progress on the storage space / 9/22/2010 painting/collage in the living room /  by Philip Tarlow

3:02 PM: today the crew made good progress on the construction of my new storage space. the door to the studio was cut on the outside, but they won’t cut the hole & mount the door inside till the space is completely sealed, so that it won’t allow the cold night air to enter the studio space. until then; hopefully sometime next week, I won’t be able to get much painting done, at least not in oil. but I may make some watercolors on one of the tables on the west side of the studio, where the space is still relatively open.

BELOW: the newly cut door, and a view of the studio this morning, with it’s roof almost completed.

3:13 PM: this morning I decided to bring 9/22/2021 painting/collage to the house and hang it on the west wall of our living room. having a new painting in the house is always the acid test for determining whether it’s completed or needs more work. after living with it for a few days or weeks, it becomes clear; it’s either back to the studio for more work, or not.

clearing the decks /  by Philip Tarlow

3:40 PM: the crew constructed the roof for my storage room today.

10:31 AM: this morning the construction crew are putting the roof on my new storage space. lots of hammering, sawing and a general ruckus. tomorrow, they’ll be making a door sized hole in the south studio wall. that will create lots of dust & debris. so I proposed they build makeshift little house in the interior south studio wall, around where the door hole will be cut. then I suggested they drape that makeshift house with a tarp, so that all the dust will be contained and not settle all over the studio, potentially covering everything including paintings, brushes, etc. they think it’s a good idea, and will implement it before starting to cut the door.

so today, i’ll be clearing the stuff you see on this south wall in preparation for the BIG HOLE!

breakfast with matisse /  by Philip Tarlow

10:34 AM: this morning, as I have done on many mornings recently, I had my breakfast while perusing one of my large matisse catalogues.

as I ate & drank, I cast quick gazes at the triptych i’ve been working on and decided to put it aside for a while & work on other things. it doesn’t work for me in it’s current state.

above me to the left is a series of ‘70’s paintings in oil on linen mounted on board of a fisherman from corthi, a village on the island of andros, telling the story of a miracle that occurred when he was a child in asia minor.

I have about a dozen leftover pieces of portrait linen, all about the same size: 70 x 35” which I cut down to 35 x 35.” they are the excess pieces I cut off at the end of the 86” roll as I prepared canvas for my 26x62” series of paintings.

I think I may do something with them today. whatever it is I do will be before 3pm, when we’re going to take an afternoon walk up cottonwood trail before our early dinner.

i’ll post updates as they become available.

a rare pic of me sans hat as I have my breakfast and peruse one of my matisse catalogues.

"tools I've known 1" begins to sing /  by Philip Tarlow

tools i've known on 10-16 as it looked moments ago, after flipping the central panel 180°

2:43 PM: flipping the middle panel has made a big difference. it introduced that element of the unpredictable I keep talking about in these posts, allowing the eye to make it’s own discoveries instead of having them all laid out and ready.

so if you compare the image BELOW, from my earlier post, with this one, I think you’ll see what i’m getting at. and if you have a look at the detail on the RIGHT, you’ll see that the way that hammer form interacts with marks drawn from a photo of the most detailed human cell image to date, creating a visual experience familiar yet mysterious. of course! you’re being reminded what YOU look like under an electron microscope!

to date the most detailed human cell image obtained with X-ray radiation, nuclear magnetic resonance & cry-electron microscopy.

DETAIL, showing how the transitions from the central panel to the one on the right give the eye more freedom to roam

tools i’ve known 1 as it looked moments ago

1:12 PM: continuing to develop this new triptych, I was in a patterning mood today. so I drew from a photo I found which reveals the most detail ever achieved of the structure of a human cell.

so far, this seems to start making the composition sing, and transition from an obvious reference to my studio tools to a celebration of the human cell.

tools I've known /  by Philip Tarlow

12:48 PM: I did more on 10/15/2021 tools i’ve known 1, adding blue and filling in the canvas on the right with a hammer shape.

here, above the 3 canvases on the table, you can discern my tool drawer, which I was looking at as I made these marks.

I have more of these 16x16” blank stretched canvasses, and i’m about to take a look & see if I can find three more to paint on. i’m awaiting a delivery of more 26x62” stretcher bars in a week or so, so that I can continue the series, and this is what I may be doing in the meantime.

in a couple of hours, mikela and I will venture up the trail for the first time in more than 2 weeks. we’re both out of shape, and i’m still recovering from the after effects of our modern booster 3 days ago, so we’ll see how far we get.

10/15/2021 tools i’ve known 1 16x48” on 3 16x16” canvases

11:47 AM: I felt the need for something simple. tired of layering & scraping, I took 3 already stretched canvases, 2 white and 1 with a tan ground, placed them together on my painting table and made a drawing.

as i’ve done with my pen & ink drawings on paper, which I then cut into pieces and used for collages, I looked into my open tool drawer and began drawing, using 2 oil brushes and 2 small containers; one with a warm grey, the other with sennelier rouge coral hélios, with some gamsol turp substitute & a little neo megilp medium. this is where it’s at so far.

9/22/2021 painting/collage continued /  by Philip Tarlow

9/22/2021 painting/collage at 2:30pm

2:26 PM: the rectangular collaged newspaper in the upper right corner kept grabbing my eye; a sign that it needed modification. so I added a piece of on of my cut up ink drawings & worked into that with blue oil sticks. if you compare this with the previous state in my 12:04 post, BELOW, I think you’ll agree that the issue was successfully resolved. I especially love what happened when the collages drawing entered the back of the tennis player in red. I went into the white paper with an oil stick, creating a new shape and a slightly different red, enriching the composition and integrating her body even more into the whole.

