A Work in Progress Story in Pictures

I sketched out the form for Protoa Beta on its backing cardboard several months ago. The photo demonstrates all the places my knees depressed the structure of the card. While it’s not ideal, the papier maché layers should ultimately cover these defects. One thing I’ve found with the Protoas is that after the initial full size sketch is drawn, I come back to it later and find I don’t like the “explosives” (what I call the outer jagged edge), and have to fix them. The following photos demonstrate the linear progression of how this was edited before finally cutting it out. The act of cutting also allows for slight editing as well: in case the drawn lines aren’t straight, I use the blade to make them true. Additionally, in the above photo, previous explosive sketch-lines are still faintly visible from edits I made before taking photos.

This design is the only one I hadn’t finished revising or cut out. I decided to work on it because it’s one of my favorite Protoas and Alpha taught me that they take a great deal of time to build. I’ve decided it’s thus worthwhile to complete my favorites first.

ii. Protoa Beta WIP 20210911 ©2021

iii. Protoa Beta WIP 20210911 ©2021

iV. Protoa Beta WIP 20210911 ©2021

I spent significant time working on pen and ink drawings of fruits and vegetables over the week too. It’s helped me think about loosening up my hand and how to emphasize shading. It’s a very useful excercise for training both the hand and eye.

Pumpkin, 20210910 | Sennelier Sepia Ink and white charcoal pencil on Strathmore Toned Grey sketch pad ©2021

I continued my Sisyphean efforts to make my silver hammered earrings. This morning I ultimately cut the ends off of both, having splintered the silver at the core. I took a quick look at a silversmithing q&a forum (orchid.ganoskin.com) and worry I damaged the grain in spite of regular annealing. I’m revising my plan for these. No more tapered end. I’ll solder earwires on after forming the spirals and hammering them into flatter hoops.

Ear Spirals WIP 20210913 ©2021

Protoa Alpha

After several months, the first full size Protoa is complete. I’ve learned a good deal about this process, and I expect to proceed with another one soon. I’ll focus on the shapes I like best since completing all nine of the series is a bigger project than I’d meant it to be. Before starting the next one, though, I plan to draw and paint still lives as hand-skill practice. I’ve always been more an ideas person than an execution person, but if I want to be excellent, I will have to temper my idea churn with heavy attention to craft.

Speaking of craft, I continued working on my silver spiral earrings, but haven’t gotten anywhere. My experiments with tapering silver wire have been unsuccessful so far. I think I may have solved a problem though: I suspect I wasn’t annealing thoroughly with the first try at forging. Or perhaps I work hardened the pieces too far before re-annealing. In any case, I splintered the sliver, had to cut it off, and then smelted it down. It’s been frustrating. All hand work is slower than I expect and also slower than I want it to be. I’m going to try forging again, the slow way, and see if I get where I want to go.

It's Alive!

PROTOA Variant 𝛼 WIP 20210827 ©2021

I’m finally painting the first Protoa variant. I wanted a highly saturated yellow green, but the local art stores were out of this hue in Golden brand acrylics (my preferred paint). When I spoke with the sales clerk at Van Beek, he told me they’d been having supply problems with Golden lately: no yellow ochre for months! Golden must be having some real challenges if they can’t ship yellow ochre. In any case, the only acrylic brand they carried with a green that felt vibrant enough for what I wanted was Amsterdam Expert. When I asked the clerk how this paint was, he tried (gently) to steer me away, saying that it had more pigment than the other grades of Amsterdam acrylics, but otherwise would work as the brand usually does. He suggested I could mix my color, but to no avail. I decided that between its inexpensive price and high intensity color, I’d try it out. Well, in spite of its name, this paint was not expert grade. I chose not to mix my color because I’ve found that if you want a highly vibrant color, mixing often leads to dullness, so for good saturation it’s often better to paint straight from the tube. In any case, even the cheap Daler-Rowney I’ve purchased at Walmart for kid’s craft art has more consistency than the Amsterdam Expert. I was surprised at how bad it was. The green pigment separated radically from the medium, leaving green splotches over a bright yellow base suspension. If I’d been painting anything else, I’d have been sorely disappointed.

