Continued identity crisis

(originally posted 10/26/09)

While this blog worries whether it is a design blog, an art blog, an “anything goes” blog (the weakest of the three), whether you would still love it if it were fat, I will post some watercolors:

These are all 15" by 20":






So many squares because I started each one based on observations of a square fan in the studio. From that starting point, several pictures, and a more or less successful dive into the subconscious, a good old-fashioned strive for the tension of illusionistic space and flatness, and also there's probably some subconscious Sharka coming through, with her Germanic love of rules—both the lines and the laws—and geometry.

Some of these look like landscapes, which Sharka also seems to be working on, although hers are explicit amalgams of both psychological and physical landscapes. My third from the top is a city I think, although that one is certainly overpainted, and second from the top appears to be a romanticized image of the American West, which is strange since I don't particularly like Westerns, or the 19th Century generally. Can you dislike a century? In fact, the only movie depicting that time period I can recall liking is Dances With Wolves, but the frontier in that movie is the plains of the American Midwest, not the deserts further on. I think that’s a wigwam at the top, painted by accident. And actually it only became a wigwam after I turned the painting on its side.

Joyce’s main criticism of these two paintings is that I was not judicious in my use of color. She’s probably right. I am very much about watercolors now because of the speed with which you can cover the paper, and not the colors themselves. I think I was hoping that through an “arbitrary”, automatic use of color, some other accidents might surface that would reveal something the images and ambiguous spaces created by the forms and composition did not. But Joyce is right to point out a certain color-apathy may be showing more than any fruitful abandon, and, full disclosure here, I did choose colors based on value and not hue, which kind of like buying a swiss army knife for the knife only. It serves the purpose, but why not just use a plain utensil?