today i reworked the red door, 38x40”
3:24 PM: following the changes i made to ano kato 50 over the past few days, mikela stopped by on her way to school in monte vista & was very enthusiastic about ano kato 50, but when we both looked at the red door, which was on the same wall a few feet away, it seemed to us both that it needed more work.
so after she left, i went over the entire painting with that pinkish color i’ve been using lately, and then scraped it to get off the excess solvent & started selectively rubbing into it using an old washcloth. i revealed the two figures, the red door & the plant on the left, then added some diagonal lines in black oil stick inspired by one of my views from above photos of the acropolis museum in athens. architectural structure is often my go-to way of dividing up the space in a composition. in this case, while the underlying bits of an earlier painting remain, those black diagonal lines interspersed with round electric light bulbs allow us to make visual sense of those traces of earlier compositions, while allowing the eye to focus on the two figures.
BELOW: the red door before today’s modifications is on the left.
