I worked on some oil paintings yesterday. Three. I started them at the end of last year and then left them in various stages while I dug into making some new works on paper. As I work on the watercolors and gouaches, I sense I am neglecting the paintings. For some reason I always consider the oil paintings (or whatever other mixed media stuff I use on canvas) more "serious" than the watercolors. They're not. The watercolors are as serious, but there's a lightness to them that is in direct correlation to the heaviness in the oil paintings. The canvases have their own gravitas- oil, sludge, opaque murky hues that in a watercolor seem counter instinctual. Water flows, Paints sticks.
Two of the paintings are 20" x 16". I like this size. I feel like I am now understanding these dimensions. I have a relationship with the canvas that feels like what a portrait might include-head, bust, partial torso. I'm suspecting that they're self-portraits. The third canvas is 24" x 30". I wrangled one of the 20 x 16's into a good place yesterday. I can leave it alone for a day or two, I think, without feeling compelled to attend to it.
I noticed I used the word, 'feel' and other words dealing with intuition 7 times in my post. This is telling.
Some notes on The Gift, the book I'm reading. I have trouble reading sometimes. I tend to scan, even when something's riveting. If there's any kind of a speed bump in the reading, I go into extreme scan mode, quickly looking for a sentence or concept or something to latch me in again. Then I feel guilty and try and re-read every word I scanned over. You'd never believe that I wrote poetry in my 20's. I barely believe it.
I'm getting a tad tired of wading through the all the anthropology, yet every page has some gems. Last night I came across his reference to the folk tale of "The Shoemaker and His Elves." I've always loved that tale and had forgotten about it at a conscious level. Hyde has mentioned more than a couple of times the uncanny concept of the artist disassociating his/herself from the making of the work, so that after the work is complete, there is a strange feeling that the "I" did not make the work. I do this all the time. I look at things I've painted and although I am fully aware that I did indeed paint them, (Proof: there's still paint under my fingernails this morning.) I feel like the shoemaker's elves have come in and finished them. I lose track in the gap between some moment in the thick of it when everything's a mess, to the moment they reach the other side.
Fang's asleep in my studio. He's been content to hang out and sleep in here more and more lately and it's comforting. I tell him he's got the day off from guard duty when he does this. (He's a shepherd mix, so he's usually by the gate playing sentry during the day.)
2 comments:
Good Fang.
How can you not be spooning with that fur ball?
ps
I've been systematically go through my flat files (I see yours in the background) and doing a purge. Sometimes I am stunned at what my elves have produced. Sometimes they seem to have been someone else's elves.
The recycle bin is slowly filling.
Yeah, I have a box which I call my rehab box. Instead of immediately recycling they go there first for more work. If they're beyond that, they go to the chop shop box for harvesting as parts.
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