anschutz from above 2 as it looked moments ago. this is #2 in a series, so far, of 3, all 16x20” oil on linen
2:45 PM:i took anschutz from above 2 back to the house yesterday afternoon. after gazing at it for a time, I decided it needed more work. so this morning I went over the whole painting with a thin wash of off-white oil color, scraped it and then worked into what was left of the previous image. I was in a very useful WTF frame of mind, which helped in walking that thin line between abstraction and representation.
as i’ve said many times before, pure abstraction isn’t my thing, nor is pure realism. I love the painterly, as is obvious in this detail of what I did this morning.
BELOW: all three paintings in the series. you can see how the one i’ve been working on today is more tortured than the other two. but seen together they make sense, it seems to me. all three are, it could be said, a hymn to the painterly.
this is a quote form a diebenkorn catalogue i’ve been perusing: “the ocean park works were never abstract landscapes of his surroundings; they were a far more personal synthesis of his own decisions, attitudes and process within a particular microcosm to which he was sensitive.”
that about sums it up, i’d say.