Working

I search the web for places to plant my blog address like a seed, like messages in so many bottles. Fishing for a readership that will somehow raise my art out of the concealing shadows of the undistinguished and into celebrated light. Prints will start selling like joints in 1978. Collectors will line up at my door. Historians sift through the garbage. My slightest penciled motion will receive accolades and jeers. The intuitive yet random color placement of background paint smears will send academia scrambling to articulate hidden meaning. The rich and famous will squabble and fuss to have images of loved ones tattooed on my canvas.

Sometimes when laying out a painting on canvas the paint strokes used to sketch the figure are themselves of interest. Including them into the composition they begin to suggest other components and if you let it happen a different painting will result. A sculptor friend and gallery owner I knew made wire sculpture that were then wrapped in copper. He told me if he dropped a piece he was working on to the floor he would pick it up and study it before fixing the damage. Sometimes the drop had altered his work for the better. Similar instances of chance can change a painting.

I begin with a plan which is often vague but occasionally specific. When the pigment is applied now a third thing exists. I have the original reference material, I have a vision, and now I have an image developing on the canvas.

With water color things happen very quickly and the windows to take advantage of what is happening on paper open and close like hands clapping. One is often seduced to continue applying pigment (by the moisture content of the paper) to keep the magic going,  just like a gambler at a casino. And I mean exactly like that. Sometimes you're on a roll and everything you do is the next perfect thing to have been done. Other times everything is lost because one too many applications of pigment were gambled.

The pace of oil painting is much more laid back. Nothing is ever lost from pausing to consider the consequences of your actions and yet you can apply pigment at a frantic pace if you want to.

I look forward to working with oils again.

Oil painting is like a fine wine or maybe the sipping whiskey of visual arts. Watercolor is a cold beer growing warm too quickly. Or perhaps shots.