Hug and Howl. 12x9 inches. Acrylic on paper. 2019
I love lone figures standing in open fields.
I also like multiple interacting figures, as long as they are in an open field. Is it a field of possibility? Or is it a vastness of choices always present?
I don't like my fields to be too defined and specific.
They have to evoke an open field feeling, to each her own. Whichever field caught her in a moment of choice, of possibility and perhaps swallowed her whole. Or flattened her out.
I like my figures to step out of their native contest. Maybe because that’s what I did some decades back. A step into the seemingly infinite field of possibilities that the West had to offer and stood there for a bit before getting my bearings.
But back to the girl and the cat.
I like funny. I like incongruous. I think my funny almost always has to have a flavor of absurd.
Girl is small. Cat is large. Girl is squeezy happy, cat is squirmy and howly. Funny. Weird. Maybe not at all believable, but that's where the magic of painting comes in.
It's a painting, so we as viewers already suspend our disbelief, we are more open to making congruous and sensible things out of flippant and physical impossibility. I love the combination of loose paint application with a painterly mark that describes gesture and texture precisely. That's what I am always after in my paintings: the seemingly effortless precision of description. That’s what I aim for, occasionally glimpsing its possibility, but even if I never reach the perfection, the process is just too delicious to care that I never quite reach perfection.
Rock Pile Picnic. 12x9 inches. Acrylic on paper. 2019
Lately I’ve been interested in making haphazard marks, slinging paint around and seeing if it just might fall into right places on its own accord.
Tools other than brushes are good for this experiment because they make impossible precision and control that artist brushes imply.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of painters who miraculously produce fantastically loose, dynamic and expressive pictures using brushes, but I am not one of those. Give me a brush, even the most destroyed cheap frayed thing, and I fall under a spell of perfection. That kindergartner in me who desperately wants to color inside the lines takes over the moment I get my hands on a brush.
Now, big brushes are harder to control, so I try to use the largest ones I have at least in the beginning of a new painting. A five inch house painting brush is a great tool for sketching in a composition, even if I am working on a moderately sized canvas. Starting rough and uncontrolled can produce most welcome surprises and wonderful areas of color and texture. So wonderful that I can spend many hours trying to avoid covering up the accidental delightful spot with my "masterful" painting.
So yes, back to this little thing. The picnic on the rocks. I painted it primarily using a palette knife, only using brushes toward the end for a few touch ups.
It's a study, a sketch, a visual note more than a painting really. But then, what's the difference? It either works or not, it ether delights and engages the viewer or it doesn't.
I am not much delighted by this piece, but I do see some areas of interest, notes to myself that I'd like to employ in another, larger and more involved composition. I love to see different colors and values combine and produce illusions of form seemingly on their own. There is a speed to palette knife painting. Not just the speed of the process itself, but the look of it. It's fast and just a tad agitated.
Like a spring wood's fresh green-yellow new leaves trembling in a gust of still icy wind.
An incongruity, a contradiction, a tension.