change of venue

We are off on an eight-day trip to the San Francisco area to visit friends and family. I closed up the studio with some reluctance, since I have been enjoying the momentum of the daily sessions of the past ten weeks. As I looked around my space today at the paintings completed, the paintings nearly done, and the paintings just begun, I couldn't help but have a sense of accomplishment. And several of the incomplete pieces are calling out for more development, so that I think it will be easy to get back into the rhythm of work when we return.

My hours today were spent on a 12" x 9" piece that has been through so many "final" iterations that I ended up dissolving and scraping back two separate surfaces that had thickened the piece without bringing it to a conclusion. This is a simple matter of spraying mineral spirits onto the surface and scraping and brayering off layers of paint. Fun but also dangerous, this process reduces paint thickness and also reveals (often unexpected) treasures on the lower layers. The danger is that those surprises may not complement the vision of the upper layers, and I sometimes have to reassess what to do next. I have discarded more than one piece that became so mangled that I despaired: One of the pleasant developments of the past few months is that I seem to be able to manage things better now.

This morning, after an hour-plus of work, I had a very pleasing result, and thought, "Finished at last!" But then I wondered if a mist of mineral spirits might clarify some of the colors (applied correctly, mineral spirits can cause some pigments to separate from others and bring a pleasing brightness to a surface). This led to fiddling and nudging, more misting, and, ultimately, taking off too much paint in too many places. Nonetheless, I had the sense to stop before losing all of the work I had just done, and I left the painting hanging on the pegboard to dry. It is one of the pieces to which I am eager to return. It may in fact be finished; I was too close to it to tell by the end of my work today.

The image above is not of the 12" x 9", but rather a finished 16" x 12" from last month -- another that was sprayed and brayered twice before coming to conclusion. I have the honor of its being part of a new web site, Resources for Cold Wax Painting, created by Rebecca Crowell. The site provides a wealth of material about this flexible and expressive medium in which I work.