Paintings & Field Notes
Painting Practice
The brushstrokes are a community of marks whose responsibility is to be themselves, in relationship. They're not meant to look like something else. They're not looking for a top-down experience, no decider organizes the others. It's a participatory playground.
A friend asked about my process and I wrote, “. . . . most of the time when I paint I feel like I’m just making a mess on the canvas and then figuring out how to clean it up”.
I don’t try to make a mess but the vitality of the marks is best when I don't watch the brush deposit paint on the panel. I sense the message and dance it, in low light, with a paint-laden brush in my hand. What is this becoming? Over many days I look and don’t touch, I begin to see where it’s headed. Only occasionally do I carry it into full daylight to see the vividness that's there, usually from a distance, to get my bearings.
This practice grows out of hours spent noticing plants in the wildflower garden behind my studio. From early spring’s emergence, during all times of day, with and without camera. I don’t try to memorize them any more than I try to illustrate them. I study, I expand images on my iPad and see what my naked eyes have missed. I notice differences, like when sun shines on compared to when sun shines through the leaves and petals.
Observance, 2026: 4 feet wide. Oil on masonite
Field Notes
Puzzling over how this could become a painting. Gray mood, gray day — until I waved Color-Aid* papers or the hydrangeas, picking the ones in its color family. Placed on the bench, I saw it: rectangles and circles, colors in common.
*Color-Aid began production in 1948. This set of 202 swatches has 24 hues, 4 tints of each hue, and 3 shades of each hue, plus 8 grays, black, and white. Hues are the colors; tints are hues plus white; shades are hues plus the complementary color plus white.
Color Families
Seeds Are Still Becoming
Gourd seedlings from Ted grew into vines heavy with fruit — shapes that evoke the same love I have for well-formed pots. During curing and storage they grew fungal patterns like glaze crystals that grew in the kiln. A few sessions of underpainting began before summer’s green foliage changed the light. Fall will soon give me that light I began with. Process changes it and me.
Chipmunks Ate the Cadmium Yellow
I'm keeping the poops — they might work well as texture. Cut one open and the yellow goes all the way through. So many other colors to choose from, and the critter chewed into an unopened tube of cadmium yellow. Why this one, when thirty others were in the cabinet? No dead chipmunks that I found. Slim pickings in the unheated studio, I suppose? Months later I was searching for the best yellow for a painting, and none were as good as this — chipmunk and I agree.
