Yearly Archives: 2013

The painting is at the stage where I don’t know what to do next so it may be finished, I’ll have to look at it for a while before I sign it.

It’s also untitled .

When my son Marc was a child a stranger once asked him what one of my sculptures was supposed to be. His answer was, “If there is one hole in it, it’s an abstract. If there are two holes in it, it’s a Mother and Child.”

There are three circles in this painting so I guess it’s a family 🙂

I’ve seen this happen before. I’ll like what I’m working on and will spend a lot of time trying to make it move the eye better but after a while I end up just doodling around and not really accomplishing anything exciting.

After a few days of looking at it and I realize that it’s not doing what I want. I’m still happy with the basic skeleton but the painting is not working….So…I’ll do something that radically changes the pace of things and see where it leads me.

I’ll take photos of where I am so I can come back to that that if I really screw it up but then I’ll throw in something that changes the visual.It’s like suddenly taking a different turn in the road and you are seeing things you did not see before.

Now the painting is heading in a different direction.  I may end up turning around but this is a part of my process. It’s always experimental for me and eventually it will succeed or get painted over.

For those of you who follow the site, I thought you might be interested in following the progress of this painting.

The process up to now is familiar to me as it resembles sculpture. From here on in it is strictly trial and error. In the beginning I lay in any color just to get something on the canvas. Using this method I can define sections of the composition. It’s possible to set up a certain balance but I’m not concerned with how it will develop as I know…I mean know… it will change several times.before the final pallet is established.

Right now the blues are way to hot but that can be fixed and in the end what is blue may not be blue so it doesn’t make any difference.. These colors are layed on pretty heavy so it will take a while to dry. When the surface is at least tacky I can begin to play around with it again.  As usual I know where I’m going when I start out but I haven’t the vaguest idea of where it will end up until there is nothing else to do on it.

I’ve completed the texturing on a yet untitled new painting. This part of the process is purely intuitive. There are favorite tools and materials that I use but what goes where is done a section at a time and each piece of the puzzle depends on what happened the day before. If the next day I decide something didn’t work , it is fixable.

What I have now is pretty close to where this part of the project is going to stay. When it is fully dried I’ll sand the whole thing down to get rid of the high points. Paint has a tendency “lay down” as it dries and by rounding out the texture where it stands up I can get closer the the look I want when finished..

Now I can begin to think about color. That part is work 🙂

Fresh start untitled texture completed