view towards the acropolis, 2010 /  by Philip Tarlow

december morning, acropolis 35x72” oil on linen 2009

5:29 PM: today was dentist day, so i didn’t get to my studio. instead of my usual update on works in progress, i’m posting this 2010 painting, december morning, acropolis, on oil on line, 35x72” in oil on linen. follwoing a trip to athens and andros to visit my son & grandkids, i made a series of paintings based on photos i had shot.

DETAIL

having lived & painted in greece from 1964 through 1979, mostly in athens and on the cycladic island of andros, i was deeply familiar with the landscape & the light. so when mikela and i spent the day at the acropolis and on pnika, the hill just opposite the acropolis, it was with great emotion that i gazed at those tourists sitting on the rocks. i believe this comes through in the painting. my studio during thos years was in a neoclassical house in plaka, which can been seen in the distance on the left. the painting is done on a tinted ground, which is how i learned to work from my teachers & mentors during that period. it was shown in my 2010 solo show at skoufa gallery in the kolonaki neighborhood, athens. it’s now in a private collection on athens.

ice bound /  by Philip Tarlow

3:07 PM: i started another small (16x20”) oil on canvas today. it needs work, but tomorrow is dentist day, so i’ll resume work on ice bound on friday. i think the earlier version you see on the left, below, might be a better painting. but it’s history.

the painterly /  by Philip Tarlow

from thoughtco.com: The Tate Gallery's glossary says the term painterly "carries the implication that the artist is reveling in the manipulation of the oil paint itself and making the fullest use of its sensuous properties."

a good example can be found in any detail of a van gogh painting. the thoughtsco article goes on to say: a style that celebrates the medium that it was created in, ….rather than a style that tries to hide the act of creation or the medium used. It is a loose and expressive approach to the process of painting in which the brushstrokes (or even knife strokes, if any paint was applied with a palette knife) are visible.

if you make this van gogh detail larger by clicking on it, you will see a perfect example of the painterly.

detail of frozen creek, 16x20”

this quality is central to my work, and has been for my entire career. for the casual viewer, who may not have a grasp of the history of art, it’s a quality more easily understood and appreciated in a realist painting than in an abstract or, in my case, abstracted painting. in the small painting i made yesterday: frozen creek, it becomes easier to identify this quality after having had even a perfunctory introduction such as the one i’ve provided here.

started "frozen creek," 16x20" /  by Philip Tarlow

frozen creek 16x20” oil on linen 2018-2019

3:38 PM: i finished packing the 2 sky paintings this morning, which were picked up by ups an hour ago & are on their way to gremillion in houston. so i had a late start, but i didn’t think i’d be able to paint at all. i did this one rather quickly, and used my brushes instead of the oil sticks i’ve been using. the other thing that’s different is that the tanish ground was dry instead of wet as it was with the last few.

discoveries made after unexpected studio cleanup, and winter creek re-shot under better lighting conditions. /  by Philip Tarlow

gaze 6 48 x48” acrylic & collage on canvas, 2016

2:16 PM: this morning there was a bit of a chill in my studio, so i turned on the supplemental elecric oil-filled radiator for a quick heat boost. shortly thereafter the power went out on my desk top, all the external drives & everything plugged in to that section of my studio. i imagined the main plug that feeds all the multi plug surge protectors had somehow pulled out of the wall. it’s buried behind an impossible number of large assembled stretcher bars & other stuff. so i removed all that stuff, which involved lots of heavy lifting. to make a long story short, i later discovered the problem was that my main surge protector, sitting right beneath my desk, where my desktop is located, simply needed to be re-set, as it couldn’t handle the extra power required for the radiator i had turned on. so i took the opportunity to reorganize that area, removing the largest of the assembled stretcher bars, which you see in the photo on the upper left. i plan on disassembling them & stacking the stretcher bars, which will take up far less room.

