2:52 PM:by getting up on a ladder, i was able, as i did yesterday, to photograph jazz 18 from above, avoiding the drips from hanging it. it does have a few light reflections, but it’s a fairly good shot of what jazz 18 Iooks like at the end of my painting day today. it’s always exciting to see how the ghost images from the previous version show through and suggest new forms, new realities. so this is a rather dramatic but natural progression of the direction my work has been taking over the past 6 months or so, and it may result in changes to more recent paintings.
as you may have noticed, i’ve been going back & forth between abstraction and realism over decades. the thing is, if you study visual art all the way back to the era of cave paintings, you see that the bones are neither of the two. it’s a false distinction.
so if you compare jazz 18 with the pervious version, the main difference, even in it’s current transitional state, your eye, rather than bopping about from one figure to another, relaxes into a subtle whole, with forms and colors suggesting rather than defining. thus, you become a living, breathing part of the painting.
2:27 PM: i took a 26x78” painting from my storage room and began a rework. i found it too busy, going in too many directions, which is understandable considering where i was at back in december. seems like ancient history! so i began the process…this is the before and after, but it has already changed considerably & i’ll have to wait till tomorrow morning to hang it and photograph it, since it’s too wet right now.
a much more accurate phot of jazz 17, 26x72”, than i posted yesterday
11:10 AM: yesterday afternoon when jazz 17 was still wet, i couldn’t put it on the wall to photograph it, due to extreme dripping. today i was able to hang it on my east wall, and shoot a much more accurate photo.