1:55 PM: I felt that the tan in the bottom portion of the painting needed to be broken up a little, so I introduced some white & a trace of yellow. as well, I added the faint siena parallel vertical lines mimicking the threads occurring in the the silk fabric of the original taiga scrolls.
and that may be it for kwazu no shosa., which I consider one of the finest in the series thus far. I may launch into a new one tomorrow, for which the canvas is already stretched.
1:46: gotta run to an eye appointment in Salida, so i’m just posting the image of what I did today & will comment later. scroll down to yesterdays post to compare.
7:30 PM: so today i was in a bit of fear. i was unsettled by the floaters i was seeing dance across my field of vision and afraid of what they might mean. as it turned out, when i visited the eye doc in salida, these floaters turned out to not be concerning. but it was worth the trip to salida to be certain i don’t have detached retina!
so i’m proud of myself that, despite my fears, i did my best work yet on kwazu no shosa, and may have finally resolved it. i found what in greek they call “το χου” which, roughly translated, means the magic.
it’s a mystery. it’s what happens when you are on the edge of despair, and ready to literally give up. give up my plans; my solutions…and how this manifests, in my case, is by going in and scraping over marks i considered precious, even sacred.
using the palette knfe as an out-of-control brush; a tool that, much like when you’re shoveling snow or sweeping it off your sidewalk, leaves a trail of marks reflecting the movement of your body & it’s innate sense of graceful rhythm and flow.
or, when you use that tool they have at most gas stations to wipe clean your dirty windshield. you create a brief, innocent dance reflected in the marks it leaves. you’re not thinking of the process as an artistic expression. you’re focused on getting the dirt & dust off & having a clear windshield. on the canvas, this can translate into magic.and this is where your awareness and knowledge of the history of art comes in. you remember a lock of hair painted by frans hals; one of constable’s clouds; deKooning’s marks in his women series…..and you know they were fully aware of these timeless thuths.
DETAIL of kwazu no shosa at 4pm
3:55 PM: kwazu no shosa was beautiful as it looked at the end of my painting day yesterday, but it was simply too pale.
so I continued work on it today, maintaining most of what was there and enriching it with greens, red & blues. it’s definitely improved, but still needs some magic. it has gained immeasurably from my experience painting it’s 12 predecessors. so something’s moving. some energy. some mark wisdom.
but i’m feeling crappy due to a recurrence of what feels like an infection at the site of a dental implant I got 6 months ago, in early april. that totally sucks, and we’ll see what needs to happen when I see the dentist in a few weeks.
this will be brief, as i’m typing it in our kitchen before starting my morning :
yesterday i made some small changes to kwazu no shosa, as i haven’t yet decided whether or not i want to keep it in it’s present spare form. and i have been contemplating some small but important tweaks to the upper areas of itsu and was waiting till i was in the right mental/emotional space.
as well, i made a small gouache of an owl for our dear owl-loving friend jason, as a house warming gift. it was a revelation to paint the beautiful patterns on this magnificent creature, and made me want to do more.
BELOW: kwazu no shosa and itsu post-tweaks
2:45 PM: kwazu no shosa was again painted over, this time with a warm white. I then scraped into it with a flexible matt knife, which I normally use to mix oil colors. it made marks that were new to me, so I just went with it.
the reason it’s photographed lying horizontally is that, although drips normally don’t bother me, I didn’t want the freshly applied oil paint to drip. so tomorrow morning when come back in, it will be dry enough to hang on the wall & photograph properly.
but the first thing I did this morning was to make the drawing for a painting in gouache on paper of an owl, for a friend who is about to go on a 2 month trip. he loves owls, so he should appreciate this.
i’ll probably make the gouache tomorrow morning, although I never know what’s on the menu until I arrive.
kwazu no shosa as it looked at the end of my painting day
4:07 PM: I was able to get more done this afternoon, introducing a few areas of foliage into the composition and muting the area of red in the central portion of the composition. but it doesn’t yet feel resolved, so I may resume work in the morning, although it’s unlikely i’ll make radical changes, as has been happening the past few days.
