a new IPA / changes to yesterdays watercolor/collage 136 / watercolor/collage 137 stage 1 /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolor/collage 137 19 1/4x 19 1/4” stage 1

watercolor/collage 136 after a few minor changes.

2:44 PM: i made a few small changes to 136 and started 137. in 137, for the first time in this series, i used watercolor to paint directly on the acid free mounting board

1:07 PM: after making numerous additions to this one, i was, as often happens, shocked by how much was going on. everything i added seemed to be competing for attention. BELOW you can see what i mean, on the left. and on the right, the current state.

time to have a slice of leftover pizza and contemplate my next moves.

8:43 AM: last night at dinner i tried one of the 4 new brews mikela got for me while i was at the dentist in boulder a few days ago: a double ipa called king sue by toppling goliath brewing, out of decorah, iowa. i liked it a lot; here’s one of the many reviews written oct.7 in beer advocate, which gave it a score of 100!

4.96/5  rDev +7.4%
look: 4.75 | smell: 5 | taste: 5 | feel: 4.75 | overall: 5

Looks great, opaque and medium gold. Smells of orange and mango. Tastes the same with a little bit of grapefruit and a slightly bitter finish. Massively juicy with the finish to bring you back to earth. Makes my top 10, probably my top 5.

today will be our last unusually warm day before the cold & snowy weather hits tomorrow night into monday. i’ll be in my studio in a few hours and we’ll see what’s in store. i’m liking what i did yesterday more and more as i gaze at it here in the house. that curved ink mark relly works.

it should go up to about 65 this afternoon, when we’ll take another walk up cottonwood at about 3-ish.

WATERCOLOR/COLLAGE 136 /  by Philip Tarlow

3:16 PM:going to walk up the trail; more about this new one when we’re back

7:34 PM: so we walked up the cottonwood trail, which used to be our favorite. it was great to be back, and with the clear, warm afternoon light, i was able to shoot some very cool photographs. of course i did fall; this time not as the result of tripping on a loose rock, but a loose lace on one of my boots.

it’s obvious, if you look at my recent watercolor/collages, where my inspiration comes from. i’m posting a few of the ones i shot, and have included a tight shot of a dead branch which, amongst other qualities, is the very definition of naples yellow. and the marks you see, made by tiny tiny critters who love dead wood, are soul food for me.

WATERCOLOR/COLLAGE 135 /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolor/collage 135 stage 2, at the end of my painting day

watercolor/collage 135, stage 1 19 1/4x19 1/4”

5:02 PM: i tuckered myself out today! so i’ll be brief. I started watercolor/collage 135 this morning. a good beginning and then it got a bit too much. i’ll evaluate when i’m fresh, in the morning.

modifications to watercolor/collage 134 / creek painting in houston collection /  by Philip Tarlow

6:54 PM: my friend, co-director of the gallery representing me in houston, texas: gremillion & Co. fine art posted this today on facebook. it’s one of the creek paintings i made in 2001, in oil on linen. i love seeing where my work is hanging; it makes my experience in the studio more meaningful. i do make art so that it canbe seen and enrich people’s lives!

we have a sister painting in our living room. it’s part of a series i did earlier on in our creek walks, when i used to jump naked into the 40° creek.

what i did today, below, and what i’ve been doing recently making these creek watercolors is an evolution from what you see hanging on this wall.

4:45 PM: we got a late strat on our morning walk and i didn’t arrive in my studio till about 1:30. by the time i had my coffee it was 2:30.

in looking at watercolor/collage 134 yesterday at the house, i was bothered by the green watercolor at the top, which was added at the last minute yesterday afternoon. so i collaged over it with thin, semi-transparent white paper from a roll i have, and then made some marks with crayon and collaged a cutout piece from an invitation i got from la louver gallery (in venice, ca.) in 2015. i may need to make further modifications tomorrow morning when i’m fresh. BELOW you can view and compare yesterdays version on the left with what i just did.

back from boulder/denver / watercolor-collage 133 and 134 /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolor/collage 134 7x14” at 3pm

3:14 PM: once i got settled and felt in a state to resume work on my watercolor/collages, i made 2 new ones. i changed the format i had been using in #130, 131,&132. i found a half used block of light weight watercolor paper in a 7x14” pad. that seemed convenient, so that’s what i’ll be using until i go through all the remaining sheets in the pad or i get tired of that & move on to something else.

i overruled my choice on #130, 131 and 132 to not allow any of the collaged pieces to overlap, but actually the only paper overlapping are a couple of pieces of tracing paper i used to push back a few of the passages that i deemed too strong. the other departure is that i used watercolor, crayon and graphite, especially noticeable in #134. i like the play between the marks on the collaged pieces and the marks i made.

if the first 129 watercolors in the 2020 watercolors series are an abstraction or simplification of my plein air gouaches and oils, these take it one step further. i’m getting ever closer to laying this out in a small book, which as yet is still in my head. interestingly, i learned just a few days ago that mondrian considered himself a naturalist painter. he began his career making studies of nature, and thought of his later work, with which most of us are familiar, just a next step in his process, but still based upon prototypes found in the natural world.

