a tour through my marks /  by Philip Tarlow

1:57 PM: no studio today. mikela had a very rough night, with the worst post 2nd shot after effects yet. without going into details, it was bad. and if this is just a taste of what the poor souls who actually get the virus go through……

i’m still not back to normal either, so i decided to stay home, rest & keep mikela company.

what i decided to post today is a tour through the marks i’ve made on many of the paintings we have hanging here in our house.

i walked around the upper and lower floors, shooting details of all the paintings, which span about 25 years. i have referred many times to what matisse said about mark making, and how, over time, you find your personal language.

if you will take the time to scroll through the images below, and i realize there are a lot, you will begin to recognize my language. i’ve never done anything lke this, and it’s giving me ideas for the book i’ve been threatening to write. realism has little bearing. jazz is one of my favorite metaphors for what we’re looking at here. in jazz, you riff.

age 3, prospect park, brooklyn / 2021 watercolor 13 /  by Philip Tarlow

a motion series painting hangs in our stairway

5:29 PM: we’re both not completely through the 2nd shot side effects, so we put off our stupa walk till tomorrow, weather permitting. snow is in the forecast this weekend, so we’ll have to see. when i returned to the house, there was a beautiful afternoon light falling on our entryway stairs, where this motion series painting hangs.

some of the ceramics you see were made by ceramicist friends and painted by me, others are pieces we’ve collected over the years. and i love those shadows from our plants, which shift daily with the position of the sun. it’s a wonderful house mikela designed; a many talented woman she is.

2021 watercolor 13 stage 1 11 3/4 x 15” on arches paper

2:57 PM: getting ready to leave for the house and then up to the stupa trail with mikela. i started 2021 watercolor 13 today. i don’t know if you can make this out, since it’s in a very early stage, but there’s a view from a woman from above and she’s in a creek environment. it turns me on to combine figures seen from above, as seen in my ano kato series, with views of the creek. if you click on painting series in the drop down menu above, then click on ano kato, you’ll see the series of paintings, which were done a few years back.

12:46 PM: getting a late start today and will have to stop at 3 so we can walk up the trail, which we haven’t done in 3 days. we like to go every other day to stay in shape, since this is our main form of exercise.

this is a photo i discovered in my loft, shot by my dad in prospect park, brooklyn, when i was about 3.

more when i start painting & have something to post.

a quick note about bonnard:

amongst the nabis, bonnard was the most willing to experiment in a variety of media. as he wrote to lugné-pöe in 1890, , “it’s a matter of varying one’s pleasures.”

bonnard, women in a garden, 1891, oil on paper mounted on canvas, four panels, each panel 160 x 48 cm. museé d’orsay, paris

rough night following 2nd shot / tweaks to 2021 watercolor 12 /  by Philip Tarlow

12:04 PM: we are both experiencing side/after effects from our 2nd covid shot yesterday. we got the shots around noon, and by the time we went to bed the side effects had set in. it’s well known that side effects are more likely after the second shot and not the first. arm pain at the site of the shot, achiness, low energy, etc. are symptoms that can appear and last for a few days.

after taking tynelol, i felt good enough to go to my studio, but after only an hour of work, i was unable to continue. so i’m stopping early & will return to the house and lie down.

after bringing 2021 watercolor 12 to the house a couple of days ago, it seemed to both of us that the face on the figure in blue (mikela) needed to be filled in. it looked ghost-like. that’s about all i did, aside from soem black marks on her hair, a few more strokes on that branch in the upper middle of the composition and some darker blue shadows on her blouse.

i’m so out of it right now, it’s impossible to tell whether that resolves this one, so i’ll bring it back over to the house and see what we think.

this is a good example of how essential it is that you feel good in your body when painting. there’s no way, for example, that i could make those grey marks indicating rocks right now. you have to be in tip top form for your brush to dance over the surface like that.

BELOW: on the left-the before, and on the right, the watercolor at the end of my painting day, just now.

