2:43 PM: atsuita went through quite a few stages before arriving at what you see here. figures were introduced, and if you look carefully, you’ll see 6 of them. most of them have played a role in paintings i’ve made over the past year or so: the jumping skateboarder on top; the walking plaid shirted figure reaching out to his girfriend below, the skateboarder with the checkered shorts and the kid with the striped green cap (overlapping the checkered shorts) will be familiar to you if you follow my work and this blog.
i had attempted to introduce elements from our creek; branches, rocks, water… but it was coming too much from my head and not supporting the composition at all. so i wiped all that out just before sitting down to post. it was on the lower left, doing nothing more than overloading and confusing the composition and proclaiming: look at me! i can be part of this painting too! so now it’s a white space with visible brushmarks and a ghost image of what’s beneath.
what i most enjoyed and related to in the two diebenkorn videos i watched a few days ago, was just how much, surprisingly, i was able to relate to his process. not only did i learn a lot, but i became stronger in my conviction that i’m on a good path, which seems at this point to be figurative abstraction, and simply need to keep going.
atsuita 38x20”/96.5x51 cm. as it looked at the end of the day