watercolor/collage 133 14 x 7”

the label from the comté we got yesterday

11:12 PM: yesterday was a 12 hour day; leaving for boulder at 8am, we returned about 8pm, exhausted. my two dentist appointments went well, and while i was at the dentist mikela was able to get most of our food shopping done at whole foods & trader joe’s. then we went together to costco to complete our shopping, trying to be a quick as possible and have the least exposure to any possible virus floating about. found one of my very favorite cheeses: comté, made in france and imported by costco. you can only find it at certain times of the year, and it’s one of the finest cheeses.

i’m going to try and switch gears, get out of my post boulder shock and get to work on something new. i’ll update as soon as that happens.

in the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about this cheese, how and where it’s made, read this. and as you will see, cheese making can be an art form; PROCESS is everything, as i keep pointing out in my blog posts.

The production and aging of Comté is founded on the ideas of partnership: between the earth and the farmer, the farmer and the cheesemaker and the cheesemaker and the affineur. All are invested in the end result: the highest quality Comté cheese.

Comté is made in a unique manner: milk is delivered from the farm to fruitières daily, where cheese is made. It is then passed on to affineurs who age the cheese a minimum of 4 months, up to several years. Each person along the supply chain is paid a premium for high quality cheese, a business model pioneered by Alix Jacquemin in 1860. In 1886 his daughter married Louis Rivoire. To this day, the name Rivoire represents highest quality Comté. Five generations later, the Rivoire family, along with 400 milk producers, 25 fruitières, and 3 head cellarmen, produces 110,000 Comté wheels for worldwide distribution every year.

At the core of Rivoire-Jacquemin’s business is an unparalleled expertise of quality selection and traceability. We know the exact origin of each cheese, the farmer, the maker and the micro-terroir. Breaking away from the traditional barrel ripening process, Alix Jacquemin invented the cave ripening. Today, our first rate maître affineur (cave master) supervises each and every wheel with constant care: salting, rubbing, flipping, and monitoring the aging process.

Time is key to our success. Rivoire Jacquemin prefers using the slower traditional method: requiring a traditional know-how, unlike our competition who favor large scale production and a standardized product with no personality.

Rivoire Jacquemin is the only affineur that rubs Comté with Guérande sea salt. In our 38 cellars, we only use spruce planks from Jura to shelve our wheels. State of the art thermostat technology allows our cellar managers to fine-tune temperature and humidity to optimize ripening. We grade each cheese to determine which are for sale aged 4 to 6 months and which are destined to be aged for up to 30 

watercolor/collage 132 gets cut into pieces /  by Philip Tarlow

WATERCOLOR/COLLAGE 132, 19 1/4x191/4” as it looked at the end of my painting day today

4:08 PM: so if you read yesterdays blog, you’ll recall that i wasn’t yet sure about cutting up watercolor-collage 131 today. i did.

it had beautiful bits, but the composition was a little choppy. after cutting it up, i plac3s the pieces in a cardboard box, along with other pieces of cut-up paper, maps and paper palettes. i spent the day selecting and attaching many of those pieces to the square, white, acid-free cardboard surface.

i won’t be in my studio tomorrow, so lets see how i feel about what i did tuesday morning. then i’ll make my decision as to whether it’s resolved, or needs more work.

watercolor/collage 132 is in the sprirt of 130 and 131. there is no overlapping, as there was in the last series of collages i made. the  whimsicality of the composition, which has so much breathing space, belies the precision of the underlying architecture. the curvilinear shapes in the pieces of maps, which indicate changes of altitude, echo the shapes of the cut out pieces of watrecolors, paper palettes, etc. plant and animal life can be projected onto these shapes, individually and in concert with one another.

morning light / a new day in my studio about to begin continuing watercolor/collage 131 / coffee: a new taste /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolor/collage 132 as it looked a few minutes ago, when i stopped working for the day.

1:36 PM: after moving all that stuff around to clear space in the studio, then working more on watercolor/collage 132, i ran out of steam. i’m undecided as to whether or not to cut this one up so i can use the pieces in my next collage and i’m too fuzzy right now to make that kind of decision, so i think i’ll just leave it as is, take it back to the house & look at it tonight, and make my decision tomorrow morning when i’m fresh. it’s rather early to stop working, but you have to listen to your body. so mikela will come over soon & together we’ll do more work on reorganizing the studio.

at work moments ago on watercolor/collage 132

1 PM: after doing some re-organizing in the studio, in prep for a much bigger re-org that will take place over the next month or so, i dove in to watercolor/collage 132, which i started yesterday. once i’m done, i’ll decide whether or not this is a candidate for being cut up to use in a collage. that should happen in the next hour or so.

that’s matcha tea you see in the white cup; an essential part of my daily process, which follows on the heals of my coffee. todays cup was something of an experiment. i had been getting 1 pound at a time of rather expensive yemeni roasted beans from a company that specializes in these exquisite beans from the birthplace of coffee. they are hard to access and thus rather expensive. i had been mixing one teaspoon of them in with the ethiopian unroasted beans, which i get from sweetmarias.com and roast myself. i decided to give that a break and use the ethiopian beans exclusively, creating a different mix every morning. the kick we get from including even that small amount of the yemeni beans is being replaced, as mikela commented this morning, by a more subtle flavor, which we both like a lot.