2nd covid shot today; feeling a bit weird /  by Philip Tarlow

3:25 PM: we got back a few hour ago from center, colrado, about a 40 minute drive from crestone, where we got our second covid shots. we’re both feeling a little fuzzy, which didn’t happen after the first shot. i went straight to my studio once we got back, thinking i’d do a bit more on 2021 watercolor 11. but no way i could paint.

so my post today, instead of focuing on my latest painting, is about a series of painitngs i made in 2018, inspired by a trip we made to napa valley, california. it’s a very paintable landscape: rows of grape vines under a california sky. if i were to make these paintings today, they would look very different. but i do relate strongly to them. my 15 year total immersion in the greek landscape gave me the tools i needed to paint napa.

they’re all painted in oil on linen and are in private collections in houston, save for one, which hangs in the wine room of a wonderful houston restaurant. they can be found on this page of my site: https://www.philiptarlow.com/fluid-landscape

you can get to this page by clicking on the drop down menu “painting series” and then scrolling down to “fluid landscape.”

2021 watercolor 12 & a preliminary drawing for the poreia watercolor /  by Philip Tarlow

2021 watercolor 12 11 1/4 x 15 “

2:14 PM: this morning i started, and perhaps completed 2021 watercolor/collage 12. mikela and a school kid who were at a friend’s house join a creek-scape, and it all seems perfectly natural.

a few days ago my son dimitri sent me 3 photos of characters in an upcoming play he’ll be directing at the national theatre of greece. they are all dressed in a kind of humorous take on ancient dress, influenced in part by the fabulous greek shadow theatre character: karaghiozis. as soon as i saw the photos, i thought of making a watercolor, combining all 3 in one painting.

reworking a 2017 watercolor/collage /  by Philip Tarlow

1:09 PM: as i was preparing this morning to start a new watercolor/collage, my eye caught a collage i had made in 2017 sitting with other collages from that period in a cardboard box. i pulled it out and looked at it, and with todays vision, it seemed way too overloaded so that my eye bounced around the composition like a ping pong ball.

this is a detail of the hand holding a cup

so i felt absolutely no compunction cutting it up into pieces, until i found the right one and began working into it. it’s much smaller than the original: 7 x 13 3/4”. thanks to some brownish mottled paper i discovered in a closet, it now seems to work as a horizontal composition.

the hand you see in the center is from a previous watercolor/collage that i cut up, which included students gathered at a friend’s house. one of them was holding a cup containing juice, and that’s his hand. although there are references to branches in the center and on the left, this is not a creek scape per se. much like the one i made yesterday, but perhaps more so, it’s creek inspired. if you know my history, which you can get a sense of by clicking through the dropdown menus on this site, you will understand that, while technically one could classify this as an abstraction, it’s clearly an abstraction by someone who has spent years as a realist painter.

2021 watercolor/collage 11 7 x 13 3/4”

starting my day with matcha and 2 drawings / CONTINUED WORK ON 2021 WATERCOLOR/COLLAGE 10 /  by Philip Tarlow

2:43 PM: i collaged over some of that green mark left over from yesterday, and flipped it 90 degrees so that it’s now a horizontal composition again.

1:16 PM: i resumed work on 2021 watercolor/collage 10, imagining i’d just make some minor additions. i ended up creating a very different animal. there’s very little left that indicates anything creek related. now a vertical composition, i cut up and collaged some of the marks i made this morning before doing the two drawings i posted at 12:12 pm. once i felt the piece was resolved, i flipped it in all 4 directions until i found the vertical you see here.

the hand in the center of the composition belongs to painter tom wudl and is cut from an invitation to his l.a. exhibition. a piece of his work can be found to the left of his hand.

the green watercolor marks on the left and the pink marks beneath it are just about the only thing remaining from yesterday’s version. also included in the collage are: a london street map, and pieces of a paper palette i used while making a 2015 oil painting.

