A weekly look at work in progress from Addison County in Vermont.

      Last week of the moon, mostly did layers on older work, some work on grounds, and got ready for the one-night show at the school. A busy but pretty organized week, just put one foot in front of the other with the idea of having the show come together at the end. Apple trees in full bloom, lilacs too in town, a lovely, timeless time in New England, although sort of jet-propelled this year by the early heat.

      The end of the moon is the time I get interested in making materials. A few different things are happening. Bottom left is the gray Rives heavyweight paper with a non pigmented gesso with fine sand in it. This didn't quite seal the paper, so I put another coat of glue on it. Still kind of grippy, and I like that green gray colour. Above it, a glue gesso ground on panel with a slightly off-white lead ground. This surface was standard very early on, and is just heavenly to paint on. Then a coarser linen with the same approach, glue gesso with a slightly more taupe ground. Then a panel with linen awaiting gesso and white lead. I've tried lots of different sources for linen, but come back to Utrecht. They have some nice deals now, I wonder if all the different substrates available are putting a little pressure on the price of linen.

      Did more excavation downstairs and unearthed some really old work. There's always a combination of embarrassment and nostalgia with these, like seeing pictures of yourself from eighth grade. Ground this back lightly and put another layer on it, easier to improve it than most parts of the past. Silly, but fun, from 2001. 10x13 inches, oil on gessoed panel.

      Put another layer on this little one from last week, this is on the halcyon combination of glue gesso and very thin off-white lead on Baltic birch. Sometimes I get bugged when something doesn't become art the first time, especially if it's something I know. But there's almost always something going on, some sort of movement beneath the surface. I never know quite as much as I think I do, there's always some muddle somewhere along the line. And this may be one definition of "human being." But fixing things is getting faster, this one is all but done in life, at least at the point where a larger one is possible based on it. Before, things used to get stuck, I simply didn't know what came next for months at a time. But, interestingly, having learned more about colour translates into knowing more about form, and this translates into momentum. Saturated, a little hard to photograph correctly. That Farm in the Mugello again, 8x10 inches, oil on gessoed panel.

      Next round on this image, a slightly larger one based on a small one. Did one of these at about 14x18 that became an inconclusive slugfest, so have been careful with this, it has four thin layers on it now. On a very good day, I could get enough paint on something this size to possibly be able to call it finished. But interest in rolling these dice comes and goes. It seems that for every alla prima one that works out, there are several that need some serious surgery. So I'm getting interested in this more moderate approach, developing the colour but keeping things loose or out of focus. About 11x14, oil on gessoed linen.

      I haven't shown anything in several years, so in a way it was fun to get organized and look things over. On the other hand, the limitations this time were severe, just a few hours to transform a classroom, and only for one night. I'm not an official tool guy, but I love those tiny vice grips.

      This is a photo of the last show I had, in 2008 in the old library in Shelburne, at that time part of the Craft School. A lovely space, I had a week to set it up, showed an assortment of finished work and things in progress, told various stories about the images in the label texts. The idea was to have a show that was equally about process and product, and was accessible on several levels. This was well-received by the community.

      This is the room we had to work with, a classroom that was part of Frog Hollow for many years, now part of the Middlebury Studio School. Inspiring, huh?

      This is what we were able to do from 3 to 5 in the afternoon, before the final clean up. My friend and fellow teacher Mary Lower's painting were larger, so I showed just smaller things. Mary is doing really interesting, deceptively "realistic" work with colour and drawing, the peony painting for example has a great sense of depth and incredible handling of the chicken wire. I brought some sheets of plywood, hollow core doors, and a roll of canvas, and, in spite of a sense of looming doom all week, it didn't turn out badly, everyone who actually knew this room was agog.

      This night was interesting on a few different levels. I have stayed completely out of art politics around here, a tar pit if there ever was one. But, given that this show occurred directly beneath the most commercial local gallery, which was also having a show, there was inevitably some commentary about the art game as it is played locally, or not. I got to see some local painters I like and enjoy working with, got some fresh morels and always funny commentary from my friend Fred, and met some local people who seemed interested in the work for its own sake. There are plenty of cultured people in this tiny college town, although these are of course people who proceed cautiously with regard to that most compromised entity, the living painter. I did get to talk to one person from my personal subculture, the various Friends schools in Philadelphia. This was interesting and nostalgic, no context in my life has been as balanced or genuinely – that is, philosophically, ethically – civilized since. Little did I know, but of course it makes sense to build in an ideal early on, then remove the training wheels, creating an opportunity to try to recreate it throughout life in that still, small way. Given the book and the internet, I'm not sure what I want from Middlebury beyond a town in which to function, and I'm sure that, given its recent history, the idea of small paintings with realistic colour and lots of art history behind them will take a little getting used to. But it's good to simply say hello, make a polite attempt at communication. This is, after all, the original purpose of the arts.

