"4/22/25 ano kato" and "the miracle"....next stage /  by Philip Tarlow

the miracle, 32x36” oil on portrait linen, as she looked at the end of my painting day today

3:32 PM: in case you hadn’t noticed, my recent work tends to go through daily transformations….radical transformations. so today, for example, both of these paintings are not at all what they were yesterday. and yet, they are! the layers, the scraping, the painting over again and again, allows me and, more importantly the painting tofind where it needs to go next.

so the miracle as it was before i painted over it yeasterday, is all the better now that i scraped and rubbed away yesterday’s layer of white. some of that white has, inevitably, remained , softening what was too harsh; had too much contrast. the goal always is to reach that place where the viewer’s eye can wander frely over the composition without getting stuck on a particular detail.

in 4/22/25 ano kato, the drawing i made yesterday of a tsaatan woman riding her reindeer, has almost but not quite dissapeared. but enough of it remains, now that i flipped the canvas 360, that, for example the reindeer’s antlers are incorporated into the new architectural composition. it wil become clearer when i take this one to the next stage, that the architecture here is an ancient pompeiian interior in italy.

4/22/25 ano kato, oil on portrait linen, at 3pm today

at work on “4/22/25 ano kato” and “the miracle” / the Tsaatan people of Mongolia /  by Philip Tarlow

4/22/25 ano kato 32×36” oil on portrait linen, as she looked following this morning’s drawing

the miracle, 32×36”, as she looked following this afternoon’s white-over & scraping

1:55 PM: i resumed work on my two most recent paintings, going back and forth between the two so as not to get stuck on one or the other. following my morning investigation of the tsaatan, a Turkic community of nomadic reindeer herders in northern Mongolia, i was inspired to white-over the miracle and then scrape into it with sweeping, calligraphic strokes using one of my palette knives.

4/22/25 ano kato: i made a drawing in oil of a tsaatan woman mounted on her reindeer directly over the colored pencil drawings, with two of the figures enveloped in blue. where i brought both these paintings could easily be left as is…..we’ll see.

i’m stopping here for the day. as mikela often asks me: “did the same artist make both of these paintings??”

The Tsaatan, also known as the Dukha, are a Turkic community of nomadic reindeer herders in northern Mongolia, specifically in the Khovsgol Province near the Siberian border. They are the last remaining reindeer herders in the world and are known for their traditional lifestyle deeply intertwined with reindeer domestication. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE9I-FyBpZI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeMcBB9wCPE

"the miracle" / day 2 of “4/22/25 ano kato” /  by Philip Tarlow

1:03 PM: after working more on the miracle, i continued work on 4/22/25 ano kato, which i started yesterday with a colored pencil drawing. it, too is 32x36” and i’m curious to see if and how i integrate all those figures into one unified composition while maintining a lot of the white space.

day 2 of 4/22/25 ano kato, 32x36” oil on porrtrait linen

the miracle, 32x36” oil on portrait linen, as she looked today at noon

11:38 AM: i arrived in the studio very early, at 7:20 AM, which is when mikela had to leave for school. while i was prepared and ready to work on a new painting, i was drawn back in to the miracle! i made a number of modifications, and i’ll need a day or so to evaluate what i did.

so now maybe i can finally get to work on 4/22/25 ano kato!

BELOW: the miracle as she looked yesterday, on the left, and today

contnued work on "the miracle" /  by Philip Tarlow

the miracle, 32x36” oil on portrait linen, as she looked at the end of my painting day today

2:45 PM: i decided today that the miracle needed more work, so i launched in this morning, and i think it’s now a better painting.

starting "4/22/25 ano kato" /  by Philip Tarlow

4/22/25 ano kato, 32x36” colored pencil on extra fine portrait linen

2:09 PM: i started a new painting titled 4/22/25 ano kato, which is the same dimensions as the miracle, (32x36”) which i completed yesterday. thus far, it’s a colored pencil drawing on extra fine portrait linen. the 7 figures are all inspired by various photos i’ve shot over time. the one in the lower left is mikela watering plants.