Fortunately, in this Protoa series, accidents are part of the process, so I went with it (though there will be no future purchases of Amsterdam Expert). One of the interesting effects of the pigment separation was the way it played with the surface texture. It added unexpected depth. In a way, this was more interesting than the consistent Golden heavy body Hansa Yellow used on the top. This color has some transparency, which offered decent blending at the edges of the Amsterdam Expert Yellow Green. For the next layer, I’m going to mix a little Golden Pthalo Green Fluid acrylic into the Amsterdam yellow green for a slightly deeper shade as an accent on the base edge. We’ll see how that mixing goes.

In addition to the Protoa, I continued my tapered spiral earring project. I’ve been hand forging 3mm round sterling wire, and may have gone too far. I tried to speed things up by using a flat rolling mill, but in attempting to go faster, I don’t think I annealed enough between presses. In any case, pure hand forging would have produced better results because you can avoid making corners. In trying to avoid a squared outcome on the mill, the corners squished into thin flaps: essentially making burs. I could continue and work the ends into mokume since the wire surface now has a fold, but that’s not what I want. I probably have to cut off the tips, which are now thin and brittle, unless they can be repaired with heat. Since I’ll have to cut off the ends if it doesn’t work, I’ll try repairing the cracks first. I wanted to avoid soldering on earwire but this may be unrealistic.

Forging Tapered wire part 1 WIP 20210826 ©2021

Forging Tapered wire part 2 WIP 20210826

Back to Work at TwoDog Studio

School has reopened for fall, and today, two of three children have returned to it so I can get back to work in the newly dubbed TwoDog Studio. This not-being-paid situation is imperfect, but making my own creative decisions will never get old. I can be as weird and unmarketable as I like. Hence, I have the Protoas in work.

It’s been a much slower process than anticipated. It took ages to build up enough layers of papier maché to make the form solid, and the raised surface is not at all smooth. I’ve decided the rough contours add interesting, albeit unexpected nuance. In another intriguing accident, the cardboard base has created a bubbly texture beneath the gesso. It may be related to my having used fewer papier maché layers since the cardboard seemed to offer enough structure of its own. Once this Protoa is finished, I may thicken the base of the next one after I’ve seen how this one resolves.

I added the second layer of gesso today. It may need some spot touches before painting, but I’ll assess later this week. It’s exciting that it’s nearly ready to paint!

A Photo Post: Chicago-TX-Chicago

The last few weeks were a whirl of travel to and from Chicago. I took photos.

18th Street Bridge View Chicago 20210727 ©2021

Towering View From the South-Loop Chicago 20210730 ©2021

PIlsen Chicago Frida-Basquiat Street Art 20210801 ©2021

Pilsen Chicago Industry 20210801 ©2021

PIlsen Chicago Street Art Statement 20210805 ©2021

Joshua Springs Park, Kendall County, TX 20210807 ©2021

Herff Road Windmill Boerne, TX 20210808 ©2021

Herff Road Boerne, TX 20210808 ©2021

Millenium Park Chicago 20210811 ©2021

Across the River from Michigan Ave Chicago 20210811 ©2021

American Holiday Week II: Texas and Back Again

It wasn’t a productive week for art, though I did have a little more reading time than usual thanks to the several hours of flying to and from Chicago. I relish any time for thought I get, and that worked for me. It was good to be back in Texas; this time flying into Austin to drop off the boys at camp in the Hill Country and catch up with my brother. I drove out to see my former colleagues in Kerrville, picked up farm-stand peaches and pecans to my enormous delight, and generally gorged on tacos as one is want to do in Texas.

The scenery out there remains spectacular; as Georgia O’Keefe noted, Texas really is a Big Wonderful Thing. I worry about the enormous amount of development threatening to swallow pristine countryside whole, water limitations notwithstanding. The world is in a bleak place environmentally, and I can’t decide whether to devote my efforts to my great love of art, or my great love of nature. Perhaps doing both is possible.