9:07 AM: as i prepare to go to my studio and start work on a new watercolor/collage, i see the morning light flooding our house and give gratitude. the quality of clear, warm fall light here in crestone/baca is unique; the silence profound.

tuning in to this environment is an inseparable part of the paintings i make every day, which could not be done anywhere else. as well, we are surrounded daily by people of different traditions meditating round the clock, culturing the silence of this place, adding silence to the existing silence creating a cacophony of silence, entering your body and fine tuning it’s frequencies second by second. this new series of watercolor/collages reflect that rumbling, silent cacophony.

another look at watercolor/collage 131/ checking out my collage & watercolor areas / creek oil 2 re-adjusted /  by Philip Tarlow

7:34 PM: i’ve been looking at creek oil 2, which hangs in our living room since we placed it there a few weeks ago. i think it deserves a re-adjusted photograph that captures more of it’s subtlties. so i reshot it a few hours ago and just now re-adjusted the colors. here it is:

2020 creek oil 2, 26x78” oil on linen

2:18 PM: we’re back from our walk, during which i took a fall, for a change. this time it was my left knee and right palm that were injured. we have to get to the P.O. in town before it closes at 3:45. so it’s not going to be a painting day. i’m eager to continue along this new path however, and i should be able to get to my studio early tomorrow. i’m liking the process i’ve developed of starting a new creek inspired watercolor, then cutting it into curvilinear pieces and using those pieces in addition to the many other pieces and scraps of paper i have on my work table.

BELOW: on the left you see my collaging space, with a blank piece of white board where i’ll be creating a new one tomorrow morning. on the left of this photo are pieces of the watercolors i recently cut into curvilinear pieces. on the lower right you can make out a curled up piece of map. on the upper left, you can see a piece of painted watercolor paper showing the areas where i cut pieces of it out to use in a recent watercolor/collage.

and on the right, my watercolor space, directly opposite the collaging area, where you see me just a few moments ago, working on a new watercolor destined to be cut into pieces tomorrow. i’ll continue work on that tomorrow.

it’s important to me that you see this: the actual process of an actual artist at work, in the thick of it!

8:13 AM: after looking at watercolor/collage 131 last night and this morning, both mikela and i are feeling differently about it. for the moment, it will remain as is and when we get back from our walk, i’ll start a new one. so all that i held forth on yesterday about how it’s an example of an unsuccessful composition now goes out the window!

this is a drawing from a 1998 sketch book i was looking through yesterday. more when we’re back from our walk.

STARTING WATERCOLOR-COLLAGE 131 /  by Philip Tarlow

6:06 PM: today followed a similar pattern of work as yesterday. i made a small creek inspired watercolor, then cut it into small curviliniar pieces and put them together with pieces of other previous watercolors, maps and other pieces of (mostly painted) cut up pieces of paper and paper palletes. i prepared a 19 1/2” square piece of board and set to work.

the problem i ran into was that i was, on some level, trying to re-create what i did yesterday. we all know that doesn’t work. so the result doesn’t yet reflect the certaintly and freshness of watercolor/collage 130. id o like it however, and it doesn’t need a lot to get there. but if you compare the two, BELOW,

it’s a goodway of contemplating the question:” what makes a composition work?”

BELOW: yesterdays watercolor 130 on the left, and todays watercolor 131 on the right. in todays composition, the discreet pieces of paper glued to the surface appear to be flying haphazardly through space. nothing terrible about that, but it’s not singing harmoniously, which was my intention. your eye goes to one piece, then on to the next, etc. whereas in watercolor 130, your eye experiences one harmonious flow, then begins to discern the punctuation points, where suddenly a drum beat kicks in, or the horns take over from the strings. i love comparing visual art with music.

so can i correct this while maintaining the spare aesthetic i’m currently cultivating?

trail walk / the demon queller toad / continuing watercolor 130 /  by Philip Tarlow

watercolor/collage 130 as it looked moments ago

10-13-20 watercolor 130.jpg

3:58 PM: i cut watercolor 130 into small pieces and am reassembling it as a collage, including pieces of maps & other pieces of paper containing images. this time, my intent is to not have any of the collaged pieces overlap each other, so that whatever i glue down to the surface will remain undisturbed. this is making me much more conscious of every move, while maintaining the randomness of the image being created by the collective pieces. i’m leaving it as you see it, and will resume tomorrow morning.

5:17 PM: after bringing it back to the house and looking at it with mikela, i decided that this one is resolved. unless i wake up with a different perspective, i’m going to leave it as is and start something new. i just now put it on my home page.

here’s watercolor 130 as it looked yesterday, before i cut it up. it’s easy to identify the pieces i used today. i’ll be using more pieces in a future watercolor collage.

1:50 PM: this is something i came across while having my morning coffee.

one of the photos i shot this morning on our trail walk

1:41 PM this morning we walked up the trail for an hour, encountering many beautiful views of the creek. i’m going to print a few out after i finish working on watercolor 130.

stay tuned for updates on watercolor 130