"the miracle" continued /  by Philip Tarlow

the miracle, 32x36” oil on portrait linen, as she looked at the end of my painting day

2:17 PM: one more scrape & whiteover, resulting in a suggestive surface awaiting definition & direction. this is my favorite of all the dancers i’ve painted and have photos of. he interacts gracefully with all that peeks through around him. and the female dancer to his right , with her checkered dress, lends balance., as do the red marks left & right.

what was once the back of a wicker chair now reads as what might be a blackboard with an algebra formula. what were green leaves yesterday now read as a vertical whale. and what was a ceiling light has transformed into a tamborine.

hey, what happened to “the miracle?” / "WATERCOLOR/COLLAGE 108," tweaks /  by Philip Tarlow

the miracle, 32x36” oil on portrait linen, as she looked at the end o fmy painitng day today

3:03 PM: it started last night. i looked at what i had done yesterday, attempting to recreate a 1979 painting, a 1979 spirit, and i knew it had to go the way of other paintings i’ve started and then painted over. that canvas was unwieldy anyway, unstretched as it was. trying to get it from my painting table to the wall was a struggle.

so i cut it in half, and now i’m working on a 32x36” canvas, with the miracle beginnnings flipped upside down and the was, as of now remainting figure standing, as it were , on his head.

i’d been eyeing an old photo collage i have of an interior, lord knows where, that i photographed in the days before digital. i had the prints made and collaged the 10 to12 4x6” photos, creating a long narrow image of the rich interior. so this is now day one, but i’m still calling it the miracle. and it will be one if a decent painting comes out of it!

12:11 PM: this morning i made sometweaks to watercolor/collage 108, which was created a few months ago. there’s a collaged map in the center of the composition which was too dominant, so i collaged over it and added some marks in colored pencil, with the desired result that one’s eye doesn’t get stuck on that map. i think it’s vastly improved, and consider it one of my stronger pieces from that period.

i tried locating the original version in my files, but couldn’t find it. so i renamed it watercolor/collage 108.

watercolor/collage 108, 2025 31x27.75 cm. watercolor & collage on arches watercolor paper

"the miracle 2025" day 2 /  by Philip Tarlow

2:35 PM: today i added a second figure to the composition. the composition is 78” wide, and i’ve been working on it spread out on my painting table. but after adding the second figure, i wanted to get a sense of how it looks tacked to the wall. so i figured out a way to bring it over and tack it up, which was tricky, since the paint is still wet and it’s so big.

i decided that seven fisherman figures, which are in the original (see yesterday’s post) were too many, so i chose 5 of the 7 to be in this composition. they follow the history of frangos’ story of the miracle, the fifth one all the way to the right, being the moment of revelation, where he bows his head in acknowledgement perhaps of the brilliant power of divine intervention.

"The Miracle" /  by Philip Tarlow

the miracle, 2025, 38x83” this is the first fisherman figure on day one.

3:50 PM: i got started today on the miracle, 2025 38x83” the canvas is 78” wide, so this is just the first of what will probably be five or six figures, rather than the seven in the original.

the miracle, 14 1/2 x 49”, oil on canvas mounted on board, 1979

1:06 PM: this morning i took the miracle, 14 1/2 x 49” oil on canvas mounted on board, out of my storage room with the intention of creating a new , more accurate image for my files. as well, i’m planning on making a new version, incorportaing all that i’ve learned since 1979, when it was painted.

the miracle was inspired by my experience with frangos, a fisherman from the village of corthi, on andros, greece. i spotted him emerging from his fishing boat with fresh caught fish, which he was about to sell to nonas, whose little seaside restaraunt was just a few hundred feet from my andros studio in the plakoura.

when i approached him with my camera, he unexpectedly launched into his experience years ago of a miracle. it was 46 years ago, and if i took notes at the time, i have no idea where they are, so i can’t tell you what exactly what that miracle was.

once my friend marika developed the photos i shot, i worked from 7 of them in my athens studio at the time, where frangos tells his story and, in the 7th one, rests, hands by his side, his head surrounded by a celestial light, with a flower at his feet. this was my way of giving the viewer a little taste of the awe i experienced in that moment.

"dancers" was stretched this morning /  by Philip Tarlow

dancers, 32x22” oil on portrait linen, march, 2025, was stretched today

12:13 PM: a special, very thin stretcher bar with brace arrived yesterday for dancers, 32x22” which was painted back in march. i didn’t leave enough canvas because i thought i’d end the painting where you see the pencil marks. but after mikela came and looked at it, i realized i’d be cutting off some of the richness of this composition, so i had to order a custom made, very thin stretcher bar, allowing me just enough room to include the edges of the composition, which would have been a real shame to lose. so here she is, stretched.