In the most fortuitous occurrence since the pandemic, I get the entirety of this upcoming week entirely to myself. I plan to use it to read, write, sketch, and plan my next few months, and of course, to eat more tacos. Every opportunity in America is an opportunity for tacos.

Lengua y Barbacoa alá Las Trancas, Austin, Texas 20210722 ©2021

American Holiday Week I: Chicago

Chicago River Mouth 20210719 v2 ©2021

After a harrowing gauntlet of covid tests that didn’t arrive when we needed them, unclear rules and restrictions, and massive lines of travelers the likes of which I haven’t seen since before the pandemic, we made it back to the U.S. It’s amazing to be back home in Chicago. It’s been over a year and a half since we’d seen our family and wow. It feels entirely surreal and has given us overwhelming joy. The boys, in spite of serious jet lag, are so visibly happy to be with their grandparents and out in America. I asked Malcolm how he felt about it, and he told me he was having some culture shock, and to be honest, so am I, but it’s good.

We took an architectural river boat tour and it was excellent, as always. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve been on one, and there’s been a great deal of new development along the riverfront including lots of public park space and a wonderful river walk. This time our docent was a serious post-modernist; I’m generally into Modernism and Art Deco in the architecture arena, so it was really nice for me to hear from a different perspective. I got a new appreciation of many of the contemporary buildings including Trump tower, which was designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill, of Willis (aka. Sears) Tower fame. I also managed to snap a few decent photos in spite of having full midday sun directly overhead. I played with them a little in the phone editor and then in photoshop. I couldn’t decide if I liked v1 or v2 better. V1 has several post processing layers of hue/saturation and level adjustment. V2 is just tweaked slightly with one hue/saturation layer. I think the colors and contrast on V2 are a little better, but I’ll admit, it looks more subtle here. Maybe it’s a little bit lost in the jpg compression. I should probably use lossless files more often.

Protoa WIP 20210711 ©2021

Originally, I was going to start applying gesso to my first large Protoa, but I decided it was too flimsy and needed more layers. After continuing to add papier maché throughout the week, I realized that this series is going to be a bear to produce. I’m going to finish the first one and think about how to proceed with the rest. Currently, the Amsterdam sculpture biennial is set up on the parkway adjacent to our building, and there are a couple of enormous works made of polyurethane. I imagine they’re hollow cast, but I can’t say for sure. Seeing these sculptures, I think about how the Protoas would be amazing as enormous works in cast resin. I don’t know how to get such pieces produced, and I don’t have the money in any case, but I wonder if I could write a grant proposal for such a piece. Since they’re not full round, they could also be made of molded fiberglass. Something smooth and shiny in brilliant colors would be fantastic. It occurs to me that it’d be a good exercise to build them in Rhino and render them as part of the exploration process. I’ve been resistant to going too far with work on the computer, but it makes sense for what I’m thinking. It does not achieve the aim of using repurposed materials; however, maybe there’s a way to do that too. Plastics recycling has become very limited in many places in the US, and I suspect in the EU too given some of the recent changes to our local recycling program. Maybe there’s an opportunity here.

Shadow Blossom Ring 1 20210713 ©2021

I also finished a silver Shadow Blossoms ring. I like how it came out, but I need to refine my finishing technique. I think I’ll try several ultra-fine grit sandpaper and polish paper swipes, and then fine polish with a chamois to mirror finish.

Summer Starts

School is out, zomervakantie is in. After spending a morning at the Van Gogh museum last week, I decided that adding serious drawing to my artistic practice is key. To that end, I’ve made a point of sketching every day, and today I had the opportunity to visit the lake in Sloterplas where my eldest is enjoying a week of sailing camp. It’s a lovely park and provided picturesque scenery for sketching. Above is my photo of one of the docks, and below is a sketch overlaid on a photo of the lake. I need to work on my proportions and perspective a bit, but it’s not a bad start.

