The azalea is blooming!

Christmas Eve

Chris and I are lazily wrapping gifts, and enjoying the quiet, lovely darkness of the house--beautiful, beautiful Christmas Eve--have always LOVED this night.

If I had gotten it together to make a Chrismas card...

I think I would have used this image. Perhaps. Christopher snapped the photo last night through my office/drawing studio window. Those are little red berries in the lower right corner, not, as you might suspect, a reflection of red Christmas lights.

I like the fact that the photo seems to suggest story.

Farmer's Market Finds

Alexander and I arrived at the Farmer's Market late today--but not so late to prevent us from picking up the last two stalks of brussels sprouts from John of Weatherhand Farm. While Christopher has a fantastic recipe for brussels sprouts (one that actually makes me want to DEVOUR them), I must confess my first impulse toward buying these was aesthetic.

Studio Bits

In the last week I've been deeply involved with a 4'x5' collage, another one of my collider images--it's been on the wall all semester and has had various lives, but I'm finally nearing the end--these images are a couple details of note.

Studio View (miniscule, but telling)

Recipe for range of texture + subtlety of color punctuated with bits of intensity--that blue, that orange, Picasso's menagerie looking on: all in proximity.

Lisa Sigal

Check out this swift little interview with the artist Lisa Sigal.

Sometimes artists appear, or in this case, reappear at a moment when they are needed most in one's studio. Sigal talks about the act of framing being the first step in making a painting, painting being a kind of shelter or fort, and the idea of creating a kind of pictorial space of the architecture--all exactly what I need to hear right about now--as I muddle through the end of one painting and the beginnings of some others, and as I perpetually push against/hybridize the definition of a painting.

Some precepts for my paintings--

1. To not plan at all--not even one step ahead
2. to let the paintings lead--both visually AND materially
3. to not limit:
ways of laying on
paint
color
paint materiality
4. to search for as many methods of laying on paint as I can discover, AND once again, to let the painting lead in such endeavors
5. to embrace subjectivity wholeheartedly
6. to believe I will be able to follow the painting (acknowledging the difference between following and finishing/resolving)

A veritable city overtakes our living room--

Blue layers

1. some truncated, suggesting an expanse that is not visually apparent
2. truncating being a means of stopping evidence of action
3. opulent movement narrowed--fit into a strip of paper both set into another piece of paper and layered above/set above
4. periodic ruptures of color: pink, pale pale orange, a triangle of black, barbs of pthalocyanine rimming an edge, lemon yellow.

covering
uncovering
layering
reiterating the wall
paralleling the wall
building by adding and subtracting
building by accumulation,
ruptured accumulation