Satisfaction is completing a painting that takes you to a new place.
Every move becomes italized, accentuated, saturated with intention and experience. A rush can seem like slow motion.
Silver lines- thick profile curves cover burnt orange and filagree silver chiaroscuro lines which define my white thought-bubble forms like a photographic overlay. More layers of white intensify the white and sky blue returns for a few accents.
I had prepared some black but none was necessary. The pre-existing 4 black vertical lines were enough.
The complex experience of completion- enjoying it and questioning it at the same time- is bittersweet. I could fiddle but it might not help, so I resist that temptation.
I paint sitting on the floor, Japanese Style, with my painting leaning against the wall so that it is part of my closest environment. It captures the drips. I keep some of the drips and edit other ones. My final move is to hang my wet painting on the wall and it separates from me.
While I painted today I listened to Ekhart Tolle's web-cast with Oprah Winfrey. Eckhart's philosophy hels me to focus and to feel calm and centered.
Now I understand the concept of being 2 related beings- the person making my work and the person witnessing me making my work. This concept is a creative approach I learned by studying acting- of having 2 symbiotic side-by-side beings- the person that is me and the person that is my character.
My paintings are my characters that I inhabit and make real. I am always there beside them. The synthesis of these two related entities is the result.
Immersing myself in this process has opened me up to new information, new experience.
Previously, I had gone through several months of frustration and negativity- my longest period of not painting in over 20 years. I was stuck and I thought I had nothing more to paint. I had become too mental. And I had focused on the external challenges that do not really matter.
Finally I broke through my own resistance. I reconnected to my Power Lines.
Long LIVE Power Lines.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Power Lines
Continuing with my 5 x 4 foot painting. Thinking of titling it "Power Lines."
Driving past a huge metal structure that holds power lines, I saw a small sign someone had put on it reading- "Higher Power" with an arrow pointing upward. That's the best thing I've ever read about Higher Power.
I relate this painting to that recent memory. My experience of what others seem to think of as Higher Power is through the act of creation. Interconnected and invisible infromation made manifest as a physical fragment of a larger unseen whole.
Reinforced the whites and added in ribbons of light blue to bring in the sky. Kept editing it down- something I do when I write here as well- eliminating the excess information.
It's not complete yet. Usually I finish in a gesture that seems to tie all the loose ends together and continues to edit out unnecessary gesture and form. Hopefully that will happen soon.
There's a resonance with certain paintings I have made, like "Telescope" from 1996 and "Hemisphere" also from the mid 90's. I'm returning to the full spectrum with white gesture but am using much less black than in those earlier painting. Instead of black is the more mutable Silver, which I'm probably going to be adding more of tomorrow.
The scallop shapes at the bottom and top of "Power Lines" are a perceptual and spatial device I have been using to set up and set off the field of the gesture and color.
The visual Buzz is happening.
Driving past a huge metal structure that holds power lines, I saw a small sign someone had put on it reading- "Higher Power" with an arrow pointing upward. That's the best thing I've ever read about Higher Power.
I relate this painting to that recent memory. My experience of what others seem to think of as Higher Power is through the act of creation. Interconnected and invisible infromation made manifest as a physical fragment of a larger unseen whole.
Reinforced the whites and added in ribbons of light blue to bring in the sky. Kept editing it down- something I do when I write here as well- eliminating the excess information.
It's not complete yet. Usually I finish in a gesture that seems to tie all the loose ends together and continues to edit out unnecessary gesture and form. Hopefully that will happen soon.
There's a resonance with certain paintings I have made, like "Telescope" from 1996 and "Hemisphere" also from the mid 90's. I'm returning to the full spectrum with white gesture but am using much less black than in those earlier painting. Instead of black is the more mutable Silver, which I'm probably going to be adding more of tomorrow.
The scallop shapes at the bottom and top of "Power Lines" are a perceptual and spatial device I have been using to set up and set off the field of the gesture and color.
The visual Buzz is happening.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Making 2 paintings as a dialogue. One is 30 x 40, the other one is 60 x 48. Oil on linen.
Returning to color after a period of painting in white, silver, and tan tones.
Color seems to welcome into it form, floating globules in these paintings, with underlayers of brighter color. The pleasure of putting down color and allowing it to be expressed, removing myself as much as I can from the process, comes with the experience of doubt and anxiety of precedent.
Painting as a medium seems heavy but juicy. In the paintings I am making now, I am seeking to lighten it up.
Over my whites, I introduced a line-work of magentas that brighten the whites, making them seem more physical to me. Some of the light, white globules had tones of other colors in them- light greens and yellows. I layered over a tiny amount of pink to pop them.
It started to feel sensual and I thought of late DeKooning and Rubens. Wanting to hump it. But there's a counter-balancing tension of ultramarine and black.
The polarity and the tension of experience keep coming back to me as a way to making something that I like. Skin and Asphalt. splattered and rearranged. Reconfigured, Re-Animated. Fragmented, Fractured, Disected and Devastated- and putting it back together again and again.
The defiance to express feeling good and doing one's best to avoid the Void.
Rarified, welcoming pleasure. Fucking and feeling good.
Returning to color after a period of painting in white, silver, and tan tones.
Color seems to welcome into it form, floating globules in these paintings, with underlayers of brighter color. The pleasure of putting down color and allowing it to be expressed, removing myself as much as I can from the process, comes with the experience of doubt and anxiety of precedent.
Painting as a medium seems heavy but juicy. In the paintings I am making now, I am seeking to lighten it up.
Over my whites, I introduced a line-work of magentas that brighten the whites, making them seem more physical to me. Some of the light, white globules had tones of other colors in them- light greens and yellows. I layered over a tiny amount of pink to pop them.
It started to feel sensual and I thought of late DeKooning and Rubens. Wanting to hump it. But there's a counter-balancing tension of ultramarine and black.
The polarity and the tension of experience keep coming back to me as a way to making something that I like. Skin and Asphalt. splattered and rearranged. Reconfigured, Re-Animated. Fragmented, Fractured, Disected and Devastated- and putting it back together again and again.
The defiance to express feeling good and doing one's best to avoid the Void.
Rarified, welcoming pleasure. Fucking and feeling good.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
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