      Whenever work leaves the studio and gets seen, there's a kind of convergence or coalescence in the process. I learn a lot, and something ends up changing as a result. So, I learned from this that, even with the quixotic intentions, some venues simply cannot be transformed. Mary and I did our best, and had fun doing it, but the room really could not be hidden or gallerified; and, in spite of a lot of bravado on the part of the school's community, the results were not up to the work. This would have made me horribly upset even five years ago, but now it seems like part of working with the question of how to define painting as a process of communication within a culture that sees it as, well, let's be polite in the Friends tradition, something else. The other lesson of note was that florescent lights cannot be overcome, they are simply pestilential. This was the only difficult part for me, watching the look of things deteriorate irrevocably as the sunlight disappeared. So, the concept was noble, but the experience established a line not to cross again. As a whole, the work held together well for me, although there are several things from the summer I thought were more finished than they are. The concept of smaller paintings based on the 19th century outdoor model on the one hand, 20th century painterly realism on the other, filtered through the craft, is one I still believe in, but, more clearly now than before, it seems to be for collectors and painters, not the general public. I do know what the general public wants, and worked for many years with the challenge of making things I liked, that they would get too. But I don't think things are going to lead back there, where the work has gone since means too much to me, is too genuinely – ethically, philosophically – therapeutic. So, in a way, this last week was a necessary exercise in distraction, trying to generate awareness of a school with some good energy but an iffy facility. It's a relief to think that, in the week to come, I'll get back to the work, trying out some of the ideas that showing it inevitably generated. So, as with what happens after getting sick, returning to normal seems pretty special again right now.

      Waning moon, decent but not rollicking energy, plugged away, had some luck within the limitations but nothing earth shattering. The landscape work is coalescing bit by bit, though, momentum is building. Unusually beautiful weather, sunny and high 70s all week, cool nights, have never seen this here and it's not over yet. It's so beautiful out there, hope this isn't the entire summer's allotment of nice weather!

      Sometimes, working on older images, there's a zugswang situation where the only way to make it genuinely better is to start over. Some of that happened this week, I put up one that is borderline. But I've been realizing that, if there's a process, not just an assembly line, I have to give it more room. Now, you'd think I've been giving it room, but it wants more. What it wants is zero judgement from me. Just shut up and show up. I'm at the point where I'm more comfortable with this. Painting is relatively simple compared to judgement. It often takes a long time to learn what's there and what's not. Allowing this produces much better results over time than pushing it in the short run. Maybe "better" isn't the right word. More interesting? Unexpected? What I wanted all along but was too dumb to know I wanted all along?

      This is coming up because I'm going to show paintings at the school next week at the first Art Walk of the season here on Friday night. One of the the clay studios will be transformed, in a few hours, for a few hours, into a gallery. I don't love having only a few hours to set up, but there's plenty of work, it hasn't been seen here in a few years, anyone who is interested is not going to care about the venue, and I have a plan for the room. So, in a way, it will be fun to chose work and make it into a story extemporaneously. But it brings up process versus product, how to balance both in an intrinsically less than ideal mode of presentation. It also brings up how deeply I mistrust any manifestation of the art world, even as one tiny as this one. My attitude needs a little adjustment.

      This guy is so humble, and so incredibly good at what he is doing here. I love the rhythm he gets into, the way he presents it all as simple.

      It's about time, it's about space, about the humans and their changing pace.

      It looked like this this week on Snake Mountain Road, looking east into the Green Mountains. Unusual configuration of colours as a result of the very warm week and denser air.

      Did this at the end of last week, something from the Garfagnana I've always been interested in, but it required a lot of landscaping. Made this with a rich putty medium, but it had too much drag. This part is a little tricky with these thicker oils. The commercial thick oils are all mobile and leveling, but thicker oil from hand-refined linseed oil is pretty adhesive. Still, that's easy to fix next time with this type of paint, and the linen did hold the paint through lots of changes. It was interesting to work with so much gray, and make all the alterations, and I like the unity that came from it all, but it was too much to juggle, there's not really a conclusion. I wanted to see if I could get away with the old church tower, really emblematic of this part of the world, but now I think not, an example of something that becomes too didactic even though it's been there for centuries. This, of course, opens the door for all the sheep that were grazing in the foreground. A larger one might emerge from this after all. About 6x8 inches, oil on gessoed linen.

