starting windy creek, 48x20" /  by Philip Tarlow

5 recent motion series paintings on my studio’s east wall. the one i started today is second in from the right

2:53 PM: i felt when i entered the studio that the work i did yesterday may have resolved those 2 paintings: spring creek & . so i began work on the third & final long narrow or “skinny” painting, which are being proposed for the walls of a boulder office.

i didn’t get to bed till unusualy late last night, so i’m a little off today. from where i’m sitting though, these 5 paintings work well together. i’m quitting early to rest up before we drive into alamosa (1 hour) for a meeting over pizza & beer. i’ll determine better in the morning which ones demand more work & which are OK. on the RIGHT: windy creek, 48x20”, which i began working on this morning

starting easter creek, continuing work on spring creek, more modifications to purple rock ii & my mentee k. continues his most excellent landscape painting /  by Philip Tarlow

the 3 paintings i worked on today: left to right-purple rock II, spring creek and easter creek

this is the landscape my mentee k. is working on. he was in my studio today. i think it’s extratordinary. he’s 13.

5:02 PM: this morning my energy was high, and i was able to continue wrok on spring creek & purple rock II as well as strating working on the new easter creek: 48x20”. you can see all three hanging on my east studio wall, ABOVE.

purple rock II

purple rock II may be close to being resolved. it has taken on a pinkish glow, and a few areas are inspired by taiga’s 18th c. hanging scrolls, some of which are painted on silk. this inspiration, which began yesterday, spilled over to the other two paintings and, i could say, into the small landscape my mentee k. continued working on.

because of this influence and the shift to a warmer ground color, it stands apart from the rest of the series and has begun to show the benefits of painting in layers, as i have been doing; one painting over another until resolution is attained.

spring creek has evolved and is in it’s best state yet, it’s so skinny: 12x48” that i was having a hard time compositionally. today for the first time it exhibits a coherence and flow. when you have a challenge like this, it’s very tempting to come form your head. that never works. one of the ways i deal with this is by deliberately working on 2 or today 3 canvasses on the same day. i forget about it, move on to a new reality and then am able to come back to it with a fresh eye, take more chances, then allow it to rest again.

continuing work on spring creek, and more modifications to purple rock ii /  by Philip Tarlow

2:50 PM: i did more work on these 2 paintings today. they have both been influenced by taiga, the 18th c. japanese landscape painter & calligrapher i so admire. the tall skinny format is proving to be more challenging than anticipated, especially taking into consideration how much i love that format & have used it in previous work. so as a result, spring creek has not yet sounded it’s note, although, as mikela remarked earlier, it does have some beautiful passages, especially on the lower 1/4 of the painting. but as yet, it doesn’t hang together as a composition. i may start work on the other two and that may lead to solutions that i can use in spring creek...

BELOW: left: purple rock II right: spring creek

continuing work on spring creek, and more modifications to purple rock II /  by Philip Tarlow

2:08 PM: today was a good day. i say was because i have to stop early due to an afternoon meeting, which will include one of our actionlab360 team members, who is driving up from boulder as i write this. so i should hear the sound of his tires on our dirt driveway momentarily. it’s a 4 hour drive, mostly at about 10,000 feet altitude.

after starting work yesterday on the first “long skinny,” (48x12”) i realized immediately that today i would need to work on at least 2 at the same time. otherwise it gets too precious, especially because spring creek is, potentially, site specific, if the intended client likes it. sorry to be so mysterious, but i can’t really talk too much about this for a few weeks.

each successive painting inj this series takes my aesthetic a bit further. today, for example, when i got a little stuck i referred to my book on the work of 18th c. japanese landscape painter & calligrapher taiga. i took a long glance at how he handles the space in some of his tall skinny japanese landscape paintings, many of which are sections of large screens with 4, 6 sometimes more sections. that was helpful, and contributed to a solution which may very well migrate to the remaining two tall skinnies. in the mean time, purple rock II gained from this research.

BELOW: spring creek on the left and purple rock II on the right, as they looked at the end of my painting day today.

starting spring creek / what matisse said /  by Philip Tarlow

2:56 PM: this morning while having my matcha tea, i cam across this quote by henri matisse. it speaks for itself, but i am finding the great master’s words especially relevant to where i’m at right now.

spring creek, 48x12” oil on canvas at 2pm today

today i stretched the third of 3 tall skinny canvasses which are candidates for a doctors office in boulder. i began work on the skinniest: 48x12”. i’m not yet used to the new non-toxic, solvent free medium i’m using, in order to avoid the dangers to my health from using the gamsol product. it’s going to take me a while to learn it’s peculiarities. nonetheless, i began working, and the painting, titled spring creek, as at the early stage you see here. i’ll likely begin work on the second canvas tomorrow, so that i can go back & forth, which keeps me from getting too attached. it lacks the subtlety of the others, but this is only the first of many layers., it’s the layering that begins producing those unplanned passages i so love, which are always suggestive, enigmatic.

stretching long narrow vertical canvases / last minute adjustments to purple rock II /  by Philip Tarlow

4:58 PM: today, up until about an hour before leaivng the studio, i was mired in tiresome but necessary paperwork & phone calls. so that makes 2 days in a row that i haven’t painted, even though i was in the studio. unremarkable? perhaps for you. but for me, it’s painful.

