tokyo olympics 1 may have been resolved today /  by Philip Tarlow

1:15 PM: we had a back & forth with mikela, who said she was experiencing the actionlab360 stuff she was working on as already completed before she even started working. so I took her cue and it seemed to work.

new are the white creek-water bubbles, the log, the indications of trees & blue sky above & some filling in of colors on the figures, particularly the blue on the girl basketball player in the center.

BELOW is the painting following this mornings process.

tokyo olympics 1 following this mornings process

tokyo olympics 1 continues /  by Philip Tarlow

2:22 PM: with rumbles of thunder as a background, I picked up where I left off with tokyo olympics 1, which is 16x40 on two panels. I focused mainly on the right panel, with the women basketball players. I shot lots of photos on out tv screen during the games, especially when they showed views from above. pinks have appeared, complementing the greens on the left. more tomorrow.

resuming work/play on 8/2/2021 creek oil /  by Philip Tarlow

3:23 PM: I made some changes following my 12:36 post. they are mostly to the red headed figure on the left which, as you will remember, was originally upside down.i also made improvements to his skiff, which now has some shadows that weren’t there before. the curve of the craft now decends to his right arm, giving more definition to the handle he’s holding. and finally, I added the yellow paddle, which is important coloristically as well as compositionally. I wasn’t happy with the pink sleeveless shirt he was wearing in the photo, so I took it out and made him shirtless, other than the green wrap around his mid-section. the figure on the right underwent some changes to the lighting on his shoulders, which is now more pronounced, and to his right hand, which is now more defined.

from a distance of about 20 feet, as I now gaze at the painting, it reads well, and, I think, inspires the question ny times reviewer john russell posed in the quote at the bottom of this page, which is also at the very top of my home page.

8/2/2021 creek oil during my process of modifications this morning

12:36 PM: I was able this morning to continue modifications to 8/2/2021 creek oil. last time I worked on her, I flipped the red headed figure on the left so that he & his buddy are paddling their floats in tandem.by the way, i’m more conscious than ever of the words i’m using, the sentences i’m constructing because mikela and I have been watching pretend it’s a city, with fran leibowitz & Martin scorsese. a lot of this production rests on fran’s use of language, her cadence, the way she modulates her inimitable voice. i’m very aware of the musicality of language, so i’m drinking it in, and she’s in my head as I write this blog post. it’s not for everybody, but I highly recommend watching it.

so anyway, it was with great relish that I dove back in to this painting. it’s not there yet, but it is emitting sounds that occasionally sound like song. originally, we spotted these guys from the bridge in alamosa. other kids were on the shore, preparing to launch their small crafts into the river. there was a festival taking place in the park and there was a festive atmosphere. so this scene fulfilled a number of my passions: figures viewed from above; activity that spurs more questions than it answers; as John Russell wrote in his ny times review of a nyc exhibition:

“ there is about him something of the storyteller, even if we never quite figure out what the story is. he makes us wonder what his people get up to when they aren't in the picture

-and that is after all one of the perennial aims of painting.”

preparing my grand central litho for shipment / evaluating yesterday modifications to 8/2/2021 creek oil /  by Philip Tarlow

6:26 PM: we finally went back on the trail this morning, after days of waiting for the smoke to clear. there’s still some haze in the valley, but it’s better.

i sold one of my grand central edition of lithographs, 48x48” so i prepared it for shipping to nyc today, carefully packing it in a sturdy tube. i still have a few of these l984 ithos, which i think is one of my best.

grand central station, located in midtown manhattan, is directly across the street from where my dad’s company was located. so i saw it on a regular basis, in various lighting conditions, reflected in the large glass skyscraper you see.

modifications to 8/2/2021 creek oil / more tweaks to my home page this morning /  by Philip Tarlow

2:41 PM: mikela is in center, (about 45 minutes drive south) & I can’t get to the kiosk in time to get my favorite bread from everett, a local baker who makes the bread the same morning & sells out within 1/2 hour. so I asked our friend Suzanne who, with her husband sells fruit & veggies at the kiosk every thursday to buy me a loaf & i’ll pay her back when we go in to shop this afternoon.

after making significant changes to my home page (see my earlier post below), which i’m excited about, I decided to launch back in to 8/2/2021 creek oil. the upside down paddling figure was kind of fun, but it was getting old, and the painting just wasn’t working anymore. so I spent time collaging off white paper over the red-headed kid and drawing him right side up. i’ll start using color tomorrow; i’m too wiped out right now to do any more.

what I did thus far is already making a big difference, and the painting works better already, even though it’s still just off-white paper with a scant drawing of the second paddling figure. but I have to be in my morning energy to take it to the next step.

