the creek at the base of the stupa trail yesterday, 3:40pm
stage 1 of watercolor/collage 158
2:26 PM: we’re about to start our stupa walk in 45 minutes. a full day, it’s been, as you see from today’s post. about an hour ago i started work on watercolor/collage 158, inspired by a photo of the creek i shot on yesterdays walk.
it’s still in an early phase. nonetheless, it gives us clear signs of where it’s headed. it’s likely that, tomorrow, collaged elements may be introduced, which will transport it from a realist painting of the creek to an event beyond realism and into dream-space.
11:36 AM: arrived early at my studio following a quick trip to town for diced tomatoes to be used in our spaghetti dinner. mikela and i are experimenting with one of the many hundreds of activities in our middle/high school product, actionlab360. this activity involves blanking out words with a marker in an article you like, to create a poem. so before jumping back in to yesterdays watercolor, i did the experiment, and here’s the result. the idea, for the kids, is to become more inventive with words and meaning.
having completed that first experiment (there will be more, and i’m going to propose it to my grandson philip in athens) i continued work on watercolor/collage 157, which i started yesterday, & is based on photos i shot last friday of the delivery guys bringing our new couches & pillows up the stairs. here’s what it looked like about an hour ago; not sure yet if i’ll do more or leave it alone for today & start something new. collaged elements have been added, the yellows have been intensified and i did some work on the legs of the guy in the middle. at first, creek water began roiling around his ankles. but that didn’t work at all (it was coming from my head, not my brush) so i collaged some white paper over it & reworked his lower legs in blue, which i like.
i’m in conversation with an author in greece, whose novel will be published in 2021. for the cover of the book, she’s using an image from a watercolor i made in 2005, of a girl on a rock at pithara, a small waterfall in the hills of the island of andros.
interestingly, she asked my to tell a little of the story behind the watercolor, and this is what i sent her. i’m positng it because i’ve been talking about putting together the story of my journey as an artist, and her request created an opportunity to dive in, albeit further towards the end of my story.
this is the cropped image of my 2005 painting the author has chosen for her book cover
“You will find the answers to some of your questions about the image on this page of my 2015 blogs:
This painting, in gouache on paper, was made in 2005. That year, over the Easter holiday, I visited my son Dimirtri in Andros, where he has a big, beautiful home on the sea, in the Plakoura neighborhood of Chora, capital of Andros. His grandmother, the great painter Niki Karagatsi, was born in this house.
Two of his friends from Athens were there, and one day we all went to Pithara together. Pithara is a beautiful, small waterfall in the hills near the village of Apoikia. I've made many plein air paintings of this beautiful spot, so I know it well. I shot lots of photos that day, and when I returned to my studio in Crestone, I used some of them to create the series of paintings you see on this page of my blog. The following year, they were shown in my 2006 solo exhibition at Skoufa Gallery in Athens. They are now in private collections in Athens. One of my favorite subjects is the human figure in the landscape. Corot, and so many other painters, made great paintings with this subject. My dear friend & mentor Tsarouchis made some of my favorite paintings of figures sitting & standing on Pnika, adjacent to the Acropolis.The attached painting is just one of many paintings I've made of figures in the landscape. This one is based on a photo I shot at a well known stone bridge on Andros, of a woman fetching something she sees in the stream. We'll never know what it was she saw. In the gouache you will be using for your cover, Dimitri's friend, lets call her Maria, is looking at the falls, with her back to us, awed by the beauty: the fragrances, the colors, the sounds of the falling water, the light....It may be that, in this fleeting moment, sitting on the rock, she had a flash of deep understanding of who she is in all of this, and how her identity is merged with, inseparable from, nature.
girl at the bridge, 2005, gouache on paper
My love affair with the figure in the landscape began when I was 6 years old. From 6 to 16 I spent 2 months every summer at Birchwoods, a camp in Huntington, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Hills. You can learn more about Birchwoods on my Story page: https://www.philiptarlow.com/chatty-bio There was a worker who, every afternoon, would stand in a relaxed pose, leaning on his shovel, and gaze at the landscape. He struck a deep chord in my soul, which guided my journey as an artist for the following seven decades. In Athens, he was personified by a street sweeper in Plaka, Athens. He worked just below my studio window, overlooking the Tower of the Winds. His name was Kyriakos, and I made countless paintings & drawings of him in my studio, leaning on his broom in much the same way as the worker in Birchwoods leaned on his shovel. Gazing out my studio window, seeming to contemplate the universe. In reality, he was watching in case his boss showed up and caught him posing for an artist when he should have been working!
BELOW: one of my many paintings of kyriakos with his broom, to which i refer in my email to the author in greece.