Sketch overlaid on photo for comparison 20210712 ©2021

I spent last week applying papier maché to my first large-scale Protoa and making ring bands in silver for the Shadow blossoms collection. The papier maché is slower going than I expected, and the silversmithing is improving. I have been broadly productive, which is good, because I’m off to the U.S. next weekend to visit family for the first time since December 2019. Thanks to covid, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen our parents. The Delta variant is a now a severe threat in Amsterdam, increasing with the most explosive growth rate since the pandemic began, and the boys and I are crossing our fingers and hoping for clean PCR tests so we can get on the plane next Saturday.

On to the Next One

I had to take the boys to Utrecht on Friday for medical appointments, and in between, we were able to peruse the outskirts of this charming 17th century town. There was a beautiful field of wildflowers, perhaps planted to revive threatened pollinator populations which is an ongoing practice in various parts of Europe. I was inspired by the tiny and unusual bees, and caught a nice photo of one alighting on a chicory bloom. I’ve always loved Chicory: it’s the most gorgeous shade of blue, and it used to grow wild in cracked sidewalks in the Chicago suburbs. When I was a kid, I’d try to pick it to place it in water, but it’s the kind of flower that doesn’t last off its plant.

Now that Amsterdam is once again open following the relaxation of Covid restrictions, I’ve been able to go back to museums. I first visited the Stedelijk last week. I was very excited since it’s a large contemporary and modern art museum which is generally the art I prefer, but it was a disappointment. The Suriname School exhibit seemed a bit… trying too hard for something? Its heart seemed to be in the right place but the fruition came off as unfortunately…. post-colonial... There were some excellent works but it was overall mixed, and the curation and display were hard to follow. After walking the Suriname School, I saw the Bruce Nauman exhibit, and I’ve never particularly liked his work, but it was interesting and I enjoyed some of it; however, I didn’t come away with a new appreciation for his art. Usually, when I’ve been to a good museum, I come away feeling inspired, but here I just felt let down.

This was not the case this morning when I went to the Van Gogh museum. Now that I live here, I finally know how to pronounce his name correctly, which is something like spitting out a hairball. That aside, I was incredibly inspired by this museum. There’s nothing like seeing great works of art in person. A painted surface cannot be replicated in photos or prints; it is impossible to match. It’s interesting, because of course, paintings are two-dimensional representations, but in fact, they are also three-dimensional objects, and light bounces off the painted surfaces in unique ways. Van Gogh, who was a master of thick and dramatic paint strokes (and perhaps invented the very concept of noteworthy brushwork) offers incredible life in his paintings. One can truly sense the painter behind the work: his hand is so well defined by his style. It’s hard to choose a favorite of his works, it is all so interesting and beautiful. I was utterly moved by the work he did at the end of his life in an asylum: many of his greatest achievements were done there. And there’s also his unsung sister-in-law: the woman responsible for making him known and getting his work out to the world. She was something like the Lee Krasner to his Jackson Pollock. Van Gogh was brilliant and tragic and it comes through in everything he did.

End (Generative Descent into Chaos)

Sometimes, when you think too hard about a process that relies on intuition, you end up overly complicating your work. You can also lean into intuition so far that you lose the thread. With Generative Line Study Painting IX, I can’t decide whether it’s over or under-thought, but I don’t like it. It was heavily planned: the most of any of the studies. The base is entirely constructed and maybe too much so. I decided the lines should be as loose as the base is structured, so I took them where they pleased. The lines on top are more focused on emphasizing the base painting than on the generative premise of line structure, and I wonder if it’s too much of a departure; it seems to be a leap towards something else that I don’t want to make. The work becomes unpredictable and chaotic; leading in odd directions. All that said, it is perhaps exactly the right conceptual ending per the premise of the Generativity project. It is an artificial construct taking on a life of its own. It becomes a coda: entirely different from everything previously created, far from the original design, and leaping towards things unintended.

