ano kato 50 continued /  by Philip Tarlow

ano kato 50, 40x45 1/2” at the end of my painting day today

2:20 PM: it got very cloudy & started raining, making it hard to see the colors, and since i prefer not using artificial lighting, i’m stopping here for the day.

i got started on the second paddler,including his yellow paddle, and added some highlights to the shoulders & arm of the paddler in blue. i’m going even slower than usual with this one, painting into it only when i feel the energy surge. while i’m taking breaks, i look at the family photos i found in my loft yesterday, especially this one of my grandma on my father’s side, shot in about 1948. i cropped it from a larger photo, which you also see here. i hadn’t noticed the amazong look on her face until i isolated it. this may be the first time i’m getting what an extraordinary woman she was. as a teen, she escaped from russia just in time to avoid being slaughtered.

11:44 AM: this morning i continued work on ano kato 50, starting the drawing for a second, red headed paddler. i’ll keep working & post when i’m further along.

ano kato 50 transforms /  by Philip Tarlow

ano kato 50 as it looked today at the end of my day in the studio.

3:25 PM: today i was in a mood. you know by now, that usually means i’m going to paint over what i did the previous day. which i did, after flipping it 180°.

i used a light yellow with a little pink in it, then scraped & put it up on the east wall. scraping got rid of a lot of the liquidy stuff, but there was just enough left to create some beautiful drips, which i couldn’t have planned better. i was inspired to make a third version of the paddlers, with the 2 previous compostions i painted over the past 2 days faintly peeking through and adding, in my opinion, greatly to the composiiton, which had become far too complex. but it was compelling to work on, and somewhere in the back of my mind, i knew it would dissapear in 24 hours.

why are upside down calligraphic japanese letters so wondrerful? and hows about that upside down couple on the right, who appear to be engaging in suggestive behavior? actually, they are a couple hugging each other in the athens acropolis museum! the diagonals in this composition, by the way, also originate with photos i shot at that museum,which had opened just a few months before our visit. the floor is transparent, revealing the ancient ruins below just below the visitors’ feet.

i originally photographed the paddlers from a bridge in alamosa, 50 miles south of us. of course i loved that i was looking at them from above. but more than that, there was something in that moment i identified with, i can’t say exactly what. i shot more than one photo. i have no idea where that folder is, but i’m going to search for it tonight.

i’ll pick it up again tomorrow after our 2 hour morning trail walk.

ANO KATO 50, day 2 /  by Philip Tarlow

3:31 PM: i took ano kato 50 to the next level today, but i’m too close to it right now to evaluate what i did. i definitely love the colors: the pink is cool alongside the blues. i’m just not sure yet about including elements of taiga landscapes with the views from above of the acropolis museum, works or not. there’s a kind of comic book quality to it, in the good sense, mostly because of the blues, pinks and the yellow stripes on the right. the more i look at it, from about 15 feet, the more i like it. i think allowing it to become more abstracted than the previous two: red door & desde arriba is making it a more interesting & fun to look at.

starting ano kato 50 /  by Philip Tarlow

3:54 PM: i finally got my artist statment & photos together for the poster, sent them off as emails, & discovered today that the cmc aspen director didn’t get them! so i’m going to re-send tonight.

for the first time in way too many days, i was able to actually paint! i’m painting over one of my motion series of creekscapes, and this one is titled ano kato 50. here i am at work on it. more later; now i have to work on re-sending those 8 emails.

artist statement /  by Philip Tarlow

5:09 PM: today i began working on my artist statement, due by wednesday. i started out talking about the title i chose: jestur.i included this tadrart acacus, libya cave art painting of a giraffe. and i quoted picasso, who famously exclaimed “after altimira, all is decadence.” i m trying making the point that great art is one, and spans the ages. this painting of a giraffe could be in a contemporary new york gallery and many would believe it was done this year.

plein air photos /  by Philip Tarlow

6:08 PM: after locating the photos i spoke about and posted yesterday; all potential candidates for the poster. today i searched successfully for plein air painting photos. here’s some of what i found in my cloud files. they’re all shot during the fall months; most likely october, which, in terms of weather, is the ideal time for plein air painting. you can see that i’m dressed warmly for the invigorating fall temperatures in the upper ‘40’s/low ‘50’s.

so how, you might ask, did i shoot these photos since i was by myself? by setting my shutter to a 20 second delay and propping it up on a tree branch. after a few tries, i got the shots i wanted.

a selection of photographs for cmc aspen to use in creating a poster for the show /  by Philip Tarlow

5:49 PM: i have a deadline for getting this selection of photos in so that they have time to select the one or ones they will ultimately use for the poster. i’m not terribly organized, so there was a lot of hunting and searching through desktop folders in order to come up with these. i’ likely narrow them down to just five or six, which is what they requested. my next step will be to create an artists statement. i’ve done this for exhibitions in the past, but now i have a different perspective, which my new statement will reflect.

a selection of "gaze" series paintings for the aspen show /  by Philip Tarlow

this morning i selected 6 paintings from my 2014 series of vermeer & fayum inspired gaze series of paintings. they will be included in the cmc aspen exhibition. it should be pretty clear to you that the two on the upper right are inspired by 1st c. fayum portraits, whereas the rest were inspired by 17th c. vermeer portraits, such as the one below; vermeer’s most famous portrait which hangs in the mauritshuis, the the hague.

VERMEER: girl with a pearl earing, 1665

2 studies of 1st c. fayum portraits i made in the british museum in 1972. the museum director allowed me to sit in front of these two paintings with my oil paints while i made the studies.