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.