Here is the painting I posted an image of earlier, only a bit farther along.
Actually, this was before I began working on it today, so it is beyond this point now. I don’t normally take pics when in the process of working on something, but it can be pretty instructive to look back later, and track the decisions and turns that make a painting move thither and yon. As seems to be the case with the recent ones, this one is now in the process of being opened up, and I am finding or threading my way through the various layers, and deciding what comes out, is light, recedes, is dark, is sharper/fuzzier, etc. In general, I seem to like the light coming from behind things, even in the previous landscape series, it was always a kind of twilight, metaphorically or visually.
There are now four paintings in various stages of being close to resolved. I often like going in to work on a Sunday or Monday- both days when the museum where my studio is located is closed – it lets me open the door, take a seat in the room opposite mine and get a better sense of what should go or change.
Now that I am trying to work from more coherent studies, I began another painting that takes off on the same theme, only perhaps a bit more close up than some have been. Right now it’s the mostly brown painting- about 28 x 24 ..
. and will no doubt give me fits before it’s done – but hey that’s what keeps me coming back. I like looking right into the confusion and ambiguity.
In fact, this reminds me of the time I was taking an early watercolor class, and had the lovely Ralph Baker for a teacher at the University of Oregon. It was a drizzly day, (no surprise there) and I was sitting on a curb out back of the art building, and had painted part of a hedge looking flat at it. Well, Ralph came around and checking in with me said that I “may not understand now why that is a good painting, but some day you will” or other zen-like words to that effect. You always go back to something when you make art, and maybe I’m going back to that day.
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