scroll down to view recent best left unsaid paintings.
last night we had 4 dinner guests. it was a lively evening. dan, just back from burning man, told many stories of his adventures. as soon as he walked in the door, i said "something is different about your face; it seems more open." indeed, he had had a significant and unexpected experience of release while there which, once he told the story, made perfect sense to me.
i had brought the 16x16" best left unsaid 3 and 4 over from the studio and hung them one on top of the other just next to the dinner table. i didn't say a word, but lilly began commenting on the unusual perspective, which opened the door for a discussion of the finished/unfinished topic. scroll down to my 9/7 post to read more about this.
so anyway i was left feeling i'm on to something with this series. when lilly commented on how difficult it must be to draw and paint foreshortening, i said exactly what i wrote a few posts ago: "foreshortening is in my DNA!" as for the finished/unfinished conversation, i told the following story as an illustration of my thinking on the topic of what is finished?
during the early part of my 15 years in greece, for most ordinary people there were no business transactions that were not transacted using cash or barter. there were as yet no credit cards and nobody used checks, as they were deemed untrustworthy. so if you were buying a car, you'd show up at the dealer or individual selling the car with a wad of drachmas. if you were building a house, for example, in the small village of paiania, half hour outside of athens, where we had purchased a small, old, traditional stone house to use on weekends, you would build as much of the house as you could pay for with cash, and then add rooms when you were flush again.
as a result, out in the countryside you'd see lots of "half-finished" houses, with reebar sticking out somewhere, usually on the roof, in anticipation of a second story when there was more cash available. this was a kind of "look," and for me as an artist, there was a certain beauty to it. I hadn't yet thought about "unfinished" as an aesthetic or had the experience of seeing the gere collection at the 2000 frick museum exhibition titled "a brush with nature," which i refer to in my 9/7 post and where for the first time i became conscious of the beauty of "unfinished" 19th c. plein air paintings.
now if you were a kid growing up in such an "unfinished" house, this was your reality. dad built as much as he could afford. then, when another baby was on the way and maybe dad had more cash, another bedroom would be added on. and so it went. the house, in this kid's experience, was NEVER finished, and ALWAYS finished! what that kid experienced, what his reality was, was PROCESS! sure, it's finished now that we built this new room, but in five or six years, there would probably be another round of building.
to get back to painting, for whatever reason, i just love this "unfinished" aesthetic. and, as i've said before in these posts, there were many times in about 2005, when i was preparing new work for my 2006 solo show at skoufa gallery in athens, when i paused at a point where the painting was about 1/3 complete, and admired the quality of that look, but didn't dare stop. except in one instance when it was just too tempting. that 1/3 "finished" piece was the very first to sell once the show opened. i was surprised, but thought no more about it until recently. and thus the "best left unsaid" series was born. it too is part of a PROCESS, which is my life as an artist.
i'll add some photos illustrating this point as soon as i get over to my studio.
1:30pm below, the "unfinished" painting that sold first in the 2006 skoufa gallery solo show.i mention above. and on the right, an early stage of a painting fro the same show which, in retrospect, could have been left at this point in the process and, from my current vantage point, would have been more interesting.
we'll be leaving soon for meetings in alamosa, 50 miles south of crestone. more tomorrow....
