Archive for February, 2010

Seeing things

Another attempt at abstraction..starting with blues and oranges and intersecting shapes, which led to a repetition of triangular shapes. Shortly after I took this photo, the painting coalesced into a small seaside new england town, replete with sailboats, a lighthouse, well maintained white clapboard houses and church with freshly painted blue roofs. And of course the requisite autumn foliage. I mean that I saw this in my mind but once I had that image there I couldn’t maintain the integrity of the work. At least as an abstract. And I didn’t really have enough information to paint representationally. And it sort of fell apart. But at least I have this photo. And maybe I can resurrect this stage again, which, though not finished, is sort of interesting.

Update on the ’snowpocalypse’

And the orange guy just keeps on trucking, rain, sleet or, in this case, 4 ‘ walls of snow. (See February 3 entry)

Abstracted

Starting with a simple design of horizontal planes and intersecting lines and a few ideas for color, I began to randomly fill in with flat color just to see where it would lead. At some point it seemed that pink had to dominate. I got looser with the paint, using a palette knife. Purples and blue contrasted nicely with that. It seem like a pleasant design but looking a little flat. Something had to go in the foreground. A few quickly drawn black lines and daubed-in white and gray shapes and an ancient civilization seemed to sprout instantly off the rocky cliffs. I began to wonder, what was their means of sustenance? I had such a storyline built up around this that I don’t think I could finish the picture. I ended up painting much of what you see above with what looked like a huge freeway (not shown). More on this later.

Cream Popsicle

When the snow first hit the DC region, little did we know what was coming. It looked so pretty at the time. I loved how bright the colors of street signs looked in a world otherwise devoid of color. A week later, we were so tired of of the 3 plus feet of snow that had fallen, who wanted to take photos of it?