P283 Fossil Fold

P283 Fossil Fold
20x24" oil on canvas
private collection

February 1, 2002: Spent some time in the studio, working on P283, Fossil Fold. I have been adding blue waves in the background, which give the impression that Abby is underwater. It reminds me of the wall hanging Debbie and I have been working on at the mall.

February 16, 2002: Most of today I spent working on P283, Fossil Fold. The face of the figure, which Abby posed for, is strange, even for one of my creatures. I always make the face too cute when I use Abby for a model, so then I am inclined to warp and twist it into one of my bug-eyed monsters with a pout or a frown.

February 22, 2002: The first thing I did this morning, after coffee, books and writing, was to go in the studio. I picked up some pastels and began touching up P283, which still did not please me, and in a few strokes of yellow and purple and blue, it turned into the painting I wanted.

Paleozoic Series

P282 Fossil Incline

P282 Fossil Incline
20x24" oil on canvas
private collection

October 30, 2001: While my daughter Abby was here last week, she was disturbed by the recent Paleozoic paintings, with their holes drilled through them and their hieroglyphic viscera. "You've made fossils of everyone else... why not of me," she demanded. When we got home, I took out a couple of stretched canvases and had her pose, the first a small close-up, curled up with her face half-buried in a pillow, looking tired and far-away. "It's not a nice face," she said, pouting a bit over the lines under the eyes. The second, larger sketch began as a rather ridiculous pose, Abby with her legs up, looking more like a fashion model than a fossil. But I played with it a bit, moving the pencil lines with thinner and a brush, and filling the figure with fossil shapes. Come to think of it, the face does look like a mask. I had an idea for a third picture, and had Abby sit with her knees pulled up and her arms crossed in front, a twin of the figure with the fossilized knee (P270).

I was anxious to start these paintings, as some sort of transition, or at least a break from the others, which are now referred to, not altogether facetiously by our art group, as the 'pain pictures', instead of "Paleozoic".

I set up the small picture, now P282, though I haven't a name for it yet. It's just a figure, exhausted and turning to stone.

November 21, 2001: After a quick lunch, I set to work on the painting, P282, Fossil Incline, and by 4:30 had finished it. The new colour combination, Cadmium yellow and red, gives rich oranges and earthy purples, which seem to suit the fossil shapes, and lends the paintings a warmer hue than the earlier pieces, in which I used Naples yellow and Prussian blue, the resulting turquoise giving off a cool aura.

The face of the figure in P282 is especially interesting to me. The day Abby posed, she was tired and feeling dejected over her health and her job. This face, while not particularly looking like her, captures her mood, the orange glow around her the comfort of home and family.

Paleozoic Series

P281 Fossil Armature

P281 Fossil Armature
14x8" oil on canvas
$125.00

July 27, 2001: This afternoon I sketched and under-painted P281, another small fossil painting. My shoulders and collar bone had been very painful the past few days, so I decided to look up the bones for a fossil shape. I was startled to see that a bone in the shoulder joint resembles the head of a raven. The shoulder blade behind rather looked like a wing. I played with it a bit, making a wing in red, a startling contrast to the yellow skeleton. When I set it to dry on the easel next to the little fossil woman (P280), though, it made an interesting progression. I suppose that is what I saw in the shape in the anatomy book.

September 18, 2001: I am very pleased with the development of the shapes in P281, which were inspired by the shoulder joint and part of the rib cage. The shoulder joint has the appearance of the skull of a bird, though I did not particularly play this up. Instead, I have allowed the underlying structure to suggest shapes, which I have moulded as I go. I am quite intrigued with yellow these days, a step over from the orange I have been using for so long, but of course when the yellow meets the medium cadmium I am using in this picture, it becomes a muted orange. I am thinking again of just letting myself play with shapes, though so far they always turn out better if based on some real thing, such as a body or even a real fossil or bone shape. For these works, I will stay small until I have decided whether I am going abstract or staying with figures.