BELOW: 8/2/2021 creek oil just moments ago, and below that is how it looked before todays intervention.

8/2/2021 creek oil moments ago, with white paper collaged over the upside down figure

8/2/2021 creek oil as it looked before today’s intervention

11:30 AM: this morning I made modifications to my HOME PAGE, which you will recall, I was working on yesterday. I learned how to make all 9 images on the page click-through, so if you click on any of them, it takes you immediately to the relevant page. I added a small photo of myself. and I switched out all the images I had yesterday, so that they are more arresting and incline you to want to learn more by clicking on them.

visit my home page to try it out:

https://www.philiptarlow.com

evaluating recent work & choosing a direction for today /  by Philip Tarlow

2:32 PM: PROGRESS: on my home page, you can now click on any of the 6 images on the page & they will take you to the appropriate page. so for example if you click on the image on the top left, a painting of tourlos, it will take you to my overview of greece page. if you click on the one in the middle, the painting inspired by vermeer’s woman reading a letter, it will take you to my gaze series of paintings, of which that is a part. etc.

might not seem like much to you, but it took a fair amount of work to figure it out, and a couple of back and forth with the squarespace support team.

10:52 AM: I arrived at the studio very early: 8:30, so I could be here when the septic crew arrived to locate & empty the studio septic, then install the new toilet. they’re here right now, so it’s difficult to get to work. I completed re-stretching the 2 recent paintings you see: the horizontal 26x62” and the vertical 78x26". the one with 2 panels and the green area is what I worked on yesterday. and the on the floor, with 4 canvases, is one I had worked on a few months back, which I now feel needs more.

with 4 recent paintings this morning, while the septic crew did their work

less smoke but still no trail walks / a bit more on 8/8/2021 Tokyo Olympics 1 /  by Philip Tarlow

3:31 PM: today I was mostly un-stretching and re-stretching 2 canvases i’ve completed, so I could remove the heavy layer of masonite, put them directly on the stretcher bars and get them over to the house to see how they hold up over there.

I couldn’t bear leaving at the end of the day without putting brush to canvas, so I did a bit more on tokyo olympics 1. the green you see in this photo of the painting is new, and I also attached the 2 canvases with wood stripping on the back, making it easier to hang them as one painting.

tomorrow the septic guys are finally coming to empty the tanks. they still have to locate the studio tank by removing the toilet and inserting some kind of probe. this was an opportunity to replace the very old toilet here in my studio, so we got a spiffy kohler when we were last in denver, & i’m hoping they don’t have any issues installing it.

so I likely won’t get a lot of work done tomorrow, depending on when they finish the job. but, like today, I may get a burst at the very end of the day.

4 rolls of my very favorite portrait linen with 4 coats of priming were delivered last night, from paris, via sennelier in california. and I should be able to get started on the new series of 26x62 inch paintings i’ve been planning, possibly as soon as this weekend! very exciting!

the 4 new rolls of extra-fine portrait linen sitting outside my studio this morning

tokyo olympics 1 16x40 in. at the end of the day today

smoke; lots of smoke! /  by Philip Tarlow

ABOVE: 6 images i may have on my newly designed home page

3:35 PM: so what did i do today in my studio? nothin!

i think all the smoke in the valley from the california wildfires in addition to allergy season, has just knocked us both for a loop. i had wanted to continue the tokyo olympics painting i started yesterday, but at least i had the good sense not to touch it today. i had also wanted to make changes to my home page. if you take a look, you’ll see i took the first step, but it’s too small. i need to have a conversatiopn with the squarespace team, hopefully tomorrow. i want it to have 4 to 6 paintings characteristic of the various series i’ve made over the past decades. and i want the visitor to be able to click on any of those sample paintings and go to the corresponding page on my site. so, assuming i feel better in the morning, i’ll try and take care of it then. i’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, because my site needs to be easier to navigate. pople want to just click & go.

here’s an example of one of my best watercolors, which i’d like to be on the home page with a link to this page on my site: https://www.philiptarlow.com/2021-creek-oils

BELOW: one of my recent creek oil paintings that i’ve alredy put on my home page. it’s representative of where i’m currently at in my process.

