2:34: woman in landscape following a few tweaks in the past hour. if you compare the upper central region, you will notice a yellow ochre/tan addition, which adds needed warmth, and a slight reduction in intensity of some of the red marks, which were a bit too dominant, and drew the eye to them at the expense of the whole composition, which now, in person at least, reads as one coherent whole. rocks and water are still clearly the main characters in this story. so, is this an abstract painting? lyrical abstraction is one term that might fit.
1 PM: upon entering the studio, my first glance at the revised and re-revised woman in landscape told me that it was, well....blah! no chi.
DETAIL of woman in landscape
so i scrapped my plan for starting a new painting and continued work on this one. the very first thing i did, and i'll admit there was some anger in my passionate movements, was to scratch and scrape the surface of this poor, delicate portrait linen until i practically made a tear in it. but that created movement, and a few deKooning-esque passages. they remind me somewhat of one of my heroes: dekooning because they have that drawing in motion feel of some of his woman series paintings, which by the way also have some level of anger. but, unlike dekooning, i wasn't feeling anger at women; rather a kind of frustration at the process, and how, no matter how much you think you know what's what, you most certainly don't! so you just keep pressing in, pressing into it, until it sings. or so you think....and the process continues.
and, if successful, you look at it a few weeks or months later and say to yourself, "did i do that? how the fuck did i do that?"
well, you didn't! and that's the whole point, isn't it?
BELOW: detail of one of dekooning's women series paintings:
BELOW: the evolution of woman in landscape, arranged chronologically starting on the upper left (december 2, 2017)
8:15 AM: a few hours i'll be back in the studio starting the process of creting a new painting in my 2017-18 landscape series. that will mean un-stretching one of the 38x36" paintings i feel can be sidelined and cutting & stretching a new piece of portrait linen.
in the mean time, as i complete my coffee shenanigans, i shot this pic of a 1999 gouache on paper, which sits comfortably protected from the sun, on our kitchen counter.
updates on the new painting will be posted as the day progresses.