stretching a new canvas / stupa walk / looking back to 2005 /  by Philip Tarlow

8pm: in 2005 we travelled to greece to visit my son dimitri on the cycladic island of andros. while we were there i made the preparatory sketches for the painting you see BELOW, which was shown in my 2006 solo show in athens and is now in a private collection. the two women in th composition were friends of dimitri.

pithara, oil on linen, private collection, athens

6:35: today was a prep day. I stretched another 78x26” linen canvas . that size and shape make it very difficult to avoid wrinkles and ripples where the canvas has been stretched somewhat unevenly. A rectangular or square shape is much more conducive to creating an evenly stretched, smooth canvas. and you know how much i love a taut, flat surface to paint on!

that said, i plan on stretching another one tomorrow; the reason being that i want to have more of an option to play. focusing on one painting is ok. focus divided between 2 equal sized canvases, now that feels more like play right off the bat! i learned this on this canvas, now let me try it over here but with a different brush or different colors.

i do have a few ideas about where i’ll be heading next. and having this open ended covid-19 block of time in front of us feels like a huge gift. we do our work, mikela in the house & philip in his studio, then take our walk. and we feel gratitude every day.

BELOW left: cutting the canvas to 78x26” this morning/right: the creek as it looked this afternoon on our stupa walk

retrieving and organizing hundreds of creek photos for use in upcoming series and a few additions to sparse reflections /  by Philip Tarlow

3:41 PM: this afternoon i added to the lower portion of sparse reflections, ABOVE, adding a few rocks and water with reflections.

1:34 PM: this morning i decided to go back into hundreds of photos of the creek on my phone. i’m transferring them to my desktop and storing them in a folder for use in an upcoming series i have in mind. it hasn’t yet crystallized, but there is an extraordinary wealth of material here. BELOW are a couple of examples:

a new collage and 4 landscape paintings /  by Philip Tarlow

4pm: this afternoon i made a new collage, which you see here on the left.

11:59 AM: BELOW are 4 landscape paintings i made over the years. on the top row left: a painting in oil on linen painted in 2006 and shown in my 2006 solo show in athens. we see a sweeping view of the attic plain from pnika, a hill next to the acropolis, which can be seen on the right, with mt. lycabette in the background. in the foreground, in contrast, is an intimate view of people walking their dogs. on the right: a view of canyon de chelle national monument in apache county, arizona, in gouache on 2 large sheets of paper. and in the second row left: a view of paraporti, adjacent to the town of chora, andros, greece, in oil on linen. right: a view looking towards mt. blanca, known to native americans as sinaajini, in our san luis valley, gouache on 2 sheets of paper.

testing the brush, 39.5x15 cm/ 15 3/4 x 6".... art as play…. /  by Philip Tarlow

testing the brush, watercolor on paper

2:42 PM: today i’m preparing for a trip and i wasn’t able to focus on painting. i was printing something for mikela to use at one of the schools on our upcoming trip. she stoppped by to pick up the printouts on her way back to the house when she noticed this little painting on watercolor paper.“i love this!” she exclaimed. “don’t do anything to it; i love it just the way it is!”

so how this series of marks happened is that i was testing out a new brush given to me as a gift by a dear santa fe friend. i wanted to see what kinds of marks it would make using w&n watercolors that come in those in little pans.

i wasn’t in painting mode, so that part of my brain that wants to make a painting was dormant. i was in oh, what a beautiful brush; let’s see what it does mode.

the resulting marks and the composition they created are, you might say scribbles. yes, but they are my scribbles. they are what my hand does when it receives the green light from my brain to create my signature marks with no representational OR abstract intention. just marks. just play.

so i placed it on a table next to 2 plein air paintings; one in oil on linen; the other gouache on paper. testing the brush jumps out at you.

it stands out. and that is precisely because of what i said in the previous paragraph. just play, as it turns out, trumps painting (you would say this with flair, as you might say: acting! when you are making fun of an actor who is too obviously acting!)

so where do we go from here?

just play.

just play, DETAIL

sparse reflections: stage 2 of a re-work /  by Philip Tarlow

DETAIL of sparse reflections

1:36 PM: i took yesterdays revisions of sparse reflections a bit further today, staying true to the new palette that emerged while working on 10th month last week; more whites & pinks and a much lighter overall feel. taiga’s landscape scrolls and their chinese prototypes are somehow commingling with our landscape here in the baca grande along with, perhaps, fleeting memories of the andros . landscapes i painted for over a decade.

my current internal sense of a global landscape in distress pushes me towards an idealized dreamscape. so that these 3 figures sitting on the earth somewhere in the wilds of the japanese mountains conjures a feeling akin to what they may have felt on fleeing the harsh reality of an always changing oppressive and unpredictable government.

sparse reflections: stage 1 of a re-work today /  by Philip Tarlow

3:52 PM: i began a re-work of sparse reflections yesterday and continued today. so far, ot’s lighter and has fewer things going on than the earlier version. below left: previous version; right: today.