      Third layer on this one, a larger version of something that was not possible small. Still, I learned a lot from the small one, this one is coming together. The larger size on paper can get a little literal from the smoother surface, this is something I'm solving by using linen. It's tricky with these happy ones to get the right balance of midtone colour and atmosphere, they seem to go back and forth for a while before settling in. About 12x20 inches, oil on gessoed paper.

      A layer on an older image from Farr Cross, a nice idea in some ways but I wanted to redo it from the beginning with what I've learned since it began. I guess this is a high-class problem, something I run into at a certain strata of the bone pile. There are some that are clearly goners, some that it's clear how to fix, others that have frames of reference that have been superseded. This one is like that. About 7x16 inches, oil on gessoed paper.

      Did this as a small one in a damar medium while exploring what is possible there for the book. I really am not a fan of the straight damar look, for resin I like this and Canada balsam least, although of course wax tones them down. Anyway, realized what I didn't like about the image was the damar, and that it would be nice to redo it larger without it. So, this one is a good example of the system: get to know the image smaller, then make a more essential or painterly larger one. Two thin layers on this since last week, somewhat coarser linen, fun to work on, more of these will be happening. Detail below, about 1.5 times life size. About 9x20 inches, oil on linen.

      I got some nice Baltic birch plywood a little while ago, and have wanted to try out working on it. This is a slightly absorbent glue gessoed surface with a thin white lead white imprimatura, toned to a sort of biscuit shadow colour. The surface is great to work on, supplies a very nice amount of drag without actually setting the paint. Had wanted to investigate this image from the Mugello, I'm at the place with these where the stronger or more obvious ones have been explored, this is another one that involved some landscaping. Became a little involved with detail, but was able to soften the edges and scrape back too with bristle brushes. This approach is kind of ideal, adding paint with fine brushes, removing with larger ones, allows pretty much endless development in one layer. Got to that point where I had no idea what to do and let it go. Too literal so far, but what I mostly wanted was to get the rhythm of the larger shapes locked in. Maybe the building piece on the left is too dorky, both it and the framing tree on the right could go, making things more spacious. But maybe that's too simple, too obvious. Would you remove the element on the right, or the left? It has a nice cloud pattern, that might get tried out next time around. Hard to say, these get finished when they have a certain something, there's no formula. A good example of starting something new during the waning moon, had little art part to offer, but it will make a nice larger one once I get this one worked out.

      Week of the full moon, usually a good one, and with the weather finally cooperating it was fun to work on the next step. About five years ago, I had made some larger landscapes, about 3x4 feet, lots of paint, but found I just didn't know enough about colour to complete them the way I wanted. So I began to drop the scale back, and ended up learning a lot about both colour and the paint in the process. So now I'm beginning to expand the scale again slowly, start and work on larger things. But what works small isn't quite what works large, so there are some adjustments to be made. This is fun, dialing in the next step technically is always an interesting puzzle. Working larger is of course easier, but please don't tell anyone that.

      It looked like this earlier this week on Bittersweet Falls Road, this is looking north towards Farr Cross and the Adirondacks. Very nice time in terms of the colours, before it all turns into Oz in May.

      I'd been thinking about the way the Golden Rectangle integrates the geometric opposites of the circle and the square. Here is how it looks. The circle is drawn from the midpoint on the square to an opposite corner. This results in a situation where a is to b as b is to ab. So, the small piece is to the large piece as the large piece is to the whole. This provides a way – well, the only way – to resolve the paradox of creating diversity within unity, everything can be expanded or subdivided and still maintain a fractal relationship.

      Here's a look at the triangle involved. In this case, the concept of unity (the short right angle side,1) is brought into relationship with the concept of diversity or duality (the long right angle side, 2). Triangles are about integration, so what integrates unity and duality? The square root of five is an "irrational" number, an interesting choice of words. It might be more accurate to say that it is an infinite number, a number the largest computer could not resolve. So, unity and duality are integrated via infinity. Probably Pythagoras 101 if more of his teachings had been preserved. It's intriguing that essentially metaphysical answers are built into the construction of physical reality, helpful for maintaining a larger perspective in the face of that temporal tar pit, the Google version of the news.

