Blog Painting No.1

 

This is a small abstract painting that I started last November.   I have decided that I will do something to it each day for the next 7 days.  No matter how finished it looks on any given day I will do something to either wreck it or bring it back to something beautiful....hopefully more beautiful each time it comes around.

Let me know what you think about the various stages.

This painting is only about 20" tall by 14" wide.    Maybe more so because it is small, I ask myself...."why bother."  What can I put on the canvas that makes it worth the space it takes up.  And with abstract painting...small abstract painting...that question seems even harder to answer.

Maybe its because I don't mind having small empty spaces on my walls.  I don't feel compelled to fill up every wall...even those small walls between the.... say ..bathroom door and the hall closet...with a painting or a photograph or a mask or whatever.  "Nothing" looks great in most of those spaces.

Maybe its because many of my best abstract paintings rely on a kind of "field of vision" impact where the sheer size and drama of the marks make an impact with respect to the size of one's own body when standing near the piece.  

 Maybe its because I would like the paintings to be something more than decorative items to fulfill that horror of empty space that I was just speaking of earlier.  

Whatever the case may be...I want the paintings to somehow do something more....but what?

The answer to that question rests on two things:

1.  These abstract pieces are best when they hover between landscape and abstraction.   When they almost become landscapes they stretch the mind.  They invite introspection and contemplation on the nature of seeing and perceiving.  A gap opens up and in that gap something mysterious...even spiritual perhaps, has a chance to enter in where as most of the time the mind is too busy setting certainties to allow for such hocus pocus.

2,  That the marks bear the un filtered "footprints" of a mind wallowing, jerking, stretching, pulling, struggling, finding and ultimately surrendering to the great whatever.  To the degree that they do this...well...so much the better.  If it shows a bit of all that, then I would venture that I have found something which is what makes it more than "just decorative."

And so....I have decided to record as many stages as I can of this process through showing what happens to this little piece each night in my studio.  Maybe the thing I would ask of you is not so much if you like it or not, but whether you are getting a glimpse of any of these thoughts that inform my work.  Frankly I don't give a damn if you "like it" or not.