New Post, New Paintings

It's been several months since my last blog - an interim in which these two paintings got done and delivered to their new home in New York State. You'll also notice that my website looks different, and soon the News Page will have frequent postings in a Wordpress format.

I'll be posting videos and a photo essay of the process of preparing paintings for transport - using the painting above right, Summer Grasses in Fog, as the example.

I'll post process shots for both of the paintings - showing the initial studies and the stages of the paintings from blank canvas through major intermediate stages to the finished work.

I was never much of a photographer, so I find the iPhone to be the perfect low-tech tool for documenting  whatever I'm engaged with. So easy to record the day's progress at the end of each painting session! However - I have Jim Nickelson to thank for the studio shot above. Jim does a great job of capturing finished works for my archives.

Stay tuned for more of what's happening in the studio, and see Jim's work here. His images of the Maine landscape are gorgeous.

Oh Ye of Little Faith

The phoebes have three very hungry, very orange mouths to feed. The duck and her seven ducklings are taking the path up from the pond. And to think that I, for weeks now, have doubted even the existence of the mother duck, so well had she hidden herself, though her nest must be close by the creek.

In his book Earth: an Intimate History, Richard Fortey writes about tectonics and the fault line where Africa and Europe meet. All the alps of Europe were squeezed out of a seam in the earth no more the twenty kilometers wide, and extruded northward like pasta or spaetzle, in layers and layers of metamorphic rock. It’s a similar fascination to me that a sweater can be made from a long piece of string, or that babies arrive from tiny blobs of genetic material.

As I hope to breach the current impasse in my studio practice, perhaps it’s not too much to wish that something be building below the surface of my thinking to come forth in a rush of inspiration, or hatch like ducklings in seven permutations of a single mother concept. What power keeps the baby phoebe stock-still on the edge of the nest til it’s ready to fly?

Painting in Winter

As the days get perceptibly longer and the temperatures fall, I spend more time in the studio, and for the first time since I began writing here, am going address some of what happens while I'm there. After all, what I want to uncover is an evolved way of painting the subject matter that interests me, and that subject matter remains, as it has for a long time, rocks and water. But subject matter is only the starting point, or perhaps not even that. It becomes a distant reference the deeper I get into any given painting. Painting is a process, and the physical act of moving paint around on a support has to be joined with patience and the use of appropriate technical tools. It's not enough to mix, shove and scrape the paint until an abstraction is produced that can be interpreted as some sort of recognizable image. It is also not good enough, to my mind, to resort to obvious narrative. In other words, I have to work harder - thinking about what I know of Matisse, De Kooning, and their descendants, Diebenkorn and Brown. Their work with spatial relationships and chromatic harmonies are informative, but not imitable. In a confrontation with a canvas, it's what makes me uncomfortable that counts.