parade 39 32x78" at the end of my work day today
3:40 pm update: i made many changes to parade 39 today, and i'm not yet sure how i feel about them. BELOW: i have placed them side by side, with today's version on the right. if you click on one then right or left click when the image becomes full screen, you can compare them.
i'll have a better idea in the morning. in re-examining it just now, the blue backpack of the central figure definitely needs work. it's not up to speed with the painterly changes i made at all. if i take my hand & hold it in front of the backpack, the whole painting gains in coherence. but it's almost 4 pm, my energy is fading & i'd rather wait till i'm fresh tomorrow morning.
i took some ballsy risks today, most of which paid off. by ballsy i mean painting over passages that could easily have remained as they were; i just knew they could be better. in general, the reduction and toning down of the mauves has made the composition less obvious and design-ish and made the journey ones eye takes more of a subtle discovery. the semi circle of adolescent feet has more of a tribal ring.
8am update: COFFEE BEAN-TUITION
we got a ton of rain last night. our local forecaster, keno, hasn't yet made his final tally; i'll let you know when he does. but it poured all night, which might seem normal to those of you who don't live in the san luis valley. it fell as snow above 11,000 ft., increasing our snowpack to 100% +. for the farmers of the SLV this is excellent. 4pm update: we now have a total for may of 3.96 inches. that's an all time record for the month of may!
COFFEE: my coffee making and my painting advance together. breakthroughs in composition, color, paint handling and so on are mirrored by discoveries in my coffee making technique. in general, i rely more and more on my gut and leave my calculating brain at the door. so there are currently 5 jars of freshly home roasted beans, which you see above on the right. they are all african beans, in this case from ethiopia, burundi and rwanda. in the past, i would make mikela's coffee in the moka pot you see above left with one of these 5 beans, usually roasted to city+. then one day i ground too much, so i saved the ground beans for the following day.
the next day i mixed that day's bean with the left over amount from the previous day. the result was a far more interesting, complex cup than i had been getting by using only one bean at a time.
you get the picture......one thing led to another, and now i USE MY INTUITION or BEANtuition, to freely mix the beans i grind each morning, playing them like a fiddle, creating an un-repeatable blend each time, with it's own unique taste. another recent innovation in the process has been our new zojirushi thermos. it keeps the coffee as hot as when you poured it in (assuming you first let it sit for a minute with very hot water) for AT LEAST 6-8 hours!!
so i bring her 1/2 cup poured from this thermos, and she refreshes it as needed. when i make her a second thermos, about 1.5 hours later, i take half a cup for myself, which i drink with toast & feta. the second thermos is totally different from the first. combined with the fact that no two roasts are ever alike, if i used this intuitive technique for the next 100 years, no two cups would be the same.
when i bring mikela her coffee, she has NO CLUE i have entered her office, so absorbed is she in her work. in the coming few months, she will put the finishing touches on the curriculum for the BETA version of our educational startup, actionlab. at the same time, our IT team marc & ken are doing their part to have it ready for piloting in 4 to 5 middle and high schools this fall.
i hadn't intended to say so much about coffee. the last thing i'll say is that i've begun using a similar technique when i choose which beans to order from sweetmarias.com. sure, i read the description of each bean and how it's rated, but mostly, while confining my choice to african beans, which have proven to be our favorite, i use my intuition in making my final choices. and by the way, in case you hadn't read about this, the benefits of coffee made from beans roasted and ground within the past 48 hours are too many to list! after 48 hours, these health benefits decline rapidly, especially their antioxidant properties.
parade 39 (32x78") as it appeared yesterday at the end of my work day.
and now, on to parade 39! here's how i left it yesterday afternoon; let's hope the sky brightens up by the time i get to the studio.