12/10/18 4:42 PM at the end of my painting day today
2:37 PM: i’m stopping here for the day. i can’t wait to get back to it tomorrow morning. this style of painting is very familiar to me from my 15 years of painting in greece. my friend/mentor yannis tsarouchis and my former mother-in-law, the late niki karagatsi, introduced me to the technique of applying a tinted ground and painting over it, giving the entire image a unity & coherence otherwise impossible to attain. this was, of course, based upon byzantine prototypes. so, after their introduction, i also studies byzantine icons carefully, both in museums, private homes and on mt. athos, where i stayed for about a week.
i have hundreds if not thousands of photos i’ve taken of the evening sky, mostly as viewed form our house in the baca grande. many of them will be candidates for future paintings, which one day will hang together in an exhibition of sky paintings. it would be cool to have this exhibition in a large gallery or museum, with one room devoted to sky paintings, another to motion paintings and a third devoted to the on site plein air paintings in gouache on paper, which serve as inspiration for the entire motion and post-motion series. that would tell the story of this segment of my life and work. hopefully i’ll be alive and kicking so that i could give a few talks about the whole process, and acknowledge my mentors for their inspiration and support!
at work this morning on 12/10/18 4:42 PM
1:35 PM: this morning i started work on a 32x32” painting on primed linen. this is the first in a new series of paintings based upon the numerous photos i’ve taken of crestone/baca skies, mostly around sunset. this particular one, which was shot at the same date & time as the title, was rather unusual in the layering of dark clouds, light clouds & blue sky. it’s being painted over a thin acrylic siena ground, which i applied yesterday, it’s kind of a nice relief from the intensity of the abstracted creek paintings i’ve been making as part of my post-motion series. work will continue for another hour or so, before we take our afternoon walk up to tashi gomang stupa.