New Painting
Phase two of work in progress
– and maybe the final (for this painting..)!
I like it! It’s what I wanted.
I love the yummy sensuousness of its details.
I love its dynamic central figure.
I find really attractive how the background figures are clearly distanced behind the central figure and yet are so strong and assertive in their own right. It is as though they were plucked straight from an eternal existence into this placement here, in the world made visible by this canvas.
I was VERY happy with the painting I did earlier in the week. Gradually, though, I came to feel that its right half was off a bit.
I wanted to make the swirl and the vertical more integrated. I thought of introducing some of the rich burnt umber of the swirl into the vertical.
What I actually did was the opposite: the yellow ochre mud of the vertical came to reside in the swirl.
The hand follows the heart; the head tries to keep up.
My main tool was a little square mat board scrap. Using it, I reshaped the right side to do three things:
• Integrate swirl with vertical
• Decrease black
• Sharpen blockiness of vertical
Here are the two versions side-by-side, for comparison. [Scroll down to the previous post (dec 9) for a larger pic of the first version.] (Subtle difference in color is due to lighting and my amateur photography, not to painting changes.)
First Version
New Version
Even after lapse of a few days, I’m happy with the changes made. MAYBE the painting is finished!
I like the sense of robust strength given to the vertical by the blocks, especially the large, scraped-off section at bottom right. It adds gravitas to the figure, giving it a solid support to rest on holding the uprights – as sturdy as large poles set in massive concrete.
The earlier version lacked this solidity. What its vertical had instead is the power of a rocketship blasting into takeoff. There was tremendous pure energy unleashed in the first version. This new, revised version, as it were, civilizes that power, turns rocket-take-off into a powerful construction, a natural edifice.
It’s the difference between action on the initial, mad impulse and the thoughtful return to tweak the results…
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
SPEAKING OF MOUNTAINS — something is happening to me, as an artist, about mountains. I see them in sharply delineated blocks set off by contrasting shadows cast in bright sunlight.
In New Zealand, I was obsessed with those images, visible to me daily across the bay. Like these:
Young Nicks Head II
Afternoon Light
Even in my brief Baja stay, this mountain muse haunted me. There was this:
Mountain (3)
On our way out
from the backcountry to the airport,
we passed through wonderful, dry,
rugged, mountainous territory
that screamed at me to come back
and paint it. And so I will!
I’m thinking that maybe I am
RELIVING THE BIRTH OF CUBISM!!??!!
Cezanne began it with mountains.
Braque and Picasso picked up on it from Cezanne
– as in this early Braque. Cezanne and Braque. Check ‘em out:
Mont St. Victoire
Grand Nu
Cubism went to some strange places; I don’t think I want to go there. I’m just saying.
