drift

"Buffalo 2", in progress, oil on canvas

60" x 48", Rico '13

There's this sense of living with the work.  I don't know how to explain it; I start a painting and it is like I'm searching for which note will come next as I play.  That's the thing, -one feels the way through; it isn't prescribed or a picture in the head thing.  It's organic.  Paintings evolve and for me it is almost a call and response relationship for weeks or months or years.  Paint is laid down.  Sometimes in earnest, sometimes tentatively at first (though one has to overcome that immediately).    I do a lot of looking.  Eventually I see.

This one wouldn't let me go.  Thought it was nearly done last year but it wasn't.  I painted out huge swaths of it over the weekend because I wanted that openness in the composition.  I wanted to take it right up to looking incomplete.  Maybe that's how we are; that's the human condition.

I'm becoming more interested in gray.  

New canvases arrived today, along with black gesso and tubes of Mars black.  I can't stop now, I'm in deep.