Generating an End Game

I managed to find more time than expected to work last week, and even took the boys for an afternoon on the beach in the warm weather. It was refreshing to get out in the waves, feel the soft sand, and we were all amazed by the enormous jellyfish washed ashore. I liked the jellies less in the water. When I was a kid on a trip to Florida, I was stung by a jellyfish. It was both unpleasantly painful and really weird: my legs started stinging from out of nowhere, and when I got out of the Atlantic, there were red marks in perfect lines where I’d been stung by jellyfish tentacles. In any case, we all avoided a similar fate, and the break from monotony made the following day, when the boys were back in school, extremely productive. I formed my silver Bloom brooch in the studio, and came home to put the beginning color block background onto Generative Line Study IX.

For Generative Study IX, I decided to complicate the background further than the others, and found inspiration in the hand-painted color block wall advertising of the sort I saw most recently in Houston. I’ve always loved the bold graphic colors and relaxed lines: they are playful and intuitive, embracing imperfections that lend character to otherwise formal shapes. It is apparent that there is a person behind this type of work. Because the generative studies are about exuberant imperfect humanity versus cold perfection in inhuman technology, this graphic style feels well suited to become a platform for the generative lines.

This is also my last piece of reclaimed MDF for the generative studies, and it feels like a good end point for the group for now. I’d like to get the Protoa series properly underway and start on another collection. I have a new concept for exploration. As I’ve been researching concepts of humanity and the Anthropocene Epoch, it occurred to me that I would like to mark this time of mass extinction with a project. It will start with a list of species recently gone extinct and another list on the brink. Creating the lists reminds me of two works of memorial: Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial and the Holocaust memorial in Prague’s old synagogue where the names of all of Prague’s Jews who were executed is painted on the walls: thousands of names in small painted letters covering all of the walls of a large building. It is very shocking and displays the magnitude of what happened. I believe we need this now to address life in the process of decimation by human activity. One of the questions of this is where to start in terms of time. The dawn of industrialization seems appropriate, though post WWII could lean into the military-industrial age, or beginning at the 21st century may work for its immediacy. Somehow, going farther back seems like it has the potential to create variance between what once was and what now is. Maybe it should be graphed too: extinctions v. time.

Shadow Blooms Brooche I Ag925 WIP 20210617 ©2021

The Latest Complications

It now occurs to me that unless I determine to work no matter the extenuating circumstances, I will never get anything done, so I will work. Fred broke his foot. As an artist, practicing from home, while juggling the banal realities of having children, there is ALWAYS a complication: an illness, an injury, a day (or three) off of school for teacher in-services, a holiday. If I decide that these are going to interfere with my ability to complete a task, my tasks will never be complete. So I have chosen to let the children fight with one another and occupy their time as they like which generally means on screens, since that’s the (anti)social addiction of our times. In fact, it is, in part, what my art is about: the cost of technology. Clearly, there is a benefit to me: I have compliant zombies who leave me alone. It’s perfect for parents and totalitarians. I digress.

In spite of a kid requiring lots of attention with his broken foot and limited childcare thanks to a pandemic, I finished Generative Painting Study VIII and began preparing IX. VIII is all about complications (an unintended coincidence unrelated to the complications of the realities of my life). I began by complicating the work with big splotches of colors. I decided that for this work, the colors didn’t need to bear any relation to each other, except that they are all tonally near pastels. I also painted this work directly on prepared black gesso without an acrylic underlay. I kept the gesso fairly smooth, and it’s only two coats so the wood veneer of the panel texture comes through. It’s a successful piece: more interesting than the other generative paintings, and also more whimsical and playful. I used a loose fibonacci series for the line counts, which gives it nice visual structure. It feels like a more natural organization and patterning. As these works become less regular, with more variations, they become more interesting and beautiful. They are based in pattern, but chaos introduced purposely and accidentally leads to unpredictable outcomes. In addition to resolving better, this resonates superbly with the formal concept of the collection: the further away from perfect regularity and precision the works get, the more intriguing and beautiful. It is the same with nature versus human built algorithms which are overly simplistic and lifeless, even with machine learning. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, we must think what we’re doing with technology. It seems to me that in a manmade quest to outdo nature, we are pursuing not death, but lifelessness, the outcome of which is entirely predictable.

