I started a new painting on Wednesday of this week, a 42″ high by 60″ wide canvas. I first prepped the surface with layers of gesso and a layer of black paint. I’m not sure if the texture of the surface will fully come through in this photo but it has an interesting surface with string-like bands running across it.
I’ve been working lately in my self-titled obsessionist style, work that is based on a dark ground with building color shapes on top. It is the style I have used for much of my Red Roof work and is the type of work I have featured as of late in this blog. I tend to work in surges, focusing on a certain style for an extended period, as though each piece, though self-contained and complete in itself, is both rehearsal and an extension for the next piece.
By extension, I am referring to an extension of the thought process that forms my compositions. For instance, I may take a concept that started in an earlier piece in the series and either expand upon it or take it in a different direction than the painting from which it stemmed, maybe in a direction that I recognized after the original had taken form.
As I have been doing a lot of Red Roof-like work I wanted to take something that I gleaned from a few of my recent pieces and move it to a larger canvas. I wanted a large mass of structures building upward. So I began working in the lower corners, blocking in the forms in a red oxide paint. As I said before I have used other colors as an underpainting before, I prefer red oxide for the way it shows through and creates a warmth and depth in the whole piece. My eye responds to the red breaking through the overlaying colors as the piece proceeds. It’s something that reminds me of the bits of a vermillion color you often see braking through other colors in Paul Gauguin’s work, something I always look for in his work.
As I start bringing the corners toward each other, I start making decisions on how it will build upward. Everything, except for the fact that I know I want masses of structures, is up in the air at this point and my forward vision is constantly shifting. At this point on this piece, I have a feeling that I want to insert a canal or river, elements that I have used often as of late, and a bridge connecting the two sides. I decide to start with the bridge and let the waterway build off of that.
Covering such a large canvas with small forms is time-consuming, more so than some of my other work which consists of large color fields and requires a different form of concentration because, as I said above, the piece is always shifting as each new element is added. It requires me to stay fully engaged which is really the basis for obsessionism as I see it. As a result, I often am thinking about my next move on the work even when I am not at the easel or when my day is done in the studio.
So, it’s time to get back at it…
Redtree Times 