to continue, perhaps complete the long narrow landscape in acrylic he's been working on over the past month. yesterday morning, before he came over, i had a brief visit from our friends, my boulder dentist & his wife. they've been visiting crestone/baca this weekend, had dinner at our house saturday night, and were preparing to drive back up to boulder.
as soon as they entered my studio, his wife teresa exclaimed excitedly that she wants to buy k's landscape painting, which she had seen the previous afternoon on their studio visit. i was thrilled, and i knew k would be, but i hesitated to tell him until he had completed the painting, afraid that this new information, which i knew he'd find hard to believe, might affect his work on the painting negatively.
k's landscape. 12x40" acrylic on canvas, (signature blocked to preserve his privacy)
after about an hour, k. came back into the studio, obviously frustrated. he's been sitting just outside the studio door & it was so windy that the paint was instantly drying on his palette, blowing stuff around & in general making his life difficult. he thought he had screwed the painting up completely, but it didn't look that way to me. it looks like a really good landscape painting to me.
so now we have to negotiate price. we'll bring it to denver on wednesday where teresa can pick it up. i think the reality will only hit kaelen when he sees a photo of it hanging on her wall.
i'm about to launch into more work on the new motion 27, and continue revisions to motion 22. pics will be posted as they become available.
5:45 PM: here are the changes i made to motion 22; the previous version on the left, after todays changes, on the right.
motion 27 at 5pm
stopping for the day. the current state of motion 27 can be seen above. it's still very early stage.
2:01 PM: this morning after our friends left i stretched the canvas for motion 27 & began the under-drawing. as i was working, motion 22 caught my eye & seemed unresolved, so i went back & forth between the two. motion 22 can be seen on the wall behind my head. to view this painting before todays intervention, click on the link below & scroll down to the 10th row of paintings. it's the one on the left.:
. i'll update as the afternoon progresses.
