The painting continues

Spent the whole morning in the studio today. How marvelous! Delicious! Difficult!

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in the studio and finished a canvas (photos to come), today I started a new canvas. I have to keep these straight…

This new one is number 5 I believe.

Here’s where I started:

the croton falls reservoir. I had written in the promontory by scratching into the paint. I liked adding the text component.

but it didn’t stay long. the painting looked too literal

I added an image transfer of my dad and me and the cellular topo forms had to come back.

but still not far enough.

new forms are coming in. they are in the lower left corner. they represent splitting, loss, tearing.

I used numbers in the piece as well, numbers with meaning. My old zip code and street, as well as 309 from the croton falls reservoir map. I know this piece isn’t done yet, but how far I’ve come– from amorphous shapes to a growing personal vocabulary. It is so exciting. And I still am not where I want to be yet. Onward, just keep painting and layering and painting over!

Yes another canvas!

Well here’s a far cry from the landscape beginning. This is just a base painting:

Yikes, where did all that come from? It was an explosion of painting, perhaps years of pent up desire to put stuff down, no matter what. But don’t worry it was always just to be a base, so here’s where it goes:

to this:

I feel closer to where I want to be, but still not quite there yet. As a flyer I put it into a juried show just to market test it, so to speak. I also put in a mixed media work like what I was doing just as I was thinking about painting again:

No surprise, the old mixed media piece got in, and the new (AND UNRESOLVED!!!) work did not.

This was akin to my other piece I sold, entitled “For R”:

You see the motifs of circles and the cell structures etc. that I have been doing for a few years now. They came out in my mandala work a few years back, and this was where they had gone at this point. But now, here I was on a new mission with my new paintings. Still not there yet.

Meanwhile as I am teaching a Creative Visual Journaling class, I run into new motifs and realize the cell structures/topography have to do with the oneness/separation of my father and me as well as my daughter and me. Issues come up of abandonment and loss. Creative Visual Journaling is not for the faint of heart, but oh, is it powerful! I am thinking of old imagery to combine into my new work. Image transfers? Maybe. Back to mixed media? Maybe. So I went back to that other canvas and here’s what I did this week:

EXCITING things are happening. I unfortunately have been taking these pictures with my iPhone 3G. You can’t get the detail and the underlayment showing through, but this piece is going to go through a lot of metamorphosis still, so stay tuned. I’ll keep you posted. Thank god I am doing this, I wouldn’t be able to keep these stages straight otherwise! I can’t wait to get in the studio and continue. Will my father appear in the next iteration? One never knows what the muse will do. All I need to do is show up in the studio.

I’m off and runnning, but where you ask?

I was hooked again, I couldn’t get enough painting. I was in the studio painting one canvas, taking a picture, painting another canvas, taking a picture, etc. every hour I could find. I’m working with line and topographic elements and my cellular structures and layering paint and trying to work out colors and making all kinds of decisions. Here’s an interim look at what I was working on with the various canvases (I am voracious):

another painting

Yes, I know they are hideous, but they are layers. They are sketchbooks where I try out ideas. I get to see what works and what doesn’t, what I like and what I don’t and I keep painting on top even with areas I like. That’s the hard part. Risk. Not being safe. It’s all good.

Here’s where it took me, and keep in mind I am still not done!

to this:

and another:

I’m still nowhere where I want to be, but I am encouraged. Dan shows me how to work with my surface texture and paint application techniques, and I explore the forms I think are working. I am liking scratching and revealing what is underneath the surface and drawing by removing paint. Oooh, yum. I like the topographic elements and how they reference my cellular structures too. Here’s a detail:

This is where I want to be going, I love the way this looks, just this spot. OK so on to another canvas…

So it begins-with a landscape?

The first step was quite a surprise. My studio mate Sharon Nakazato and I went to Baxter Road nearby to try out plein air work as a test for a future plein air date for charity. We wanted to see what supplies we would be missing and how it would work, so we went to nearby Baxter Road, a beautiful pastureland where horsemen and women ride and people walk their dogs. Fields and trees, hills and dales. We found some hay bales a ways into the back fields and set up. I tried painting with watercolor the view. I wanted to abstract it, but kept getting caught in the description of the landscape and going representational. OK so maybe we do the abstracting back in the studio…

In my first class with Dan Becker I showed him the watercolor and I turned it sideways and said I wanted to start from there. So I did, on a big canvas. Here’s the watercolor and my derivation on canvas:

Here’s the 24″ x 36″ canvas I painted from the watercolor:

And, as I am a fan of cropping the best composition and area I like, here’s the detailed area I decided to go with as the first composition:

So this is my starting place. Where I want to be is another thing entirely, but I’m on the path…

I know this is very Diebenkorn-like, and I like that quality, but I don’t want to paint like Diebenkorn. So I take what I like from this and what I can learn from what I have done and I go from there. Dan recommended I work on a few canvases simultaneously and work larger. He said he could tell that I am more comfortable working large (how did he know I used to do 6-8′ canvases in art school?). So I bought myself 6 36″ x 48″ canvases and started three new ones, using this composition as a starting place for one of them. I had been working with map imagery in my printmaking and am interested in the lines and the topography from them, so I wanted to add that element, so I roughed in one of my new canvases:

And another:

And I added the topographic element to it:

Now I was working with different ideas and forms and techniques, areas that I liked….

Back to Painting: The process

I just needed to get back to painting. There seems so much that I want to do with it, and really find my voice. I have been mixing media and printmaking and doing visual journals, but painting is my first love and I want to get to that visceral place where my abstraction is compelling and and my expression enigmatic. I want it to convey glimpses of thought/memory/idea/feeling. I want it to reach people in a place beyond words. Because that is what I want to describe, that place where we KNOW, but cannot quite articulate. Perception. Existence. What it means to be human and be in the world.

At some point I will be able to articulate that. It is ineffable though. The struggle to do so is the process that I love. Paint has texture, color, shape, stroke, gesture, layer, transparency/opacity, line, composition to work in it’s favor to convey this idea.

So I am going back to class. Studying with Dan Becker at the Ridgefield Guild of Artists. He gets me. We speak the same language. I appreciate his comments and assistance and his pushing me. I like being challenged and stretched and I needed someone to help me do that. It couldn’t be done in the studio in a vacuum.

In the pursuit of trying to understand that wonderful striving, in my baby steps of getting back to my painting roots, I will show you the journey visually. Where a painting comes from and where it goes.

This is the first installment of that process.

One of my favorite things

I love this collage. It has everything I like in a piece of art, some everyday objects (security envelope), layers of paper and transparent elements, as well as text. It is dynamic in it’s composition and has great energy. Don’t you agree?

Post two

Today I am making myself make a post. I really like the idea of putting out photos mostly of things that inspire me. So here’s three for today.

I don’t know why it won’t make a vertical image vertical, so I will work on that, but tilt your head until then. So what do these images have to do with one another? That’s the question, and for me, my reality.

First post

This is my first blog post and I am excited as I am sure everyone is who starts a blog. What are my expectations? It is a bit scary to share with the world at large. Will this be a process journal about my art? Will it be more of a sketchbook? Yes to both. Don’t expect a lot of personal stuff here. For that you need to get to know me personally. Okay, so let’s start. I want to post some photos of things that inspire me. Then, I will edit the format of this blog so it looks halfway decent.