P267 Striation

P267 Striation
16x12" oil on canvas
$150.00

January 4, 2000: After spending several days cleaning up and resting after the holidays, I settled back into my sketching ideas for fossilized creatures and objects. What would the detritus of our modern world look like, if suddenly fossilized? What would we look like, already decadent, reduced yet more by the heat and wear of primal forces. Creatures and chairs curl at the edge, folding in on themselves, making patterns and sculptures.

It is a pleasure to set up the French easel in the kitchen, and work on a small canvas, an idea curling in on itself, in primary colors.

Although I am painting in primaries at the kitchen window, the world outside is white and khaki, bleached by a gentle snowfall. It is a good time of year for interior work, especially thinking, for ideas insist on coloring a landscape that is shadow-less and dull.


February 2, 2000: I have been thinking about the layers or accretions that we accumulate and carry about with us, many of them impossible to remove or lose along our life's way. Some of these layers harden like rock, making us living fossils in part. How weighted down we are by these stone shells. We drag through the day, half petrified, barely moving. Sometimes our own sense of self-renewal, that mental device that is capable of dissolving rock, permits us to free up a portion of the soft under body that is our original amorphous self. What an adaptable creature we carry within is. Smooth and malleable, it can take on any form. Yet we allow ourselves to conform to certain molds and inevitably to set into immutable forms. All progression, all evolution is a slow process. That is why it is so important to take notice of and record any changes, the slightest advancement.


June 20, 2000: There has never been a period in my life when I have been this long away from my art. A family emergency, lengthy travel, a large contract, and extended illness all kept me from my studio for three months. This week, finally, I found myself sitting in my canvas chair in the middle of the studio with coffee and music, surveying the two works in progress, their surfaces flat and dry, and their palettes dotted with fossilized oil paint. How would I regain lost momentum, find the thread of ideas in each piece? It was unthinkable to work on the large hanging (P254), with its complex progressions, though I am well aware of where it was going when I abandoned it.

The little oil sketch, P267, then. Its primary yellow and blue seemed particularly unappealing to me. What was I thinking? I turned the music up very loud and spent the rest of the evening thinking and staring at the Paleozoic paintings, which are all hanging like museum displays in the studio. What a deserted air my studio has! Even the music seems dusty.

The next day, as therapy, I assiduously cleaned the palettes and work areas for both paintings. I considered scraping P267 down and painting over it. But after fiddling in my sketchbook with a similar figure...ah, yes, the Striations...the little painting almost began to make sense again, and I rather grumpily squeezed some paint out and started to work on one of the yellow folds. Almost instantly, that empty gap of time dropped away, and I reconnected with the idea. It had not occurred to me that a large part of the connection to a painting is tactile. Even the color, spreading under my brush, became a sensory fact; of course yellow is the color of this striation.

After completing the painting last night, I immediately began another.

Paleozoic Series