second pass

I had to chuckle as I worked on "arc" today, because this piece is really open-ended and is thus a vivid contrast to the landscape I wrote about in the last post. As I try my idea of an abstraction keying off of a specific cliff, I truly don't know how it will turn out. I am painting on an as-I-go basis, though I do use some artistic judgments. For example, I established some value contrast today, with the idea that this is a kind of base layer, in opaques, to be covered over with successive layers of transparents to build the cliff.  But, who knows where the next step will take me? Nor do I know how much "cliff" will be left in the final piece. I guess I am assuming that because there is a drawing underneath everything that I put on top, some essence will come through. But I don't know that, nor do I know whether I might not go back in with drawn marks later on. I just don't know where it is going.  But that is what is exciting: There is no predetermined image that I am trying to achieve. It will go where it goes. I am documenting its creation here mostly to record my musings as the process unfolds, so that the next creation might be more informed. The idea of "cliff-ness" is still in my mind, I just don't know how literal I want to be. This may be too referential an approach, but I won't know until it is finished. I am continuing to work on the older 16"x16" cliff-ness panels, also with arcs, that reference no actual cliff. I posted an image of one in process on January 16th. It will be interesting to see if the two approaches produce clearly distinctive finished pieces, or whether they will morph into such similar results that the differences between their processes are indistinct.