so now that i got that off my chest, lets get to what happened during the last 2 hours today. i decided to make 3 new tall skinny paintings: two 48x20” and one 48x12”. they both will be verticles, intended for available walls in a professional office space in boulder. it’s challenging to stretch a canvas with those dimensions & not have wrinkles show up. on the 12 incher, they did, so i wet the back to shrink the canvas & eliminate the wrinkles. we’ll see in the morning. there’s a danger the canvas will shrink so much that it warps. we’ll see in the morning. these are lighter weight stretcher bars than i normally use, and thus more prone to warping. if i could afford it right now (we’re tight because of where we’re at with out start up educational product) i’d get those super strong stretcher bars i see on blick.

but before walking out the door & going 500 feet to our house, i impulsively grabbed a blue oil stick and began making marks on a painting i had intended to work on tomorrow morning; it was too dispersed.

i actually love those moments of impulsivity. the energy had been buiding all day. “what’s the fucking point?” i asked myself while sifting through a stack of piss-pointless paperwork. “what’s the fucking point?” i wondered as i made calls to various institutions that like to warn you “this call is being recorded….” and what, pray tell, is NOT being recorded? “all of our agents are helping oher customers, please leave your name and number and someone will call you back shortly”

i don’t normally go off like this. stuff happens.

inevitably, what’s been fermenting within me for years will emerge in the paintings i’ll be executing over the next period of time. and, speaking of time, mikela and i have decided that when people start fishing to learn our ages, we will now respond “i’m 1000 years old.” it happened at the passover seder the other night. they try & pin you down, using well known events (in this case the dictatorship in greece, which i lived through) to zero in on a likely age, when i begin to get that vibe, my answer will be “i’m 1000 years old.” now that we’re 1000 years old, it feels good. it feels right. so next year i’ll be 1001….big deal!

so anyway, getting back to the impulsive marks i made at the very end of my day in the studio, here’s purple rock II before (left) & after (right) my impulsive marks. good night friends.

more on the evolution of the motion paintings /  by Philip Tarlow

day 1 of k’s new landscape painting, 16x16” oil on linen

6:20 PM: today my mentee k. came to the studio & started a beautiful new painting, which you see on the right.

BELOW: the two plein air gouaches on top reflect the evolution of decades of plein air painting here in crestone, and before that on the cycladic island of andros, greece. while the forms are becoming more and more simplified, the colors have remained more or less true to the earth colors of nature. in the 2 motion series paintings on the bottom, the abstracted rock forms have burst into color. reds and blues dominate, while the ground remains a tan-ish earth tone. each step of the way, these departures from the actual tones and colors i observe at the creek seem to me like a risky leap into the unknown. it’s a process. and there’s no short cut.

paintings i ran across /  by Philip Tarlow

3:09 PM: today was spent putting together a document for a new potential client who wants to surprise his wife for their anniversary. i was reminded how exhausting i find something like this, whereas i can spend the entire day painting and actually feel more energized at the end of the day! no big surprise, right?

so anyway, while organizing the 4 page document using the pages app, i came across some paintings i hadn’t looked at for a long time. here are some of them. hoping to get back in the groove tomorrow.

i haven’t included titles, dates & dimensions; maybe i’ll do that later from the house. right now, i gotta lie down!

scottie, day 2 /  by Philip Tarlow

1:26 PM: i continued work on the small (11 3/4 x 8 1/2”) gouache on paper portrait of scottie. BELOW you see yesterdays version on the left; todays on the right. the abrupt transitions fomr light to dark, difficult to navigate with gouache colors, have softened. the whites in his beard have darkened so that they no longer pop. many changes have occured, and it now reads as a finished portrait. his deep and complex personality and his extraordinary/ordinary abilities as a healer are evident, at least to me. he worked on both mikela and i when we were in edwards for the TEDX youth event in vail. we both had the same experience. no ego. no “i’m gonna heal you.” in all the work we’ve had over the years, and we’ve had a lot, especially during the years we were leading personal growth seminars around the world, scottie stands out. no, jumps out as the real deal. i haven’t done a portrait in gouache in a long time, and this has whet my appetite for a series of images based on the olympics that i plan on doing soon.

scottie/ creek drawings /  by Philip Tarlow

3:08 PM: i think the solvents i’ve been using are adversely affecting my health. so i ordered some non-toxic oil painting mediums from blick. until they arrive & i can continue work on the motion series, i’ve started working on a small 9x12” portrait of scottie. we met in edwards during the TEDX youth event. we were both staying at our friend kat’s house, along with his wife, who is a wood sculptor and had some of her work on the stage at the event. i shot some photos of him at a restaurant one night & said i’d be using them for a portrait. because of my intensive schedule painting the motion series works, i didn’t really think i’d be painting his portrait for at least a few months. actually, it feels like a great change of pace, and i’m enjoying making this little painting in gouache on paper enormously.

it needs some softening, which i’ll try to do tomorrow. using gouache to make portraits is tricky, since sfumato (blending of the colors) is impossible, which is why oil painting was created

6:28 PM: we walked up north crestone creek this afternoon. at the head of the trail, after walking a mile up the dirt road (closed through the end of may) mikela continued up the trail while i walked down to the creek & made some small sketches. it’s the first time i’ve drawn or painted at the creek since late fall, 2018. a great delight it was, sitting on a rock & drawing. it opened my appetite for more plein air paintings as we move into spring & the weather warms. below are the 5 sketches i made, in chronoligical order upper left clockwise, with notations of the time in the lower right.