12:12 PM: i was late getting to the studio today. normally, i start my day drinking my matcha tea with toast and reading; either about my 11th century chinese calligrapher buddies, art forum, or maybe a bit about matisse. today i was trying out a new pen sent to me after i had cancelled my order because of the terrible reviews i read. weeks after the order was cancelled and my money refunded, i received the pen. don’t know why they sent it, but i figured i’d try it out to see if it was bad as the reviews claimed. it was worse!!

but in testing it out and attempting to make the ink flow and the ridiculously scratch point work without catching on the paper and tearing it, i brought out my 2 favorite fountain pens and decided to make a couple of drawings using all 3 in rotation.

i added some colored pencil, and this is the result. so now i’m going to make some additions to yesterday’s watercolor/collage 10 and start 11.

i’ll post what i’ve done when i’ve got something to show. we walking up the stupa trail at 3, so i have about 2 1/2 hours.

2021 watercolor/collage 10 /  by Philip Tarlow

2021 watercolor/collage 10 11 1/4 x 15”

today, intent upon making a new watercolor and not working in oil, i turned 2021 creek oil 1 to the wall so it could have a little rest, and started 2021 watercolor/collage 10.

it was an interesting start, and at a certain point i felt it needed some collage elements. so i went to my collaging surface and found a cut up paper oil palette i kept, from a 2015 painting in my parade series. at that time i used to label and keep all my paper palettes knowing that i might want to use them in the future. which is NOW!

the elegant shapes created by the snow and ice covered creek seen from above, point in the direction of a miro and make me more conscious of where his inspiration came from. maybe.

more work today on 2021 creek oil 1, 26x78" /  by Philip Tarlow

3:40 PM: got a late start today as a result of unexpected lostical stuff i had to take care of. i was intending to start a new watercolor, but simply could not resist the urge to do more work on 2021 creek oil 1. as i’m ending my painting day, this one is in a kind of raw state. it has harsher colors than i’m used to using, harsher transitions and a questionable composition. gone are those neutral tans & greys. missing is that diagonal thrust you’d normally see in a long narrow piece like this one.

nonetheless, i feel somehow attached to it. and i’m intensely curious how it will evolve. maybe our political situation is rubbing off on me. but i’m fine if it just doesn’t work out, and ends up in the trash. many of the solutions i’m discovering and combinations of colors i’m employing will undoubtedly show up in future oils.

so here it is, in all it’s ragged glory. and we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

continuing work on 2021 creek oil 1 /  by Philip Tarlow

2021 creek oil 1 26x78” at 2 pm today

1:58 PM: a few small additions just now. you’ll notice some white bubble marks in the blue water that weren’t there before, as well as a few more darker blue marks center-left. small as these additions are, if you scan the image wtih your eyes before & after these small additions, you may notice a subtle but significant change in how you perceive the space.

2021 creek oil 1 26x78” at 12:30 pm today

DETAIL

DETAIL

12:44 PM: that orange was too much, so i introduced a warm grey, as well as some darker blues and whites, beneath some of the rock shapes, giving the viewer more of a sense of water. the dots are from plastic bubble wrap pressed onto the wet painting surface so that they pick up some paint, and then pressed in another spot, where they deposit some of that wet oil paint. i’ve used this technique in earlier paintings, for example in my gaze series (you can view the series if you click on the dropdown menu on the upper right of this page.)

one might say that 18th century japanese painter ike taiga, about whom i often speak, gave me permission to dive deep into pattern. the nabis vuillard and bonnard were great at exploring their endless possibilities. vuillard, surrounded as he was growing up with fabrics used by his mother & sisters in making dresses, was steeped in patterns from childhood.

2021 creek oil 1 at noon today

11:41 AM:feels like i’ve been working on this painting for a very long time. each time i’ve make changes, it has remained in the tan-ish range, with accents of white. this is the first time stronger colors have appeared. i may continue working on this one; not yet sure.