      I've been painting this road now for fifteen years, hard to believe. Some of the earlier images are gone, or I made versions of them that didn't work out. The earlier ones are especially nice in that they feature the road before it was cleaned up by the large farm that went in to the west. This was an amazing day, the whole road was magic. After having worked out various ways to complete smaller work in one sitting, I realized that what I wanted wasn't going to be possible at a larger scale. So, this is a test of an underpainting approach for a larger scale, simplifying the forms in a sort of graphic, Corot-in-Italy way, just using the chalk putty, no white. Made the colour elemental because it will become pretty soft. A lot of scrubbing with a bristle brush, doing the landscaping. Left out the details: clouds, early corn, possible foreground tree on the right. I liked this, and did other variations of this approach as the week went on. About 9.5x12.5 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      The original idea a few years ago was to make smaller ones that were complete, then take the best of those and make larger ones. I got a little involved with the smaller ones, but learned a lot about both the paint and colour. This one worked out small, so decided to do it larger. Also a test of coarser linen with a white lead ground, this worked out very well. Two layers on this, going slowly, making sure it's all right before committing to more paint. With this approach it can be ground back at any time, but I'd love to come up with a seamless system for making these from start to finish. Farr Cross, September evening, late corn, waning light, the usual suspects. About 9.5x20 inches, oil on linen.

      A rare farmhouse image from around here, have two small versions of this spot but got beaten up by the first larger one, became overconfident and couldn't find the composition at the larger scale. So, started this one slowly, humbly, this is layer three. Simply put shards of paint on until the surface was covered, then let it go each time, no build-up. I'm pretty happy about this, even started to put the cows in. About 11x14 inches, oil on gessoed linen.

      Okay, here's the other approach to these layers, this one was saturated from the beginning, tried to develop a great deal of atmosphere, but not the detail. This is the second layer after grinding the first one back with 320 paper. Very shiny in life, but very flat, didn't photograph with the usual reflections but isn't exactly accurate either. In life it's kind of Magritte-ish, poised but slightly eerie. We'll see where the third layer takes this, it might be completable but I'm finding that, the more I learn about what the paint can do, the less I'm interested in a specific definition of finished. About 9x14 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      Warming up slowly, crocuses are out, forsythia almost out, we're do for some real sun next week. I spent most of the week trying to get rid of this cold, it's still hanging on a little bit, very unusual. Waxing moon, did lots of work but mostly layers, not new things, it was all very up and down but hung on, just kept going. April is usually pretty hard, but May is usually better, has sometimes been great. I feel close to closure with this landscape project, so it's hard to be patient. But, whether it's inspired or not, painting is great therapy, a way to focus on the beauty of life, something sane.

      A while back I did some experiments with zirconium silicate in the oil to see if it would help it dry. I wanted to get zirconium carbonate, but no one would sell it to me. But zirconium silicate is used in pottery, and I think Kremer is using it as a pigment in watercolour. Anyway, it is very fine, and some of it stayed in suspension for a long time, until I put the oil in the freezer. This procedure has cleared everything so far, and it finally cleared this too. I thought zirconium silicate would be pretty inert, but it looks like it has pulled something from the oil besides itself, the second layer on the bottom of the jar. It also bleached the oil, the original colour is that of the jar below. Everyone likes light oil, but the original colour is always fugitive, has nothing to do with any long term darkening. Anyway, I wonder if this is going to be better than I thought.

      Off and on I've premixed a gray of the day for landscapes, but this week I did it regularly. It is very helpful for keeping the values slightly compressed and for putting in reflections in the midtones. At first they had a lot of different pigments in them but then I found one I really liked made from black, vermilion, and raw Sienna. This works very nicely with blue skies because it doesn't have any blue in it. Another duh moment. I'm sure they'll move around, but the effect of this was interesting to see.

      Started here, muted Spring colours, envelope first alla prima concept with lots of pushing and pulling in looser paint. This was fun, and I thought it might lead somewhere, but when I tried a second one in this style the next day I ended up erasing it. Oops. It's always a matter of following the energy of the given day, for me there's no way to have a conscious agenda outside of the moment.

      Several more layers on this one, in life I like it but the sky became odd in the photo. This started out pretty rich or fat and has just kept going, at the stage where detail can be made with large brushes wet-in-wet, I'm getting more comfortable with this, it's certainly the easiest way to finish something. About 8x10 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      Earlier image with a different form of detail, working on the combination of light and recession in this, it turned a corner in the last layer. I thought it would be the study for something twice as big but maybe not, it's interesting in life because the scale is so small. About 5.5x12 inches, oil on gessoed linen.

      Third layer on this, still wet, there are several tight beginnings like this at about one by two feet. I used to try to muscle my way through these with lots of paint, but learned the hard way to be more patient, develop the colour much further before getting into the detail. The issues with blue sky landscape have been more complex for me, since the envelope is there, but more subtle. This one again benefited from a premixed complex gray. The other interesting thing about these is how big they seem after having mostly worked smaller this last year. Plenty of room. It will probably get a few more layers concentrating on the sky before too much happens in the foreground. About 11x24 inches, oil on gessoed linen over panel.