5/18/2021 watercolor/collage 11x15”

6/10/2021 creek oil 26x78” oil, oil stick & collage on portrait linen

Tokyo olympics 1 / modifications to 8/7/2021 creek oil & 8/2/2021 creek oil / a better direction for 8/7/2021 creek oil? /  by Philip Tarlow

3:22 PM: I started my day following a great sleep and one of my deeper meditations earlier this morning. we’ve been watching some of the 2020 tokyo olympics in the evenings, and we especially liked the skateboarders and the relay races, both men & women. I photographed a few moments of these competitions by pausing the playback of the games we had recorded. of course I preferred the aerial views. I found 2 stretched portrait linen 16x20” canvases and decided to make a 40” wide composition, placing the two of them side by side. so this is stage 1:

as I was starting this project, I glanced over at 8/2/2021 creek oil and saw something I wanted to modify around the head of the figure on the right, with the blue bathing suit. so I made that modification; adding blue, not liking it and then taking it out with solvent on a paper towel. that removed most of the grey textured look around the head of this figure and revealed the almost white canvas beneath, which ends up unintentionally making this paddler the focus of the painting. well, maybe it needed a focus & I subconsciously knew that! here’s the modified painting, BELOW>

8/2/2021 creek oil following todays modifications

and lastly, as occurred yesterday, while working/playing on other stuff, I cast glances at 8/7/2021 creek oil, the 20x20” painting that was cropped from a larger, unsuccessful one a few weeks ago. it then had a different name, but since I really started radically transforming it yesterday, i’m just calling it by yesterday’s date. confusing, I know. what I did today consisted of collaging 3 different elements, enlivening the composition with the yellows in 2 of the collaged pieces; fragments of a brochure from aspen I had in my stack of papers. following these modifications, I decided I like it better this way, with the black bit on the bottom, contrary to what I said earlier. the blue suggests sky, while the blacks suggest a landscape.

so here’s the current state of the painting/collage, BELOW:

8/7/2021 creek oil/collage following todays modifications

10:13 AM: I think I like it better this way:

8:7:2021 creek oil 20x20in.

than this way:

10:18 AM: about to get to work now….more in a little while

scraping the hell out of it 8/7/2021 creek oil /  by Philip Tarlow

3:51 PM: while I was un-stretching a canvas a little while ago, my eye caught this painting. it’s 20x20” and was cut down from a larger painting that was not working. since what I was doing was very boring, I took the opportunity to make a few changes to it. here’s how it looks after those changes, which include one collaged piece on the lower left, entering into the blue band of color.

8/7/2021 creek oil. 20x20 in.

8/2/2021 creek oil just now, after I flipped it 180°….makes a lot more sense compositionally

1:13 PM: just ran over to the house to bring mikela some of the oatmeal I made. when I returned, ii felt like flipping the painting 180°, so I did & I think it’s way better this way. that black belogs at the top. what do you think? leave a comment if you have an opinion.

so what happened here? why does scraping often prove so effective? once again, it has to do with the unplanned, the accidental, the unexpected.

by the way, I came across this INTERESTING INFORMATION ON MATISSE:

from Art as Life

The Matisse we never knew.

By Peter Schjeldahl

"Amélie and, later, Marguerite—a daughter Matisse had fathered with a shopgirl in 1894 and raised with Amélie—were strong-willed confederates of Matisse in his work, and severe critics when his concentration flagged, managing a virtual family firm of which the artist was both the fragile chairman and the slave-driven labor force. According to Spurling, “The family fitted their activities round his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential.” Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an “annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings.” The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted."

when I entered my studio this morning & glanced at 8/2/2021 creek oil, I said to myself, “no.”

more of a salad mix than a coherent and pleasing composition.

I made more marks, employing a yellow band and a blue band of color, ripping off what I did (successfully) a few paintings ago. nah.

so I grabbed my palette knife and began scraping the surface without regard for which precious passages I was obliterating. I knew in my gut that this is what needed to happen at this juncture.

so here’s where it stands as of a few moments ago. the two paddling figures are no longer 2 discreet entities. the orange/red mushroom shapes no longer stand apart, laughing at the rest of the painting.

ok, but why isn’t it just a messy, smudged up surface that used to be a coherent composition? ah, there’s where a knowledge of the history of art comes in handy. not saying i’m a brilliant light in that history. simply that it’s easier to understand and appreciate this stage of the painting if you’re aware of what’s happened in mark making since the stone age.

8/2/2021 creek oil moments ago, post-scraping

8/2/2021 creek oil yesterday at the end of my painting day

ok, so then is this a formula? can you just keep making fragmented paintings then adding some bands of color and scraping over it all? no.