hold that thought

Recently, Cathy Woo asked me to tell her about this new direction of my art. Writing an email response was an interesting exercise that gave me some insight into these mysterious abstracted landscapes.

I start each painting thinking about my feeling of the day. The work becomes about relating color to my feeling or state of mind. Ever tried to meditate? They say one should acknowledge the random thoughts that come floating by and then let them go. In these abstracted landscapes, I try to capture those thoughts to form an overlay of the primary emotion. That results in a visual expression of an in-and-out, back-and-forth exchange of emotions represented by colors, shapes, lines and textures in a sort of window-pane effect. When I think I've said what I wanted to say and I feel I've made the relationships interesting, I stop painting.

Cathy, so good with words as well as with paint, called my explanation "...structure to 'hang' the process on."

Today, I got interrupted when I was close to finishing this painting. All I could think of was "hold that thought!" I took a quick photograph of the piece to review on my computer display - a sort of distancing that works for me when I think I’m almost done.

Later, I went back to work without the review. I quickly lost sight of where I was going and then felt I had totally lost the message. After hours of additional work on it (with a Bob Dylan song in my head), I photographed it again. When I compared the two photos I was surprised to see the same message but now with more punch and spunk. This painting is called "From the West unto the East."