Nancy, oil on 8 x 10 inch board

Ottercreek, oil on 12 x 12 inch board

The four paintings done from photographs taken in the Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan, were intended as studies of sand. In Hat, an initially more realistically painted sand was overpainted with a gradient of titanium yellow.

So, in the spirit of the season I got out some more varnish, mixed in some crimson and sploshed away. This is the first version.

And this is the seasonal development.

In this instance I am attempting to develop an idea of racial entanglement that goes back to one of my first inspirations for this series. The work in question is a piece of airport art from Kenya that constitutes a chain, carved from a single log, and featuring a head at each end. In fact, I took a swipe at making a version of such consisting of two ceramic heads, one negro and the other white, connected by an arbitrarily long steel chain. This chain, many tens of feet in length and rusted and worn, was to be draped over a remotely high and obscure support. The heads were to be at the same height from the floor and so arranged that they might collide with each other. I didn’t feel able to bring this off and the project pends.

Along similar lines is this: two separate and separately colored chains which follow their own trajectories, yet cross and entangle with each other.

The rule is to not show an unfinished project, but in this case I’m making an exception. This because I’m looking for comment.  For instance, does the layout say anything? How about the links?

This painting captures the sunrise at the Hudson River in Manhattan. At 7:00 am, April 4th, the rays of the sun bounced off the buildings on the New Jersey side and then reflected within the Hudson itself. The early morning sun produced a different lighting than the midday sun in my Sleeping Bear Dune picture. In my Dune picture, the light across the picture is quite flat. Contrast is achieved by using bright complementary colors, red and green, blue and orange.

Here I am comparing these two paintings posterized to level 4 in black-white. The early morning picture of the Hudson River (right panel) has a more extensive differences in tone than the midday picture of the Sleeping Bear Dunes (left panel).

Yesterday, I looked at light and color combinations in various paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many paintings showed pronounced differences in tone while others made more use of complementary colors.

An example of a painting with a pronounced difference in tone is Vermeer’s ‘Study of a Young Woman’ (right panel). There is no point in showing the painting, copied from the MET website, in color. The cloth worn by Vermeer’s young woman is a lovely cool light blue, not grey as the website shows. The photo of Vermeer’s painting, like that of my painting, is posterized to level 4 in black and white.

Renoir achieves contrast in his painting of Tilla Durieux (left) using vivid complementary colors which is again not obvious from its poor color of the photo on the MET website. The wall behind Tilla is vivid red and green. Likewise, her clothing and rose repeat the bright red-green colors.

Thus, it seems that, in case of even lighting, complementary colors can make a painting more interesting.

oil on basswood, 20 x 24 inches

Monet painted outdoors. A servant carried his paints and canvasses when he worked away from his house. At home, he diverted a stream to create his famous lily pond. A gardener kept its surface pristine, free of rotting leaves and insects.

Today, some painters work from photographs. Gerhard Richter painted from family photographs or obtained permission to paint from photographs in newspapers or journals. Peter Doig’s subjects, as FT.com puts it “ figures, buildings, landscapes – are stolen images (often carried around found for years on paper or in his head) knitted together into an imaginary world”.

Like other artists, I also prefer to paint from photos – recently, my own, while earlier, I made montages combining my own photos with images from the web. Enjoying hiking and photography, I now go out hunting for motifs that appeal to me.

Here is a scene from the Sleeping Bear Dunes. Brave people run down the 300 ft high dune, and, as you can infer from my painting, climbing back up is a different matter, especially over the hot sand at 1:30 pm in early August.

A few more excerpts from the ft.com article on Doig who works alone in contrast to many artists who employ legions of staff:

“Besides, I’d hate to have anyone else in my studio, because then I’d have to do something like … paint. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be a business. I like painting because you can go in and out of it; the simplicity, the directness, the dabbling quality”.

And, “Painters enjoy the rawness in historic painting, and the invention. That’s what you see in Goya, Velázquez, Picasso, Bacon, Matisse, Munch … even early Pop art. That’s what’s lacking in contemporary painting. It’s become very refined. I don’t think there are people taking risks.”

Finally, a comment that I am musing about,

“I’ve realised what I like in other artists’ paintings is when they’ve been left open and not shut down. I’m learning to do that. A painting is a living thing. It’s finished when it’s let go, when it’s out the door.”

Doig, born in Scotland, lived as a child in places with diverse climates such as Canada and Trinidad, went to art school in London and now lives again in Trinidad. His art education may explain why he first became popular in Europe with shows in Frankfurt, at the Tate and now in the London Michael Lerner gallery. In NYC, his pictures cannot yet be viewed in museums – the two owned by the MET are not on exhibition. But that may change as Doig has now acquired a studio in NYC in addition to his studios in London and Trinidad.

Out of the corners have come some pieces of ill-used Foamula that have caused me to ask: “What was I thinking?’.  However they often still possess a pink reverso, open to a further assault. This new onslaught upon the as-yet unslaught upon seeks to answer some questions regarding the application of polyurethane varnish. Before, this varnish was apt to dissolve the Foamula and required a preliminary coat of water-based primer or paint on the surface to prevent that from happening. Since then, the composition of the varnish – at least the stuff I’m using – has changed. Unfortunately the new formulation is of a brownish color and more expensive. Fortunately it now appears not to dissolve the Foamula any longer. The old veteran boards are being pressed into service to see if this is truly so.

A design was drawn on the surface of this board and areas were blocked out with gesso, leaving the rest of the area bare. I then applied a hot air gun – the type used for removing paint. This caused the bare surface to shrink while the portions protected by the gesso remained relatively unaffected. I then tinted some varnish and spread it over the surface. It collected in the grooves and indentations with results that you can see. So far there have been no untoward effects.

In the interests of confirmation, I have tried a few more.

This was made the same way and with yellowed and silvered varnish. Something about it makes me think of a specimen seen under a microscope.

This one was painted over in black, so it’s not exactly an experiment. I then applied a layer of purplish/white varnish and, upon its hardening, a layer of varnish with gold.

Finally, and apropos more to the culling side of things, is this old painting of railings on a snowy day. It had already received a lot of attention over time and I chose to hit it  overall with whitened varnish as a final make-or-break gesture. The effect came out as creamlike, what with the brown cast of the vehicle, but it served to unify the composition somewhat. Not exactly a hit, but better.

Many of the models are interesting characters, here is another one:

Recently, encouraged by Minerva, I stayed on for the afternoon session during which two models were interacting, a younger woman and an older one. Drawing the various poses of these two women, the younger one being protective of the older one, I felt highly emotional. Earlier that day, as I learned only afterwards, my mother had broken her leg – ESP?

This is today’s last drawing.