A Week of High Productivity

I finished study VII of the Generative paintings. With this one, the acrylic was once again applied directly to the gesso’d surface without a base layer of paint underneath. The tooth of the gesso definitely improves the application of the linework. This painting, for some reason, gave me anxiety while painting it. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the colors. I was thinking about modernist Italian graphic designers when I chose these colors, but while painting them I couldn’t help but note they’re German Axis/Nazi colors too. Ugh. Sometimes I look at the the Amsterdamse style all around my neighborhood: it’s laden with art deco graphics and early 20th century design styling, and it pains me to note that the Nazis took the same deco styles of the era for their imagery and propaganda and ruined the aesthetic forever with the association. It’s no wonder modernism was such a departure from art deco and at the forefront in postwar American art and design.

But I digress… I changed my line pattern, deciding to shift colors using a fibonacci series. It’s got a nice weight to the transitions. I also began my eighth generative study during the week using a loose fibonacci series for the transitions. VIII will be quite a departure from the others. I gave it complications. I like it so far. Hopefully, I’ll be able to finish it this week, thought that’s complicated too: Fred broke his foot over the weekend and can’t go to school. If I don’t want him on a screen constantly, it will require constant effort on my part. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to volunteer and silversmith at the Buurtwerkplaats this week because I’m homebound with him. I need to resolve the next design for silver in any case, which is something I can do on paper at home. I may finally also go back to the Protoa series.

Speaking of silver, I finished the March Blossom Earring pair over the last week too. It was great to complete a piece of jewelry again. I was able to use most of the tools at the Buurtwerkplaats, which was a good opportunity to see how they are and whether I’d like any of them for home use. The little butane hand torch, while harder to control than the propane-ox torches I’m used to, was a nice item and fairly safe. I’d much prefer to have a glorified creme brulée torch at home than giant propane and oxygen tanks that need maintenance and oversight. The hanging flexshaft tool, while considerably cheaper than the Fordham I’d been using, felt like you got what you paid for: chintsy and hard to control. For professional work, it seems worthwhile to pay for the higher quality. I plan to make a silver Bloom collection and then see where that leads before fully outfitting my home studio.

March Blossom Earrings, polished 20210601 ©2021

Return to the Bench

After several months without a space for metal smithing, the lockdown restrictions have been lifted further, and I can go to the community workshop where I volunteer as a shop monitor, and finally get to work on the silver ideas I’ve been mulling over since the end of 2020. Last Thursday was the opening day for participants, and I was able to get these earrings to the forming stage. I hope to finish them this week, and then continue my silver garden with companion pieces. It’s fun to be back at the bench!

I completed my large generative painting (Study VI) and began two new ones: a black gesso wide landscape one and a large white gesso neutral pop color painting. My productivity has increased significantly: not surprising since I once again have decent childcare with the loosening of covid rules for after school programs.

Generative Line Painting Study VI 20210525 ©2021

Progression of Generativity

I finished the Chaffinch Generative Painting which feels very different than the rest of the studies. If anything, it reads like it was made during the same time period the layer painting group. I like it, but it doesn’t read as part of the collection; it seems to have landed as a bridge piece. Perhaps that’s good when building a body of work.

I made progress on my largest generative study as well. The week before, I’d felt stymied with artistic angst, and put off working on it. Now that it’s about two-thirds of the way complete, it’s the most dynamic of the group so far. I decided to use four different brush weights instead of a single one. In particular, it was fun working with the 15/0 liner. I really liked the versatility of this brush. It enables a broader range of stroke widths than the shorter round brushes I’d been using. I’ve decided to buy a few more to add to my brush selection.

