ode

While working on the In the Shadows series I got frustrated enough with the drawbacks of direct painting to return to indirect painting, which is what I’ve concentrated on since. Do you notice a pattern of frustration and vacillation in my history? Anyway I’ve learned a lot of lessons in the process of vacillating from indirect and direct styles, such that I was able to solve a number of my issues and find methods that lessen my frustration for other aspects. So pretty much everything created in 2009 will reflect my new and improved indirect style. This does means slow paintings, and by slow I mean about 5 sq inches per hour – or to put it another way an area the size of this paragraph would take me two and half hours. I dislike that I can’t be as prolific as I would like, but I do like the finished quality of my paintings. The primary example of this at the moment is Ode.

Ode was my piece for Launchpad’s ‘4th Annual Love show’. As previously mentioned with the ‘Dreams’ show, I try to tailor pieces to a given show’s constraints, so I wasn’t going to just pick a random painting that had red and titled it Love. Although I did figure I’d include some pinks and pale violets in the palette, and also that I would base it on the bloom of a flower, with the overlapping petals creating the primary rhythms in the painting. Now I knew this was cheesy, but I figured by the time I was done with it no one would look at it and say ‘Look, a flower’, so it wouldn’t matter.

As I was drawing some sketches (with a pencil and not digitally for once) I was reminded of a painting I had seen, Esteban Vicente’s ‘Bridgehampton Rose’ seen at the bottom of this post. Vincente’s composition tends to fairly simple, more about subtle modulations of colors than about having complicated forms and rhythms. So I thought what would happen if I took his painting and overlayed my more complicated drawing. I thought making the painting a homage to Vicente could also further it as a piece about love. Of course this little narrative would be completely unapparent to the viewer, but it made me feel better.

I proceeded with this conception for about twenty hours before realizing that it wouldn’t work. I would either have to just recreate Vicente’s painting or do my own thing, I couldn’t manage any sort of melding. So I went back to the computer and did some more mock-ups combining one of my original sketches with a photo of the inprogress painting and of course throwing lots of other digital noise and layers at it as well. This really helped shift the direction of the painting. Now doing additional mock-ups and sketches in the middle of the paintings as a form of problem solving is a regular part of my practice.

Ode is probably my favorite piece of mine at the moment, although the photo of it doesn’t look fantastic. I’m pleased with the journey it took and the lessons I learned in the process. More importantly it looks good in person. It has the slightly inexplicable quality that can only be achieve with glazing, or at least this is the only way I know how to achieve it. Most particularly what I mean by this is that there are a lot of happy accidents of color. Now I love to mix color, I frequently spend an hour or more at the beginning of my day mixing colors for the day’s paintings. However, there are colors that I would never have picked and painted, which occurred because of semi-transparent layers of color stacked on top of each other with light refracting around between them.