mikela in chelsea crop 1
3:40 PM: there’s an oil painting i made in 2017 that i’ve always had a problem with. today i was going to un-stretch and roll it for storage when i noticed some area i actually liked a lot. so i cut one out and mounted it on a piece of board.
it measures 11 x 11 1/4” & so far i like it a lot. part of the problem with this painting is that it was made on inferior canvas, and the brush strokes simply don’t have the sensitivity of a finer french portrait linen.
the other factor is size. increasingly, i think i’m designed to make smaller scale paintings.
and the third factor is, let’s call it the luck of the crop.
there’s quite a bit of the painting left, and i may make a second crop tomorrow!
1:07 PM: when mikela came over yesterday afternoon, she spotted a few areas of the painting that might need work. the tweaks i made, based on her observations, are to the blue dress of the girl on the right, and the green cactus leaves below her. here’s the painting after my tweaks, and below that, before. and in this cropped image, you can see the changes more clearly.
8:29 AM: as i brought mikela her morning freshly roasted & ground coffee, i noticed some of my older paintings just across the room from where she works every morning on her laptop. the one in the center is a watercolor painted in 1972 in my athens studio, in the plaka neighborhood of athens, just below the acropolis. seated in his chair, o kyrios yannis (mr. yannis) sits with his pet cat, waiting for his next customer. he would park their car in an available space until they came back. above that one is the corner of a larger, 1987 painting in gouache on paper. it’s inspired by photos i had taken at david hockney’s home in the hollywood hills, and was painted in my south florida studio, where we lived at the time. and to the right is a painting in gouache on paper of aspen bark, made at the beginning of my creek inspired series of paintings, in 2000.
and this is a ceramic platter with collaged elements, made ca. 2015. it’s currently placed on a glass table in our living room.
i’ll be in my studio in a few hours, where i think i may begin the process of stretching new 16x16” canvases, which i’ll join together as i did with 2021 creek oil 9, so that i can continue this new series of work.
more once i get to the studio. we’re forecast to have high winds with blowing dust today, with cooler temperatures than the record breaking highs we’ve been having over the past week.
ceramic platter ca. 2015