One of the best parts of the generative studies is that they achieve both my conceptual goal of exploring the meaning of “human” creation while also acting as a means of exploring the craft of painting itself. The studies are excellent painting and color mixing practice, as well as a way to play with brushwork and practice hand control. It also gives a better understanding of my preferences for brush makes (I’ve liked my Princeton brushes the best of all of them), and also achieving paint consistency. One thing I’ve noticed is that the first generative study, which was the only one with line work applied straight onto the gesso, is that it has a different quality. The tooth of the gesso versus a layer of acrylic underneath made a difference in the texture and application of lines. It was also completed without the aid of retarder or flow media so the color is dramatic. I may go back to working directly on gesso for the next study.

Generative Line Study Painting VI 20210523 Work In Progress ©2021

Never Enough (Generative Study in Progress)

I tried something different with this study, which isn’t yet finished. I saw a beautiful, small, sparrow-sized bird in the park while walking the dogs. Apparently, it’s a common bird here, but I’d never seen one before, and although it’s been several weeks, I haven’t seen one since. I found it in the bird guide I’d picked up for just such an occasion and learned it was a Chaffinch. It had a lovely blue grey head and rusty breast, with black and white banding on its wings. I made a point of remembering it because I thought its coloration would make an interesting ground for a painting: the colors were dramatically contrasting, and worked within my framework of using tones that chromatically oppose one another. I decided to try this on my black gesso'd board; however, when I laid down the paint using a palette knife, it covered the backing fully, so the black base became mostly irrelevant. That said, I liked the marks from the knife at the edge of the painted field and chose to keep the colors separate across a central divide of black. The next step will be layering line work on top of this. I’ve been thinking about doing something new here too: all white lines, but using an array of brushes that range from very fine (my smallest tip is 15/0) to wider, perhaps to a No. 2 or even a 4. There was an early generative pencil sketch I made focusing on the line spacing and weight, and it was interesting. It could work here. Perhaps the colors are more interesting behind a stark line layer.

For my other work in progress, prepared a week earlier on the largest board with white gesso base and ribboning undercoat, I got nervous. I wanted it to be the culmination of the generative paintings, and maybe I put too much into that plan. In any case, I didn’t want to go straight to paint like I have with the previous ones, and instead made a group of colored pencil studies. I landed on a set, but painting it will require several solid hours of uninterrupted, dedicated focus at a time, and there wasn’t enough this week. Again, the children had two days off school, and lacking alternative care, I would be the one entertaining them. It made me feel more American than ever: wondering why there are so many holidays when there’s so much work to do.

Mother’s Day Bud Vase 20210513 ©2021

My Mother’s Day tulips gorgeously captured the fading evening light coming in from the western sky through the kitchen window.

Carving Time (Generative Painting Study IV)

While it remains challenging to carve out time for work with everyone home and requiring constant attention, I managed to accomplish a few things. I cut out nearly all of my Protoa designs from cardboard to build the armatures, prepared several boards for generative line paintings, including two primed with black gesso instead of white, began my largest scale generative painting with a ribboning titanium white undercoat, and finished my fourth generative line painting study.

This fourth painting is the first one in which I’ve painted an intentionally textured undercoat. In this case, it’s made using titanium white heavy body acrylic mixed with soft gel, retarder, and flow enhancing media, which creates an interesting texture when laid onto the mdf with a large brush. I also started with the first fine line in the middle of the work and painted outward on both sides. Interestingly, while this one is my favorite of the series so far, both my husband and son disliked it, and if I had to guess, it’s because of the colors. I like this painting because it has more visual complexity than the previous works due to the base layer and also working from the center out so the imperfections resonate separately on either side. The textured undercoat also changes where the lines want to go and accentuates them differently. Overall, the studies are becoming more interesting but something still seems missing.

