3:01 PM: i made a few chnges, which i think makes the painting easier to read. here’s how she looks at the end of my painting day today.
hoo, 48x18” oil & collage on linen, as she looked at the end of my painitng day
1:49 PM:this is day 2 of this new painting, now titled hoo, painted for a client of the denver gallery where i’m represented. i may simplify a bit.
3:39 PM: i started HOO today. to be continued tomorrow.
meshuggeneh 48x18” oil on linen, day 1
6x8” watercolr i made this morning
7:28 PM:before getting to work on celebration 26, i made another 6x8” watercolor, with a tiny bit of map collaged on the left
celebration 26, 36x36" after removing the black i added earlier today. better, eh?
6:37 PM: mikela walked over to the studio late this afternoon to have a look at the newly blacked over celebration 26. she pointed out, accurately, that the sensitivity of the painting had been lost. she’s got such a good eye!
i spent about an hour scrubbing off the fresh black oil paint with some old washclothes soaked in a solvent. and here she is.
celebration 26, 36x36” as she looked after blacking over 2/3 of the composition
1:40 PM: there was too much white in the composition. the dramatic figures were getting lost. so i mixed up some black oil paint, attached it to my trusty long stick and began painting black around the figures. when i got about 3/4 of the way down, i stopped. and then i took one of my spatulas and scraped 3 vertical tree trunk-like marks vertically down into the black.
i had 2 fans on high to avoid breathing in the toxic fumes, and i think it worked.
i can’t hang it till it dries a bit to avoid drips, but on first glance, i think the black works, and as a result it’s a far more powerful painting.
celebration 26, 36x36” following today’s drawing with oil pastel
4:40 PM: i’ve been gazing at celebratoin 26, which is hanging on my east facing studio wall, and contemplating doing more to it, since that central white area seemed too empty. so i went in with an oil pastel and made a creek landscape drawing, with rocks & branches.
celebration 29, 6x8" watercolor on paper
2:35 PM: today was a topsy turvey day. this morning i was dealing with a bird who smashed into my window and lay on the ground, dazed. she finally recovered and flew away, but not before i tried contacting a local service that deals with wounded wildlife and waiting on hold forever.
then a technician came to repair the studio toilet and the rest is history. i’ll be without a toilet until sometime next week.
i couldn’t end my day without putting brush to, in this case, paper. so i made a 6x8” watercolor title celebration 29. it’s a still life of sorts, using whatever was in front of me; in this case, a plastic bowl resting on a cutting surface with measurements, a wooden picture frame and a landscape watercolor, vintage 2009.
vyd zverkhou, 24x28” oil & collage on linen, as she looked at the end o fmy painting day.
3:47 PM: i went back & forth between these 2 paintings today, using discoveries and solutions i found in one and applying them to the other. they are both part of a new, lighter touch, with lots of white space in an uncrowded composition.
celebration 26, 36x36” as she looked folllowing my white-over earlier today
BELOW: celebration 26 before and after the white-over
12:14 PM: celebration 26 has been hanging in the house for the past week or two. as has been happening with other recent paintings, the more i gazed at it, the more it bothered me that here was so much going on my eye didn’t know where to rest.
so this morning i brought it back to the studio and began whiting over quite a bit.
whiting over much of celebration 26, 36x36” moments ago
vyd zverkhou, 24x28” oil & collage on linen, as she looked at the end of my painting day today
3:43 PM: the white-over i did yesterday was just dry enough for me to go back into it today. i kinda love the starkness of these 3 figures on the white backround, which is transparent enough to give us a little taste of what lies beneath.
these figures are old friends at this point; i’ve included them in quite a few recent paintings. this allows my strokes and marks, informed by that loving familiarity, to be more painterly.
11:57 AM: when i cast my first glance this morning, vyd zverkhou didn’t inspire me at all. so i prepared some white oil paint and went over the whole painting. a bit of color from the work i did yeaterday hadn’t dried, so it was picked up by the brush, but i was able to make it an overall white, with just a tad showing of the layers underneath, which is exactl how i like it!
vid zverkhou, 24x28" oil on portrait linen, as she looked moments ago, following a second round of modifications
2:50 PM: this morning i made changes to vid zverkhou I, which i had last worked on in may. i’ve been gazing at it recently and found, as has happened ercently with other relatvely recent paintings, that it needed to be simplified. it’s a painting i had worked on, then flipped 360, which is why the drummer is upside down. the chinese-like writing was inspired by one of my favorite books on chinese art of the 10th c.
i just now finished making more modifications, painting over the pinks that were surrounding the figure doing a handstand as well as adding two treet and some rocks and here’s the current state.
12:53 PM: i last worked on this painting back in may of this year. the title, vid zverkhou is ukrainian and means from above. i have a zoom friend in kiev with whom i connect twice a week, and at some point i was inspired to title a painting in the ukrainian language. it started out with a number of musicians; today some of them dissapeared, leaving only the drummer, seen upside down on the left, and the guitar player.