in the process, i discovered a painting from my gaze series titled gaze 6, which is 48x48”, which you see above. it may be one of the paintings we use for a new home staging next month in boulder.

winter creek 16x20” oil on linen re-shot under bettter lighting conditions

k. back in the studio & "winter creek" /  by Philip Tarlow

4:34 PM: after a break due to k. traveling to the east coast for an interview with a school he applied to, he was back in the studio today & we resumed our mentorship. whenever he’s in the studio i do good work, so i started a new one titled winter creek, 16x20”

i proposed that k. help design my new project, crating 84” by 24” paintings/scrolls for my may show, but he was more interested in painting a sky. so he chose of of my sky pics, i printed it out & he started work on his sky painting, which you see here in an early stage.

"icy creek 3", 38x36" /  by Philip Tarlow

2:37 PM: today i painted over a collaged piece from 2016 that didn’t hold up after having it on the wall in the house. the new boldness of form & line continues, with just 2-3 events ; abstracted elements that started 5-10 years ago with plein air creek gouaches & oils. as with the others in this series, the under-layers are faintly visible, although not as much as they were in the previous ones, which had predominantly white grounds. this one differs somewhat in that it has pure red marks, made with an oil stick, on the branch shape below the rock shape. the rock, encased in ice, could be floating. or falling. the yellow ochre marks it contains reflect the uneven, time worn surface of the rocks in the creek. not inlike the “liver spots” that appear on the back of our hands as we age.

icy creek tweaks & the new "little icy creek" /  by Philip Tarlow

little icy creek, 16 x 20”

2:07 PM: today started out with some work i needed to do on a proposal for a new home staging in boulder. i selected 17 paintings, large & small, and prepared to email them in a 6 page document to the owner of the home for her to review. i had started work on that last night so as not to take up studio time, but it still took a while for me to finalize the document.

at work on little icy creek this morning

i’ve been gazing every now and then at a 16 x 20” oil on canvas that was incomplete. i didn’t like how it was going, so i basically started over on a freshly applied tan gound. it was still wet, so i was able to draw into it with oil sticks, and it has become a member of the new ict creek series i’ve been creating over the past week. i had to scrape & paint over it 2-3 times to get it where it needed to be.

then i made a small tweak to icy creek, adding a small pink mark in the center of the composition which, albeit a minor change, makes a hug difference to the feel of this painting.

icy creek following my minor tweak. the new pink mark is in the center

revisions to icy creek & roiling /  by Philip Tarlow

icy creek 18x48” mixed media & collage on canvas 2018-19

roiling 38x38” mixed media on canvas 2018-19

6:15 PM: when i entered my studio this morning, 2 of the painitngs i worked on yesterday struck me as needed more work. icy creek II had a split between the upper & lower portions of the composition, and roiling seemed a little too busy; too much going on, even though it had already been greatly simplified.

BELOW: the two paintings as they looked yesterday afternoon (LEFT) and this afternoon.

3 meta-motion paintings revised /  by Philip Tarlow

1:41 PM: emboldened by yesterdays breakthroughs, i launched into revisions of 2 other meta-motion series paintings, and one i had worked on yesterday. they are definitely more reliant upon direct drawing with oil pastels than their predecessors. here, for example if roiling as it looked on october 14, 2018 (left) and today. the earlier version is diffuse, with multiple graphic events taking place throughout the painting. todays version contains one main event, with 2-3 peripheral events, all contributing to the left thrusting white element.

quantum rocks was a series of 3 loosely defined rock shapes in a sea of pink & blue/green on september 8, 2018, when i last worked on it )left) now it it is a single event, somewhat akin to what philip guston might have conceived early to mid-career.

icy creek II 38x32” mixed media on canvas

icy creek II, on the right, consists of bold biomorphic shapes on a tan ground, giving the impression of large rocks encased in ice. previously, it had a similar look and feel as the earlier versions you see above. this direction will likely continue for a while.