Hello, bloggers!
I made two discoveries this week in my studio here in the Florida Keys.
Three or four weeks ago I did a dip (the first step in my painting process), then let it dry. I then put one of the pieces on the wall, and I was wondering whether it was abstract or figurative. I looked at it for about a week, and first I liked it, then I didn’t like it—it was really taunting me...
So two days ago, I was working with gesso, and there was a little bit of gesso left in the bottom of the pan. I thought: “If I throw this gesso on the ceiling, some of it is going to drip down onto the painting.” And so I did. It fell on it and splattered.
I let it lie there for about an hour, then I went over with my gloves and started to manipulate it—and all of a sudden, here come my spirits: first one of them, then two, three, four, five, and six... They were very bizarre; they had different things going on...
So this was an unexpected development with the second randomization with a white color, which is very difficult to work with when you’re doing a multi-color painting. The way it came about, and the way the spirits manifested themselves, makes me think the spirits are telling me now what I’m supposed to be doing; I’m not telling them.
Then, as a second discovery: I was doing a dip with different sizes of canvases, a 3x4, 2x2s, and so on... I manipulated them all around, and then I thought: These don’t look very interesting to me.
So I took some blue and purple and started to splatter them, and then some yellow, and it started to incorporate into the melange that which was already on there—which was more of a scrape piece, where all the colors are in different lines scraped together.
They then started to be encompassed by the different fluids, but eventually they overcame the fluids and were their own strength, and came to be embedded in the whole melange. This was a sort of second life for the process. Tomorrow I’ll continue that exploration.
Every day, every week, it seems there’s a new mutation that presents itself.
Matt