Ahead of the Curve

Today, as I post this work in progress as it looked five weeks ago, I have started to listen to a Brené Brown podcast, Dr. Marc Brackett and Brené on "Permission to Feel." 

Back on March 7 when I was adding color and building layers on this piece, the podcast probably hadn't even been recorded yet. Happily, I was ahead of the curve—already giving myself permission to feel, using paint as my medium. 

work in progress, 13 days in, 3/7/20
30 x 40" canvas (rotated)

Complete vs. Completed

I see this piece as an outward manifestation of a burst of inward tumult. It is not a completed painting. That would be something different. It is what I'd call a complete self-expression.

The inward tumult has passed through, as inward tumults do. It is complete. It has, however, left a vapor trail, traces of having blown past.

Most likely I will pick up this scrappy, rough, hand-me-down canvas again sometime and do something else with it. For now, perched on my dresser, it provides refreshing 'visual cacophony' in my bedroom.

The Cacophony of Birds at Dawn
16 x 20"; acrylic, latex, ink, collage, and oil pastel on canvas
abstract
2018

Pressed Into Service

As previously stated, on Monhegan I had only limited tools and materials at hand, most notably watercolors, with which I am almost entirely unfamiliar other than having used them occasionally as a child and most likely a few times when my kids were little. Certainly not in the past four years of painting as an adult.

What could they do?

What could I do with them?

No way to know but to press them into service and follow their lead.

I felt mostly flummoxed as I started this piece. The experience felt flat. On the surface. Mechanical, if you will. A hand moving water and color over paper with a brush.

I didn't feel the inward reverberation of expressing myself—although, really, what else could it be that I was doing?—until I picked up my Bic pencil, Neocolor water-soluble crayons, and Posca paint pen.

Then, using my watercolor base on the page as a prompt, I felt animated, intuitive, in flow, present, in direct conversation.

Scribble, scratch, dot, dab, done.

Preoccupied with Light and Shadow and the Regular Business of a Summer Morning
4.5x6"; watercolor, pencil, and water-soluble crayon on watercolor paper
abstract
2018

Slapstick 12/13/17

Good grief, it's only 315p as I pop outdoors to catch a photo in natural daylight, and I have to ask, daylight? what daylight?

With my geometric series completed, I choose a fresh palette and start brand new today. I paint from a measure of raw uncomfortable inner dissonance that I carried into the studio with me. The dissonance doesn't sit well in my body, but it does open me to impulse and freeform painting—welcome gateways to both feeling the disequilibrium rather than running away and to expressing it.

Plus, I get a start on paper.

12x16" work in progress,
photographed indoors

work in progress after a second pass,
 photographed in waning winter daylight