September 20, 2001: As I have been working on P281, and looking at the little woman with the fossil armpit, P280, I realize that one is an outside view, the woman with her arm raised to reveal the fossil, and the other is an inside view, the actual event. Even the colours of these two pictures are the same, my strange venture back to red and yellow.

September 21, 2001: My work on the shoulder bone painting (P281) has me thinking of ways to express the 'disjointedness' I feel, the sensation of having different areas of my body out of order. But I wish to create a positive image, one of putting oneself back together again, in different configurations. If bones were reconnected in different ways they would form different paths, varied networks. A reconfigured person ... what colours would represent rebirth or restructure? Red for pain, certainly, but red is also the colour of creativity, thus recreation. I have been using a great deal of yellow for the bones and fossils, and this is certainly the colour of rebirth and renewal. The blue is perhaps the colour of hope.

September 22, 2001: Much of the day was spent working on P281, which has become a delightful exercise. I added, very late tonight, a mysterious lump or kernel, something to focus away from the generalised skeleton. It is a bubble or bump, something growing or disappearing, I am not sure.

October 30, 2001: Today I completed P281, the fossil shoulder-blade, out of sheer willpower. Its original concept, its shapes and colours, are now completely complexing to me, though it called to me briefly when I set it upright to look at it. Yes, there was something there, but there must be an end, for now, of my cataloguing of aches and pains.

Paleozoic Series

P280 Fossil Woman

P280 Fossil Woman
10x8" oil on canvas
Private collection

July 18, 2001: Another very warm day, the lake wrinkled by a breeze and the clouds stretched like gauze over a brilliant sky. A bird chirps. The wooden wind chimes clatter softly, musically. All other sounds are distant. An orange and black butterfly lands on a clump of red flowers in my garden, and the hummingbirds buzzes busily around the feeder and the flowers. A family of geese is idly paddling down the lake. The dog, panting, follows me, loyally lying down beside my chair.

I decided to bring some painting gear outside. It took me a while to set up my French easel on the deck. My arthritic fingers would not loosen the thumbscrews and wing nuts, so I had to run upstairs to the studio to find a pair of pliers, which I will keep in the easel box. Then I had to find tubes of colour and brushes and rags and thinner and pencils and art gum, and finally it is all set up before me, complete with a small panel. A very large dragonfly just landed beside the panel, as if to christen the set-up. I am having a wonderful time.

Since I brought French Ultramarine as my blue, I have the choice of any series subject. Among the limited colours, I chose Cadmium red, which I have not worked with since the Sanctuary Series, Cadmium yellow, Viridian, and my usual Paynes grey.

I drew a curled-up woman, all arms and knees with a particularly open and vulnerable armpit. The armpit makes me fall in love with the little picture. The other thing I love in this picture is the fall of hair, which looks like a rag or cloth in the left hand, curled over the head. Almost immediately I do the under-painting. A varying mixture of red and yellow for the body, pure Cadmium red for the hair, and ultramarine for the background.

The painting, which will have the catalogue number P280, has some interesting areas. What you at first take for the second knee is in fact a shoulder, and what you take for the other arm is a leg. The right arm is laced under and through the right leg. the red rag of hair looks like an organ, or blood. One can almost picture the figure as being hurt, crouched down and holding her head. I don't know what she is doing. She is supposed to be a fossil, so I suppose she is curled up, waiting to turn to stone. Or already turning, she cannot move. Her posture does resemble some of the body imprints found at Pompeii.

I like ambiguous figures like this. The interpretation is always up to the viewer, and differs with the viewer's frame of mind. The woman can appear peaceful, looking up at the sky or the sun, enjoying a relaxing moment, totally abandoned to sensation. Or she can be cowering, hiding from something, shielding herself with her arm. Is she opening up, or closing in? Is that really a red rag, waved in defiance? A red flag, warning. The woman is golden, glowing, a molten changeling. She refuses to be anything but what she is, this moment. She hold everything to her centre, and releases all, like birth, with a red flash. Even though she is facing upwards, her eyes are closed, concentrating inward. She already knows what is up there, out there. She closes her eye, feels it, and becomes it.

I love this painting because I genuinely didn't care what I painted, because I had no idea what I would do when I started, because I chose a different red this time, and because the drawing is primitive, a simple gesture, an iteration of a continuing idea.

It is getting dark, and I should put my painting away, even though it glows like a sunset. But I will have time to paint in the morning, especially if I get up early.

Paleozoic Series

P278 Fossil Glyph

P278 Fossil Glyph
12x9" oil on canvas

$100.00

May 15, 2001: After working on some Latin at the kitchen table, I went back upstairs to work on P277 a bit more. The idea of the glyph troubled me in a rather pleasant way, so I took a small canvas (P278) and sketched my own version of one of the Mexican glyphs, transformed into an organic shape, fossilized. I was very pleased with the image, which resembles the first Palaeozoic fossil I painted. As well, I dabbled at an unfinished watercolour in my sketchbook, a fossil made up of masks.

May 16, 2001: This evening I worked in the studio, on P277, and also did some of the under-painting on P278. As soon as I had stained the glyph of P278, orange, it took on the appearance of a scarab or beetle. Or even a mask. I am ridiculously pleased with this little picture, probably because it is the first new work in some time. I am beginning to have fun again. In a burst of optimism I prepared another small panel.

June 24, 2001: I worked on the new painting, P278, the small fossil that resembles a heart or an eye, originally inspired by a Mexican glyph. At first I had no enthusiasm for it, since I have been away from the idea for some time. My tentative glazes ran and blurred, and the limited palette seemed uninteresting. But as usual, the application of chiaroscuro and the addition of a warm yellow made my new creature come alive. It probably good that I have a small picture to dabble at, since I am at present unclear on the direction the series will take.

June 29, 2001: The wind hisses through the trees, rising and falling, and the day has remained hazy after last night's torrential rain. I love the feel of the air, as if everything is renewed, everything extra washed away. The colours are brighter, another reason to like such a day. I work outside a little, listening and smelling, and then come up to the studio to escape the midday heat, which is bad for my condition. I have been picking away at the little glyph painting, P278, thinking about some new paintings.

Last night, when I couldn't sleep, I thought of new paintings, perhaps a new series, for the first time. I have been thinking of knots as the visual representation of dilemmas or ideas. Also the homonym of knot, not intrigues me. Not (knot) theory. It may be a step toward the abstraction I seek. I must play with it a little. I am reminded of the knots I began using in the Sanctuary Series. Above all, though, I do not wish them to be perceived of as negative, just what things are not, or the tangle of trying to get to the truth or basic, untainted idea.

July 4, 2001: Still wondering where P278 is going, but at least I am working on it this morning. Its fleshy coils look as though they should mean something, and I suppose that is the whole point of abstraction or near abstraction...the mind attempts to resolve the pattern before it. It comes around, again and again, sparking new ideas, but always returning to the abstract. It is that abstracted state of mind we try to achieve, anyway, when we are looking for enlightenment. This is not an abstract, surely, for it appears figurative, but it is unnameable, unrecognizable. This was how the Mexican glyphs affected me, so many of them simply a pattern that was almost something, organic or geometric, but always just slipping off the symmetry of recognition.

As if to underline that feeling, the music I am playing this morning is equally fugitive, Tippett's Symphony #4. At times I think there is a flaw in the disk, but then melody creeps in. Now I am laughing at myself, because the disk was skipping after all. But it was a wonderful moment, the way the sound matched the painting and my thoughts.

The painting is equally silly to me at times, but that may also be the point, that art is about everything we think, not always profound or meaningful. I simply make it all into my patterns, pleasing in cadmium orange and Prussian blue. I keep wanting to make fun of the little painting, but when I come up on it, after being out of the room, I am drawn to it. It is my daring step, my willingness to make a mistake, to paint something bad.

July 11, 2001: ...The multi-coloured fossil glyph(P278) is beginning to resemble some exotic fruit. The addition of yellow was unfortunate, I think. I want to go upstairs and do something about it, but I seem immobilized here. Why am I writing about a rock concert? But I am really writing about self-satisfaction and dearth of passion in art. Dabbling without heart, mouthing to the lyrics, without voice. Maybe that glyph is my heart, turned into an over-ripe fruit, crystallizing into a gaudy fossil. Where is the integrity of the idea? I dare not get back to work on the large hanging, until I have my head and heart back into the idea. At least I did not paint this bauble into a major work.

For a while this morning, I actually considered painting over the picture, and I may still do that, rather than waste more time on it. What is stopping me is my periodic interest, over the past few weeks, in the idea. At one point I was quite enthralled with it, colours and all. Often, just past the halfway point in a painting, I am quite out of love with the entire idea or the way I have done it. Seeing it through usually resolves things. But I should not be too hesitant about tossing aside a bad idea, either, and moving on.

July 25, 2001: This is where it gets interesting. After getting dressed this morning, I wandered around doing some small chores and feeling depressed and hopeless. Well, the writing is going well, but the little painting I just finished, P278, the fossil glyph is gloomy-looking. I consider brightening it up. I bring it down to the kitchen, yes the kitchen, and bring the French easel in from the deck. It's very cold and grey today, so I am thinking I might pick away at the little fossil woman here in the kitchen, which is almost the deck, since I have the same view.
The fossil glyph doesn't look nearly so gloomy and dull down here, especially when the sun suddenly comes out, and the little picture glows. It is subtle, I think, less brilliant than some of the other paintings in the series. I will leave it, as I think I already knew I would. What is the point in going back over a painting that is done? You are already a different person, a different artist, than the day you finished that picture. And it would be a different painting. Better to make another version of an idea, than paint over an existing one. It would be like writing over journal entries. I feel differently almost every day, about the same things.

Paleozoic Series

P277 Diary of a Fossil Woman

P277 Diary of a Fossil Woman
20x18" oil on canvas
private collection

March 16, 2001: I started a painting (P277), a twisted women with great holes eaten into her joints. In spite of her condition, the woman continues to scribble lines, pictures and words, disappearing into a great spinning blue vortex.

May 15, 2001: I take a cup of coffee up to the studio and tidy up a bit before settling down to the painting, P277, which has been abandoned on the easel for so long. At first I followed what I had started to do, where the arm crosses the body...but it appeared flat or stiff, such an important place, and in the middle of the picture, the path to the gesture. I turned the painting the way I had originally drawn it, landscape-wise with the face down, but the woman seemed to be falling out of the bottom. What happened to the image? I turned it back up again, with her head at the top, and it seemed right. Then, on a whim, I added a lozenge shape inspired by the Mayan inscriptions I saw in Mexico. I worked the arm differently, so that it was joined by webbing to the body and the lozenge, which in turn is joined to the body by its own webs or veins. How strange it looks, a discontinuity. But it is right. Something is happening to the woman, something permanent.

At first, having been away from the painting so long, I laid out the wrong blue on the palette, French Ultramarine. I stared at it for a moment, another discontinuity, then replaced it with Prussian. But I wondered what the Ultramarine tube was doing at the easel with this painting.
May 23, 2001: When I got home, I settled down to my painting, P277, and completed the entire central portion, which now disturbingly resembles the entrails of a sacrificial victim, although I will staunchly defend the effect as a fleshy fossil thing. My quest to depict pain may have reached its logical conclusion, since all the possible guts have been spilled, but of course I will continue with these shapes until I have finished with them or they have come to represent something else in my mind. I simply cannot let go of the flesh tones, and these colours alone make everything look, well, fleshy. And the twisting, coiling, knotted shapes have always appealed to me, though they admittedly tend to look like brains and viscera.

Paleozoic Series

P276 Inter-Facial Difficulties

P276 Inter-facial Difficulties
18x20" digital collage, oil on canvas
Private Collection

This collage was done for the InterFaces online exhibit, the theme being 'the masks we wear'.

January 10, 2001: I began assembling two mask paintings for the exhibit, both with collaged elements, P275 and P276. Working on them both at once, using the digital shots I had taken of my own face and hands, I came up with quite different compositions, one where the hands and fingers seem to form a mask, and one in which the hands are holding or removing the masks. After they dried, I did acrylic under-paintings in French ultramarine, cadmium orange, and yellow ochre, carving out shapes.

January 11, 2001: Last night I decided to work up the second collage, P276, in oils, and I spent some time on the left hand of the figure in the far right. The ochre under-painting had taken away from the overall composition; being too close to the orange of the masks, but it makes an excellent ground for the flesh colour. In this painting, which I have rather whimsically titled "Interfacial Difficulties", the orange colouring and the cutting away of the head and hair separate the facial area, but there is no head behind it, no creature behind the mask, so to speak. The bodies are all flesh, just necks, torsos and arms. I have thought of adding lumps behind the masks, to represent heads, but am intrigued with the idea of there being nothing behind the masks.

January 12, 2001: The afternoon was spent working on P276, the oil collage. The image took a sudden twist when I began isolating some of the hand shapes, making one orange. Suddenly the hand becomes an object demanding attention. Here I am, it says, insisting it is different from all the others. The addition of crimson, which adds mauve tones in the flesh and blue, also adds more dimension. The mask, with its bulging eye sockets, is bothersome, one is not sure why, until one realizes that it would be impossible to see out of it. Perhaps every mask in the picture should have a flaw or difficulty.

Paleozoic Series

P275 Digital Mask

P275 Digital Mask
18x20" digital collage, acrylic on canvas
$350.00

This collage was done for the InterFaces online exhibit, the theme being 'the masks we wear'.

January 10, 2001: I began assembling two mask paintings for the exhibit, both with collaged elements, P275 and P276. Working on them both at once, using the digital shots I had taken of my own face and hands, I came up with quite different compositions, one where the hands and fingers seem to form a mask, and one in which the hands are holding or removing the masks. After they dried, I did acrylic under-paintings in French ultramarine, cadmium orange, and yellow ochre, carving out shapes.

January 11, 2001: In P275, the acrylic collage, there is only a mask, with two arms supporting it, the hands forming a mask in themselves, masking the mask. This image is more ambiguous, though it looks a little like a fossil, and I may put a version of it in the large hanging.

Paleozoic Series

P274 Creature with Virtual Mask

P274 Creature with Virtual Mask
24x24" oil, digital collage on panel
Private Collection

September 13, 2000: The new mask painting, P274 'Creature with virtual mask', has begun to show some alarming tendencies toward self-portraiture. Why does this surprise me, since the mask is a digital image of my face? But when it was simply under painted orange, it was more of a mask, less of a face. The creature beneath, who is removing the mask, is different, almost masculine. Yin and yang, or the reduction to mere opposites. Although the creature is simply one of my visages, it appears more real than I intended, which usually happens when I use the flesh colour. Even the orange, shocking at first, becomes a reasonable shade of skin when the features appear. The expression is always more important than the complexion. As well, this mask has eyes, each different, slightly askew, very human. Before I go to bed, I play with lights in the background, but everything added around the heads looks like hair, or an aura.

Tomorrow, a fossilized, fleshy shoulder and the larger-than-life hand, not so dainty. Perhaps it was swollen that day.

When I was arranging the collage and doing the underpainting for this work, I had thought of the orange mask as being unreal, but the orange colour merely added to its life, virtually a visage. As usual when I work with collage, I painted over and changed everything, eliminating digital detail and adding my own. I am particularly fond of extra bits of paper, which contribute edges that are not part of the original collaged image. The creature, then, is removing a lifelike face to reveal an icon of a face, the way the creature sees itself, an amorphous reduction. As well, the body is half in, half out of its shell...to whom does the violet robe belong? The disguise is but partial, making the gesture, or moment, a pivotal one. Is the creature assuming the mask, or removing it? Or the creature may be holding it up, like an artifact..."Pardon me, did you lose this?" Discarded, the mask may become a fossil, eyes crystallizing and skin turning to a ferrous shell.

Paleozoic Series