New big painting, as it is now

With this painting, I've been thinking about all the complexity within the facets of jewels. Also about ponds in the winter when they freeze over with leaves and cracks inside them. I like how the blue shape also resembles the symbol used by meteorologists for hurricanes. It's as though everything is frozen now, but could burst apart.

Dreaming the Universe, finally finished

I thought this painting was done a while ago, but it really wasn't. I finished it in August, thought I'd finally post it.

I have been working on a painting for a while that is about 6 feet by 8 feet. Here is an earlier image of it.

In contrast to other paintings where the whole thing is full of relatively small marks or objects, I wanted this one to have one big shape inside of the painting, with other smaller shapes inside

Three New Canvasses

I was visiting my friend, Shane Guffogg, a painter here in LA. He's preparing for an upcoming show, and is working on about 15 paintings at once. That's not the way I usually work. For me, each painting is a lengthy journey, and often, when I am done, I pick up at that end point when I start a new painting and go from there. But for him, working on all 15 paintings at once, his process is more like being immersed in a thought or a premise, and then working towards a conclusion in 15 different (but also similar) ways. He was also talking about working from a dark ground toward lightness. Most of my paintings contain quite a lot of the white ground even to the end (as in the Dreaming the Universe painting I've been discussing before, which I do indeed think is done.... still got to give it a couple days to be sure).

So today I started three new paintings, all with strongly colored, mid-toned grounds. I used naturally transparent colors for the red and the blue one, and used a lot of medium to thin the paint in the light areas, but not have the paint get too thin and washy. The blue one has a few streaks of white added. The red one has no white-- just the gessoed surface coming through in some areas. The green one has a fair amount of medium, plus nickel-azo yellow in the center.

I am going to work on them together.

Maybe finished?

I've been working hard on the painting and maybe it is finished. I never know until a few weeks have passed. More density in some areas? Open up others and leave more space? I like the way Julia's face emerges. I am not so sure about the hair. I like the point of view that makes her head seem like a large globe which can be like the earth or maybe the universe. I may add more small details, like small thoughts coming to the surface.

More Progress

The face is beginning to emerge a bit more. More color, which I like. There still seems to be a good interconnectedness between the figure and everything else. The picture above shows the lower left side of the painting. The picture below is a detail of the lips.

Dreaming the Universe

For quite a while, I have been wanting to get the human figure back into the wild biology paintings. Dreaming the universe is the first way to do this that has made sense to me.

I am reworking an old painting, Whirlpools, that had nice flow and density and interesting details, but never really crystallized as a painting. I am getting ready to add a large outline drawing of Julia's head that will almost fill the whole canvas and a few painted post-it notes to represent ideas.

It is one week later now than when I wrote the paragraphs above. I am excited about how the three components are coming together. The outline of Julia's head gives me a lot of opportunity for rich color, when you look up close. And she seems totally integrated and interconnected with the rest of the water/fish/air/movement around her.
The work seems very open and linear, though, and I wonder about getting a bit more atmosphere or weight into it.