I began without any ideas at all today. I just painted a shape here and another shape there. What I had in mind was to surround each shape with a black moat, creating a maze. Paul Klee painted many paintings with this look (such as Intention and Comedians’ Handbill). The shapes in this composition don’t have much meaning. […]
I started my study today with Earth tones including red iron oxide and quinacridone orange. Since the element iron is found on Mars, I can call them “Mars tones” as well. However, I did not know that my composition could eventually pass as a Martian landscape. After glazing the surface with my colors, I splattered blue pigment […]
This began as a study in shading. I drew two circles, and (curved) tangents that met at two separate vanishing points. I intended these two triangular constructions to be the sources of light for each of the circles. I shaded the first circle beginning with dark on the outside gradually becoming white in the center; the other I […]
I used to play the violin. I still have the one my friend from a violin-making school made for me. It is a beautiful copy of a Guarneri del Gesu. I’m scared to death to look at it, as I haven’t taken it out in a very long time. Paul Klee was a musician as well […]
My abstract started with a blue ‘S’ curve. I let it sit for a while until I decided that it would be a baby dragon. I cross hatched some scales along the snake-like body and ended with a flourish of squiggles. My dragonlet has just gotten to the somewhat smokey ‘ignition’ stage (I haven’t decided […]
I drew the curves first in the study below. Somehow they reminded me of part of a leg bone near the joint. It was only natural to insert the ‘ball’ part of the ‘ball and socket’ joint, to complete the idea. The design came out fine, only it wasn’t exactly the picture I had in […]
I took my paper folding-painting to another level with the study below. This is a continuation of my adaptation of Simon Hantaï’s technique of painting on folded canvas (see Abstract – After Simon Hantaï). I began using a French Curve as a template to incise several lines with a steel point. These fine lines were virtually […]
A lot of art today relies on technology. I’ve been reading a bit lately about the dawn of tech in the arts. I have also been reading about the beginnings of Abstract Expression in the 1940s and 50s, and the studios near 10th Street and 4th Avenue in New York City. I was surprised to read […]
I carried forward my experiment in which I painted on a crumpled ball of relatively light-weight paper (Abstract – After Simon Hantaï) to today’s effort to apply Hantaï’s method to a very heavy (246#) sheet of linen-textured paper. I scored the paper along its width, with about a dozen (more or less) parallel lines. After I […]
I started again by etching designs with my compass/divider and my straight edge. I began with circles, then partial circles, which I extended with arcs of longer radii. Somewhere during this process, the idea of a leaf began to coalesce. I had ideas about painting within the lines with interesting contrasting colors. However, the first […]