9/22/2021 painting/collage after my modifications today

12:04 PM: work continues on 9/22/2021 painting/collage today i’m still in my morning fresh energy, so I won’t say much yet. you can compare yesterdays version with how it looks at the moment BELOW. yesterdays is on the left.

continuing improvements to 9/22/2021 painting/collage /  by Philip Tarlow

9/22/2021 painting/collage at 2pm, following modifications you can read about in my 2:01 post, below

2:01 PM: I made significant modifications to 9/22/2021 painting/collage in an unlikely atmosphere of hammering and periodically checking in with the tech guy who was trying to improve our crazy slow internet speeds.

I use the word significant because, if you compare the before and after, BELOW, you’ll notice that painting over the pink on the left has resulted in a far more coherent composition, which was my intention today. the deepening of the shadow of the jumping skate boarder; the isolation of the upper body of the dancing girl on the left and the addition of a shadow beneath her legs and the addition of the falling tennis champion’s right arm….have all made it easier for your eye to traverse the surface of this painting without getting stuck. if you make the before and after images BELOW full page, then go back & forth between the two, you’ll likely see what I mean.

DETAIL

12:02 PM: amidst the hammering of the crew building my storage space and the fluctuations in our internet speed, which is being worked on as we speak, i’m going to launch into further modifications to 9/22/2021 painting/collage, which I think can improve greatly if i’m in the right space.

here’s what it currently looks like:

a drawing in salida / preparing for a drawing exhibition / my participation in the arvada art of the state 2022 juried exhibition /  by Philip Tarlow

6:32 PM: while mikela was in the saguache high school meeting with teachers, i went to the dentist in salida, 45 minutes away. i hadn’t eaten anything and it was noon, so i went to sweeties, a cool salida bakery/lunch restaurant, had a veggie sandwich & made a quick drawing of a guy eating lunch. i started drawing a different guy with a cowboy hat, but he got up. i decided to start the new drawing on top of the first one, and it kind of works.

i liked the patterning on his jacket, so i photographed it & may draw on those patterns in my next painting.

the dentist couldn’t get to the bottom of my molar pain, and gave me 3 options, one of which was to pull the tooth, which had a root canal a year ago & i’ve had pain ever since.

i’m going to spend time considering my less extreme options and then make my decision.

while we were away, we had snow in crestone, with temperatures hovering in the high 20’s. an ealy taste of winter is not unusual at this time of fall in crestone/baca.

7:01 AM: yesterday i submitted 3 recent paintings to the arvada art of the state 2022 juried exhibition, which takes place every 3 years. i’ll post them this afternoon.

as well, i’m reviewing my drawings done ove rthe past decade in preparation for an exhibition which is in the formative stage. more about this later today.

improvements to 9/22/2021 painting/collage / work begins on construction of my studio storage space /  by Philip Tarlow

9/22/2021 painting/collage at the end of my painting day today; to be continued Wednesday morning

4:23 PM: here’s the current state of the painting, after doing a bit more since my last post. can’t be in the studio tomorrow, so i’ll resume on wednesday.

9/22/2021 painting/collage at 2pm today

2:43 PM: this painting, which I created back in september, has been on the easel or on the wall in my studio since then. I look at it every day, and have the sense that it’s not resolved. it differs from the others in this series in that it’s rectangular in shape, rather than long & narrow. so it presents a very different set of compositional challenges. painting the others was a bit like working on a frieze. this shape is, in a way, more challenging. today I added the figure of the tennis champion at the moment she learns she’s won, falling to the ground. this pose is a few seconds earlier than the one i’ve used in 10/2/2021 painting/collage., where she’s actually on the ground. here, she’s in the process of falling. so her limbs are in different positions.

BELOW you see the two stages of the tennis champion’s fall; on the left, in today’s painting, she’s on her way down, and on the right, in 9/10/2021 painting/collage, she’s fallen to the ground.

continued modifications to the right portion of 10/2/2021 painting/collage /  by Philip Tarlow

10/2/2021 painting/collage at 4pm

4:07 PM: I was never a big fan of the juggler. so I ditched him! I struggled with that figure all day yesterday & today until finally at about 3pm, I said fuck this! you might say, yeah, but you were getting somewhere integrating him into the composition. but I just wasn’t loving that figure, so working on him seemed like a chore. know what I mean?

in his place, two familiar dancing figures, who have appeared in other paintings in this series. I love their red hats, her checkered shorts, their dancing moves….it’s still in process, so we’ll see what happens in the morning. we have an international Zoom with our German friends at noon, so i’ll have to work around that. see ya then!

10/2/2021 painting/collage as it looked moments ago

2:28 PM: I may be overworking the figure of the juggler. I need to get some new canvases stretched so that I can have a couple of things to switch back & forth on and not get too attached to one or the other.

that said, I do feel that the changes I made have improved the composition as a whole. the biggest shift was in the area surrounding the head and upper body of the juggler. the black magazine cutout collaged around his head allows that form to gain equal importance as the figure of the fallen tennis player on the left, allowing the central figure of the paddler to be more of a balance point.

in the comparative images BELOW, the eye gets a little lost and confused when looking at the right side of the composition. i’ve been going back & forth about that rose area to the left of the juggler’s head, but right this moment I do feel that the dark grey shape I replaced it with is a better solution.