2:29PM: this morning I had a bunch of logistics to take care of. I finally got started around 1 & have been painting since then, taking this short break to post my progress & gaze at what i’ve done thus far. I won’t say much more right now; here’s kwazu no shosa as it looked on the easel moments ago. I put it on the easel, but have been working on it lying flat on a couple of saw horses.
you will notice far bolder colors than i’ve been using in the rest of this series.
kwazu no shosa at the end of my painting day today
4:26 PM: Michael is still working on the new heater installation, so it smells strongly of a glue he’s using, and I hear the sound of his various tools up in my loft area. I didn’t think i’d get any painting done today because of that and the fact that I didn’t get a great nights sleep. but the juices unexpectedly kicked in about 3 pm & I went back into kwazu no shosa with gusto and a feeling of excitement that this one differs significantly from the others that came before it, while maintaining & advancing the sprit of the series.
I love when the freedom and calligraphic melody of the marks resulting in unplanned imagery, often biomorphic. there’s a seals head, a guy with a very big nose turning his head in wonderment or despair…it reminds me a lot of how I respond to some of archile gorky’s richest imagery: a flimflam of interrelated marks summarizing our collective experience of leaves, branches, butterfly wings and tree trunks swaying in a strong wind. and so taiga has moved me. opened doors for me. given me access to a language he & his wife & buddies dreamed up as regimes came crashing down and they ascended to their mountain retreat to listen to the sounds of a flute over water.
3:59 pm: today i went back into kwazu no shosa, which i had painted over with a tan oil color 2 days ago. i painted a version of an 18th c. japanese poem on a scroll. this was then scraped over, and the shadow of my hand & arm, which showed up on the canvas due to a strong light from behind, was added with blue oil pastel. I how it looks right now, but michael arrived to continue installation of the new heater just when my strong morning energy was waning,
so I left it that way until tomorrow & made some small tweaks to the 2 paintings I mention in the title of todays post. emerald ripples needed something in the upper central portion, where the white space was too large, as you will see if you look at the painting before my tweaks, BELOW left. on the right you can see the painting post-tweaks. it works now.
sound of a flute over water II, which is a commissioned version of the original, needed some work in the upper central portion of the canvas, in the 3 areas of green leafage. as I gaze at it from a distance of about 20 feet, it looks to be resolved. before tweaks, BELOW left; after tweaks on the right.
4:57 PM: this morning I assembled this new storage rack for my stretcher bars. it’s already making a huge difference; they’re all sorted by size, which will make them far easier to locate when I want to stretch a new canvas. more importantly, it allows me to see what i’ve got & not order new stretcher bars I don’t need.
mid-afternoon michael came over to begin installing the new water heater, just in time for an abrupt drop in temperature predicted for thursday, with a possibility for snow thursday night.
I didn’t think i’d get any painting done with all this going on, but towards the end of the day, I did make some small but important changes to Meiji & sound of a flute over water II, which you can see below. meiji is on the left; sound of a flute over water II on the right.
4:14 PM: today I did lots of work on kwazu no shosa, which I started yesterday. nothing can compare with a big white canvas. at the back of my mind was the desire to maintain some of that virgin white of the quadruple primed linen, and not apply the tan ground i’ve used on many of the others in the series.
the work today took many twists & turns I didn’t stop until just about 1/2 hour ago. for some of todays work I lay the canvas horizontally on 2 sawhorses. the rest of the time it was on the easel. the Japanese inspired calligraphy I started with yesterday still peeks through in spots. I love allowing the story of the process of a painting to be transparent for the viewer to unravel. I love the complexity of it, but I have to be careful that the story doesn’t co-opt the composition as a whole. ideally, there’s delicate balance struck, and the viewer is drawn in, becoming him or herself a participant in the creation of the story; making it their own.
BELOW left: the painting on day 1; right: today
