1:09 PM: as i was preparing this morning to start a new watercolor/collage, my eye caught a collage i had made in 2017 sitting with other collages from that period in a cardboard box. i pulled it out and looked at it, and with todays vision, it seemed way too overloaded so that my eye bounced around the composition like a ping pong ball.
this is a detail of the hand holding a cup
so i felt absolutely no compunction cutting it up into pieces, until i found the right one and began working into it. it’s much smaller than the original: 7 x 13 3/4”. thanks to some brownish mottled paper i discovered in a closet, it now seems to work as a horizontal composition.
the hand you see in the center is from a previous watercolor/collage that i cut up, which included students gathered at a friend’s house. one of them was holding a cup containing juice, and that’s his hand. although there are references to branches in the center and on the left, this is not a creek scape per se. much like the one i made yesterday, but perhaps more so, it’s creek inspired. if you know my history, which you can get a sense of by clicking through the dropdown menus on this site, you will understand that, while technically one could classify this as an abstraction, it’s clearly an abstraction by someone who has spent years as a realist painter.
2021 watercolor/collage 11 7 x 13 3/4”