It has been eight years since I last posted an entry on this blog. The main reason I stopped had to do with joining Instagram and the amount of time I spent posting on that account which was considerable. The reason I joined IG was because I understood it was image-oriented and a lot of painters posted their work on it as opposed to Facebook or other social media. I saw a great deal of excellent work and corresponded with some very fine painters/draughtspersons. But, eventually, I became disillusioned with IG because I began to see less and less painting and drawing and more and more posts about member’s personal lives including those inexplicable pictures of people’s food! That is not why I joined. And, I must say, I have also come to question the value of social media, in general.
So, I’m back to the blog and a lot has changed in eight years.
One aspect of my work that has changed recently involves the idea of unfinishedness. This has been important in my drawings, watercolors, and gouaches for many years. I inherited it from Old Master drawings, Egon Schiele, and many other Modern painters, principle among them, Cezanne. It has been a predominant aspect of my work on paper, especially in the past decade. However, with the pictures of Scott’s Creek, that began to change. The reason for a more complete treatment of the picture surface had to do with a pursuit of the illusion of the transparency of water. I found that any sense of transparency was much more difficult to achieve in pictures with areas of blank paper. So naturally, I began to cover the entire surface of the creek pictures. What I did not expect was that this would extend into other imagery. I became fully aware of it in the self portrait below.
Self Portrait, charcoal, gouache, 30×22”, 2026
This drawing went through many changes over the course of months. At one point, I was so irritated that I erased out most of it and started back in.
Eventually he became his very dour self, but with a level of modeling and finish that is very unusual for me and not what I intended. For whatever reason, I could not make myself stop working on it. The only good result of this is the surface of the drawing. There was so much erasing and re-drawing that it tore up the skin of the paper which then mixed with eraser debris to create a very rich surface that can seen better in the details below.
The urge to finish or refine has extended across imagery and media which is reflected in the gouache/pastel landscape below from Bristol, Maine. Why this has happened is one of the many mysteries of picture-making; you slowly realize you are doing things that you neither wanted nor intended and yet, you feel compelled to continue. Very strange.
Bristol. Maine, gouache/pastel/charcoal, 30×22” 2026