Comfort food for thought

I was right about something yesterday: the looming threat came true. I went through all the stages I promised myself, then I got all painterly and compositional and lost track. Now I have three dead-end little pieces, I went to some trouble photographing them at all their stages, but now I'll just dump them.

Not all is lost though. Through working all day I noticed something which was happening during a stage of the previous process, which I decided to take advantage of. These work better; I will take them to wherever they might go. Next, I'll work again on paper, but on a more comfortable, larger size. After that, acrylic on smooth shiny board. Some hastily taken photos. The pieces are much blacker; red and blue are fluorescent, acrylic on paper:

A hard, thick piece of board

Made a trip to Home Depot for a nice, prefabricated 4’x2’ board. It would be interesting to stop painting on canvas for a while. The movement of wet paint on a hard, smooth surface, like on this board, should be quite different than on canvas. I’ll make two pieces out of this -- if what develops looks interesting, I will adjust the scale.
I would like to see the sequence of paint layers be more obvious, and this surface will help. The bottom layer of paint will be a warmish, coming-forward (but not too much) kind of color, perhaps near-red, and show only in very small areas. The colors cutting in around it will vary, in a transition from the edges toward the center. They will range from warm to cool, allowing the cut-in red to appear to come forward or to recede, depending on its location.
These moves will, I hope, produce more clarity and emphasize the ambiguities. I think that I might loose some of the field-of-color “thing” of my previous pieces, but hey, its just all black anyway.
I feel a bit tense about the process. This is probably not too good, so I will have to work on (shiny) paper a few times to fall in to it. The biggest looming, scary threat: I will get all emotional and compositional if I'm handling and dipping in to the world of painterly transitions.
Yes, that's the answer; make good preparations for my preparations. Need to arrive at a point where I can establish a process, which I can then follow mechanically.

Aftermath

That evening, last feed before the winter storm:



Then yesterday morning, in the aftermath of an all night snow:



A gutter would be good here:


And now, today...





Not a bad set-up for Christmas Day. Some of the coldest weather of the year, so far.
I will soon tire of taking photos of the snow.

Events from today; some snow calling for a vertical composition:




A very bright Christmas Day. Cold, strong, sharp wind, but bright...
Shadows from a batch of bamboos on snow:

A cold December day...

...the little convection heater is whirling in the studio while I fumble around the house waiting patiently for it to become habitable over there.

I find it uncomfortable hovering in that time and space between being clear in my mind about what I need to do, and having access to doing it. My father learned from experience to be equipped with a pen and notebook at all times, and never face the horror of missing the essence of some inspired idea. He constructed special little holders inside his jackets, which contained a notebook and a collection of multicolored pens (for color-coding his ideas), so avoiding these all-important items from getting tangled with the mundane objects which inhabited his pockets -- always ready for the quick draw.

I, meanwhile, am working with large objects, canvasses and their like. The notion of the process is glowing within me, but will it remain uncorrupted over time? It feels familiar, like trying to hang on to the recollection of a dream. The recollection is so different at first awakening, then altered later in the morning, then again later in the day.




Red2
I completed this piece a year or so ago, but never felt that it realized its full potential. Big monster, hard to move around the studio, but it sure is dry now, and ready to continue its journey.

Deep breath

A gasp from all those waiting for a new blog about abstract, minimalist, and (almost, but nowhere near) monochromatic painting. And to be even more pompous, I must add that I will dwell about the act of doing art. I will also write about the attendant events which feed and distract from the main event.