shared today by a friend on facebook
1/1/19, 4:21pm (32x36”) as it looked after extensive revisions earlier today
1/1/19, 4:21pm 32x36 as it looked yesterday
1:21 PM: upon enetering my studio and casting that all important first glance, i concluded that both of the 2 paintings discussed here; the most recent in my sky high series, needed tweaking. so i got busy, using the same palette for both. i have lingering doubts about this series, after interrupting my motion series of abstracted landscapes, where gestural, calligraphic marks abound. these sky paintings demand a very different approach; not only a different mindset, but a very different handset. but i had to find out: are the hundreds, perhaps thousands of sky photos i shoot destined to become paintings, or are they meant to remain as photographs?
so i made extensive changes to the new 1/1/19, 4:21pm (32x36”}, which i began work on yesterday. i found that the cloud shapes occupying the upper 2/3 of the painting, while they may have worked as abstract patterns, were not at all in harmony with the treatment of the sunset at the bottom of the painting. so i did my usual scraping and schmearing, then painting into it, repeating, until i got it resolved…i think.
1/1/19, 4:21pm as it looked after extensive revisions earlier today
8/24/17, 7:38pm as it looked yesterday
as for 8/24/17, 7:38pm, i felt that the transition from the orange/yellow sunset sky to the blue sky was too abrupt, and in effect, created the impression of 2 distinct, sort of but entirely related, paintings. as with 1/1/19, 4:21pm, i did a lot of scraping & dragging a fully loaded brush, scraping again and so on. it seems to me i definitely resolved the issue of the perceived split between upper & lower portions but, as with almost all the changes i make to paintings, i can’t get a good read until the following day.