Research Vakantie

My time has been severely limited since I returned from Houston; first because of the unexpected need for quarantine, and then because of the lack of childcare while the boys have a two week holiday from school. This pandemic has gotten pretty old, but I shouldn’t complain. The situation in Latin America is disastrous, but completely overshadowed by the even more horrifying situation in India. If humanity manages to vaccinate the world in time to stop the variants from overwhelming our best efforts, we’ll be incredibly lucky.

With the short and heavily distracted time I had last week, I prepped two work surfaces and managed some reading and writing. It’s a small accomplishment. I’ve also put together a loose plan of readings to complete over the next several months using the Lee Lozano book as a jumping off point. I read Susan Sontag’s “The Aesthetics of Silence,” and picked up a copy of Roland Barthes. Since last year, I’ve slowly worked my way through Yuval Hariri’s Sapiens and my goal is to finish it by the end of this month. I’ve been schlepping a book of critical essays (Theories of Modern Art) around since I found it on the street in Brooklyn years ago, and it’s finally a good time to read a few of them. I also need to learn more about the Anthropocene Epoch, which is a controversial idea, but seems to underscore my thinking well. Additionally, I have Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Adrien Piper lined up for philosophical reference. I haven’t read in this way since college, and I’m enjoying it. Of course, to do it right means eventually putting the ideas together into a research paper, and surprisingly, I find that exciting.

Home Quarantine in Tulip Season

I didn’t plan to spend the week at a hotel in Amsterdam, but upon landing, I learned there’d been a Covid exposure in my household, so instead of going home, I found a hotel. I decided, given the ever expanding universe of unexpected circumstances, to enjoy the benefits of cheap hotel rates and chose the same Hilton where John & Yoko held their famous Bed-In against the Vietnam War. I held my Bed-In against Covid Infection, and thoroughly enjoyed my stay, complete with wonderful city views. I did make a point of visiting my family outdoors, socially distant, and double-masked. It wasn’t great for my painting plans, but I was able to do some reading (Lee Lozano: Not Working by Jo Applin) and project planning, and also purchased flow medium and supplies for something I’ve been neglecting all along: a varnish coat.

Fortunately, everyone avoided becoming ill (and got the PCR tests to prove it), so I came home late in the week. On the weekend, we toured the tulip fields around Lisse just as they started to peak, and it was glorious.

Vaccication: Houston

This week my main focus was on getting a vaccination, and it was a wild ride. I’d signed up in my home state of Texas, hoping I might get a spot since a lot of folks are disinterested in the vaccine there. After several weeks of waiting, I was offered a J&J appointment, so I took it, made flight arrangements, but three days before I was set to go, the CDC took J&J off the shelves to research adverse reactions in the form of major clotting events. At this point, I had a flight, hotel, and car booked, so I figured I’d better find an alternative. Fortunately, I received an update that I’d be getting Pfizer. Unfortunately, I hadn’t budgeted for three weeks and a second shot, so I'm personally taking it upon myself to use the UK’s strategy of prolonging second doses out of sheer necessity. If I’m lucky, the Netherlands will have its vaccination act together (looks like I’ll have to be very very lucky at the rate they’re going) and I’ll be able to get a second shot in June. Or maybe I’ll have to wait until I’m in Chicago in July. Who knows? I’ve given up on any kind of certainty over the last year.

On the bright side, Houston, unlike Amsterdam, was open for business and offered lots of fun while everyone remained fully masked. I enjoyed a full time taco diet, homemade black walnut ice cream, and world class fine art. I took the opportunity between vaccination and PCR testing to visit the Rothko Chapel and Menil Collection, both of which were wonderful excursions, and the local parks offered decent wildlife spotting thrown in with a little exercise. It was nice to be back in Texas for a minute, and made me miss the place. I tried to draw and do a little project planning, but getting more familiar with Cy Twombly and seeing Mark Rothko’s art during my first museum visit in well over a year, offered a needed injection of inspiration and new ways to think about painting. It was especially wonderful to see Rothko’s work since I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it during the generative painting process.

Mark Rothko, Plum and Brown, 1956 | At the Menil Collection, 20210416