purple rock II as it looked october 14, 2018 and on the right, after todays intervention/ it was 38x32” and is now a horizontal, 32x38”
3:15 PM: some of my earlier motion series paintings have survived. after a year of living with them, they passed the test. this one almost did, but not quite. so i painted over it, scraping off some of the over-painting to allow traces of the original to come through. the newer version contains many of the same shapes and marks. todays version not only reads better from a distance; it displays those essential marks that convet a certainty not found in the earlier version.
as well, i made a few tweaks to icy creek II, which i worked on extensively yesterday. BELOW you see the two side by side, yesterdays version on the left. the area that was bugging me was that purple-brown mass in the center, just beneath the red rock. it needed to be broken up, which i was able to with one swipe of a loaded brush, creating 2 distinct shapes where there was one, thereby allowing the entire composition to breathe and allowing ones vision to move across the surface without getting stuck in one spot.
on the RIGHT are 3 examples of the many hundreds of plein air studies in gouache on paper that serve as inspirations for the motion series paintings made in my studio over the past few years.
