7:37 PM: this morning at the bonfire café in carbondale, colorado, mikela oriented volunteers for the diane mitch bush campaign on how to canvas. then we did 2 hours of canvassing, knocking on 41 doors in silt, colorado.
while we were at bonfire, i made 3 drawings. but my favorite place to make drawings while we’er on the road is h&h in edwards, where we’ll be on wednesday-thursday to work with the kids at the middle school.
katarachtes, 50x48” as it looked at 11am
DETAIL
11:23 AM: the very first thing i did this morning, following a restless strange-dream-filled night, was to unhesitatingly squeeze some cerulean blue onto my palette and, using my favorite fan brush, apply it to some areas, especially on the top portion. following my matcha tea & toast with feta, i added some touches of yellow ochre. more could follow, but i do like the calligraphic greys with accents of color. i like it a lot. it’s early still, so lets see how the rest of my day goes, under brilliant sunshine.
one might say that what is currently emerging in my work is the essence of my decades long love affair with our creeks and with my 10th c. chinese calligrapher/landscape painter buddies.
katarachtes as it looked at the end of my painting day today
DETAIL of katarachtes at 4:15 PM
4:27 PM: i worked into katarachtes this afternoon, creating a contrasting bright white in the midst of all that grey. it did accomplish my goal of having the painting pop more. the dominanat color remains warm grey, broken by bursts of subdued purples, reds & oranges.
it’s helpful to view a detail like this one, which gives more of a sense of the calligraphic marks i added this morning, mainly in the upper portion.
2:14 PM: i was going to let katarachtes sit & marinate & start a new painting. but i couldn’t help myself, and made some rather chinese-reminiscent changes. they involve one of my fan brushes & dark grey oil paint.
katarachtes at 2 pm today
just now i was re-visiting looking at pictures, the little (4.25x2.75 inches) book by my old friend henry geldzahler, in which he wrote a sweet dedication in 1991, just 3 years before he died of liver cancer. i was wondering what his feedback would have been were he able to see this stage of katarachtes. when it began to go chinese on me, i also remembered mikela’s mom ceil. i never met her, but have heard stories form mikela about how deeply she loved chinese art. so i invited her into my studio space and asked her to join in the fun.
DETAIL of kataqrachtes at 2pm
after looking at it over the past hour, i see it needs more pop. that could happen today, but the skies have darkened again, so i might wait till tomorrow morning.
to read more about henry, visit my story page & scroll down a bit:https://philip-tarlow.squarespace.com/config/pages
DETAIL: katarachtes at 5:30 PM today
today, following a morning actionlab 360 meeting at the house, i migrated to my studio. i stretched a new 32x38” piece of portrait linen. i’ve been missing the unique surface provided by this extraordinary, albeit expensice, frech linen, which has 4 coats of priming. i was waiting for my mentee, k., who wasn’t able to make it today. so, despite the overcast skies, which made it necessary to work by artificial light, i resumed work on katarachtes, 50x48.”
i eliminated the pink tone surrounding the central image of abstracted rocks & water. as always, i won’t know until tomorrow morning what happened this afternoon. but at first glance, it seems easier to look at. at the same time it’s stronger, punchier. katarachtes is greatly relieved to be out of the p
3:35 PM: now that we’re back home, i resumed work on pink branch. the last time i worked on it was september 19. it’s in transition, and while there are some sweet passages, it’s nowhere near resolution. my time in the studio will be limited until the election on november 6th, after which i should be able to find my rhythm.
2:13 PM: snowmass: just packed up to drive back to crestone, wating for mikela to return from organizing & preparing volunteers, and doing some door knocking herself. scrolling through my thumb drive images, i stopped when i came to this one, from my gaze series, shot 7/4/2016. time in the linear sense has long since been rendered meaningless in my life. so when was that? july 4th, 2016? doesn’t compute at all. if you take a look at my story page, you may conclude, as did a recent FB friend, that i am a very lucky man. i concur.
vermeer the love letter 1669-70 44x38cm.
how, i seriously ask myself, did i make this series? why? it was tsarouchis who first introduced me to the magic of vermeer. oh, i had looked over and over at his paintings in the museums. marvelled at his brushwork. but it was tsarouchis who gave me the keys. his painting inspired by vermeer’s the love letter, provided the doorway i needed. make it yours, was his message. who, exactly are we talking about? ah, there’s the rub. make it whose??
tsarouchis the letter 1974 130x110 cm.
while he substituted friends & lovers in his version, he gave us the gift of better understanding vermeer’s magic and why he stands apart in the history of western art.
7:36 PM, snowmass, colorado: when we’re traveling i post less frequently, and often rely on images i have on my thumb drive. today i came across this one, shot in my studio on new years day of this year. i’m at work on motion 6, one of the earliest motion series paintings. i love this phase of the series, although i don’t feel nostalgia for it. relative to the works in my current post-motion series, the rocks are still very recognizable. in roiling, BELOW, while they are still recognizable as rocks, their solidity has morphed into fragmented forms, ghost images suggesting a reality broken to bits, humming with movement. broken to bits and at the same time interconnected. not discreet individualized forms. barely forms. sharing atoms freely while bathed in a pink glow. interchangeable parts of a vast whole, caught for a millisecond writhing in harmony; roiling.
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5:06 PM: i was busy this morning preparing the athens gouache painting for shipping, so i just got around to doing some more work on katarachtes later in the day than i’m used to working. it was helpful that the heavy dark clouds cleared enough to provide good natural light. BELOW is a comparative view of the painting as it looked before todays work (left) and after.
katarachtes, 50 x 48” as it looked at 3:30pm today.
3:02 pm: just back from carbondale last night, i continued work on katarachtes today. it’s more interesting than before. less of a punch in the face, more of a journey through time & space. of course you could say that about many things: a good poem or piece of music. the whole thing is floating in a sea of pink. so far, i’m not bored looking at it, which says something i guess. the intentional marks and the accidental ones are playing well together.
i spoke with a native american friend yesterday in carbondale, and we planned a book together, about rocks. we’ll see if it comes about, but it was an exciting conversation, and great to be able to speak freely about my relationship with the rocks to someone who shares my passion and even has words and expressions for all the aspects of my communication with them, including ones i didn’t imagine or suspect. in their tradition, the rock people are higher on the order of beings than humans. much higher.
BELOW: 3 details
9:18 AM: currently at a friends in snowmass, driving home this afternoon. as always, i have my drawing book with me at all times and take advantage of any opportunity to draw.
as i sit and organize my thumb drives, i ran across a drawing i made years ago in california. BELOW: is one i made a few days ago in a basalt coffee shop, and next to it on the left, the one i made at a grape picking session in california, 1980. my focus seems to have shifted from more to less descriptive of the subject & his/her psychological state to an impression of the entire space & how the subject integrates with it.
at the mexican themed café bernard
at the little mexican themed restaurant in basalt, café bernard, where i made the drawing above right, opposite us there sat a mexican family of 7. there was too much movement from them and a table of people partially blocking my view to make the drawing i wanted. so what you see BELOW, is a little confusing, and does not include the little girl of 12 or so who is the focal point of my story.
to her left was her grandpa; to her right her uncle; opposite her parents & grandma, plus various other relatives, what i observed was the unconditional love being showered on the little girl from all sides and how, as a result she was expressing herslf with total joy and self confidence. it was moving to observe the interactions of a bonded extended family, and caused me to reflect on just how much we americans have lost those qualities that often produce adults who are fully developed humans.
1:48 PM: carbondale: we had meetings here with volunteers for the diane mitch bush campaign. here’s a drawing of one of them:
