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