10th month goes pink /  by Philip Tarlow

noon: no time to say more right now, except that 10th month has gone pink.

12:36 PM: i’m writing this from the democratic caucus, which is being held today at the crestone charter school.

earlier today, i was in the studio printing out some forms mikela needed for the caucus. i glanced at the work i did yesterday on 10th month and PINK popped into my head and eyes. i had no intention of doing any work today, since we had to leave for the school at 12:15. i grabbed a large pink oil stick, and half an hour later, i had completed the new pink areas of color, as well as some blue and white, also accomplished with oil stick, in the sky. that pale yellow was too dominant and seemed boring whan i saw it first thing this morning.

virginia landscape, archile gorky ca. 1944

i’ve been wondering if maybe this sound of a flute series isn’t over and i should move on to other things. but no, i know in my gut there’s more to come, and much of that may have to do with my use of color in the 15 previous paintings. they are mostly painted on a tani-ish ground, in keeping with the overall look and feel of taiga’s scrolls. but, although he is my inspiration for the entire series, archile gorky keeps appearing to me.

i love his use of color. in virginia landscape, below, he manages to combine his favorite colors in such a way that the painting can breathe in spite of all that’s going on. the way he leaves the white canvas to show through in critical areas helps a lot in this respect.

gorky has developed a language of forms and colors which, combined with his distinctive marks evoke plant and animal life. the painting is infused with his armenian spirit. like taiga, his work is not bound in time. he adheres to miro’s definition of original; meaning that he returns to and renews aboriginal prototypes.

10th month: big wipe then re-work this morning /  by Philip Tarlow

DETAIL: 10th month with the red reflections

2:36 PM: since i shot the 12:08 photo i did more work on 10th month, in particular the waterfalls in the center of the image as well as adding a few red ripples in the water beneath the lower rock. the origin of those red reflections is a photo i shot sometime last year at the creek site which is at the foot of the trail leading up to tashi gomang stupa.there are some many colored tibetan flags hanging over the creek, which cast some red reflections (in the image on the right)

below on the left is the earlier version and on the right, the painting as it looks at the end of my painting day, just before our hike up to the stupa.

12:08 PM: i was able to get an early start this morning. when i looked at 10th month, i was horrified at how harsh it seemed & got to work immediately with solvent & rags to wipe out yesterdays foolishness and begin working into it. still a ways to go, but at least it’s calmed down. below left: yesterday & right: today

10th month, stage 2 /  by Philip Tarlow

DETAIL of 10th month at the end of my painting day

2:25 PM: we were in denver yesterday for my eye appointment, which went exceedingly well. it was a 12 hour day; we left the house at 7:15 am & returned at 7:15 pm. there were a few icy, windy spots in fairplay, as usual, but overall it was an easy drive, plus we got to stock up on food supplies.

10th month

i returned to the studio this morning with fresh eyes, and did some more work on 10th month,I which thus far is lighter & brighter than the rest in the series.

the lower portion with the rocks i added today is more painterly than previous versions.

sound of a flute series # 16: 10th month /  by Philip Tarlow

10th month this morning

12:41 PM: after stetching a new 78x26” linen canvas yesterday & removing a few pesky wrinkles this morning (by removing the staples & re-stretching that area of the canvas) i launched into 10th month, named after one of the series of scrolls reflecting all the months that taiga painted around 1750.

before launching in and as i was having my breakfast, i was reading a book i have on the work of miro. it definitely influenced my mood as i started working, especially the way he interpreted the word originality as meaning “going back to the origins.” so he consciously “ejected perfection & aestheticism in favor of the spectacular, brutal strength of a voluntary primitivism.” (a quote from the text of Louis Permanyer in his book miro; ninety years)