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.

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.