2:30 PM: here's the current state of gaze 23 as i prepare to clean my brushes & leave for my appointment.
i learned a lot from my earlier version of vermeer's girl with a flute. and i am convinced more than ever that vermeer was no different than any of us painterly painters, in that he delighted in fabrics or surfaces whose texture and way of catching the light provide us with the ideal playground for flourishing our brushes. this is, i believe one of the greatest values for a painterly painter. i feel increasingly that the abstract, in and of itself, can't hold a candle to the process of transforming elements in the "real" world into juicy, delicious, sexually provocative gestures where paint meets canvas.
1:12 PM: current state of gaze 23 re-visited. it's a riff on a detail of vermeer's girl with a flute. i'll paint for about another hour before cleaning my brushes and leaving my studio to get to a 3:30 appointment.
i knew when i made the changes i did 2 days ago that it would provide an ideal ground for whatever image i chose to paint. there's already a version of this, which is gaze 20. you can find it if you scroll down my home page.
9:12 AM in about an hour i'll continue work on gaze 23, which i painted over a few days ago. below: a draft of my proposal for a gaze show in germany.