      Cold and overcast, some freezing rain on Friday. In retrospect it's clear that I've been pushing things, wanting it to be Spring when it really isn't, and this week was dominated by a cold. I tend not to take anything too seriously that doesn't involve a fever, but this has pretty hard to get rid of, eventually resorted to echinacea and goldenseal, but it's not quite over yet. Did get one little painting done with the help of some black tea – Upton has some teas from Nepal now that are like quality Darjeelings at half the price – but the painting was inconclusive, as always the lesson is not to try for too much when you're sick. I feel close to a change with the landscape work in terms of being able to blend paint and observation at another level, and this makes it especially hard to be patient. Still, pausing and thinking about things has its own role; part of me would like to paint constantly but I'm realizing that the cycle of rest and activity has a larger purpose, not only in life but in the work itself.

      When I finally went to the co-op to get some medicine this week, a little old lady was finishing up a conversation with the teller as I unloaded my basket. "You can't have everything," she said, not unkindly, but firmly. In my semi-delirious state, I felt the need to put a more positive spin on this, and commented that you can have almost everything. But almost isn't everything. Events like this often act as messages, triggering further connections, and later that night I began to think about how I've wanted to write a book that had everything. It seemed that this would be the most functional approach, allowing the reader to chose which path they wanted to take with the materials. In this case, the most focal choice is whether to use the older approach that uses lead white, or the 20th century approach that uses titanium white. A subset of this is whether to get involved in leaded oils, the traditional way to make paintings dry quickly, but also a way of introducing specific rheologies to the oil. I decided to describe how to use leaded oils most effectively, since there are no historical sources that are particularly clear or conclusive on this subject, and also since the sources tend to use way too much lead. I even described the best way to make and use a mastic gel, the evil meglip medium containing leaded oil that has caused so many painting to darken and crack. Now, the lead story at this point is quite complex. In the 20th century painting manuals, lead is non-existent, persona non grata along with everything else about older painting that they chose to judge without comprehension. But in Eastlake, De Mayerne, Mrs. Merrifield, Carlyle's The Artist's Assistant, technical art history in general, lead is a given as an important aspect of older practice, and formulas for leaded oils abound. Technical art history is clear that white lead makes a strong and flexible paint film, and the same is true of leaded oils, an important consideration for large paintings on stretched canvas. Technical art historians like Jaap Boon are also beginning to think that titanium white makes a relatively weak and brittle paint film over time, and my early experience with titanium supports this. So, we can't have everything. The inconvenient truth is that paintings on canvas made with titanium white may prove to be at risk in a similar way that paintings made with zinc white proved to be at risk.

      The other side of this coin is of course that lead is toxic. Cobalt, cadmium and manganese are also toxic, but because lead was used in house paint for so long, both interior and exterior, it is by far the easiest heavy metal to demonize. In Europe at this point it is difficult to obtain lead in any form, and, in spite of the fact that the Chinese will manufacture anything, this will inevitably be the way the world goes in the long run. So, in spite of its usefulness to oil painting, possibly to the point of being a necessity as a pigment, lead in all forms will ultimately be regulated out of our lives, along with all other heavy metal pigments.

      So, this is the lead conundrum at this point. Like many painters, I've tried to develop a titanium paint that acts more like lead white, but I think this route can only have limited success, lead white remains a far more cooperative pigment to work with on all levels. Of course, I'd be trying harder if there were no lead white to work with, as will eventually happen. In the book, I've given a lot of information from research into lead and leaded oils, but this has in turn led to feeling that I am safest selling the book with a disclaimer. If I remove the information about lead, I instantly make an officially safer book, one which, from the modern academic perspective, is untainted with painting's sordid, toxic past; one which people can feel is greener and therefore "better for the environment." But, as any technical art historian knows – the only people besides painters who know that painting is not about theory but practice – this is not necessarily a more honest, or more functional book about oil painting technique. Is the book about how older technique actually worked, or is it about the reinvention of technique in more currently acceptable ways? I have a funny feeling I can't have everything.

      For a while I've been writing with painter Laura Spector about a project she's been working on. This project has several levels, to the point of being multidimensional, like three dimensional chess. Laura has done a great job of describing the project, with lots of illustrations from the work itself, here.

      For some time I've wanted to do another copy of Constable's first Sketch for the Hay Wain (c.1820). The blend of realism and abstraction in this is just mind-boggling. I also love its lumpy sincerity: early in his Journal, Delacroix is a fan of the Bonington oil sketches, but later realizes they are superficial. How could Ruskin have found Constable pedestrian? I guess it is all in the eye of the beholder, and everybody thinks they see what's there. The original is only 5x7 inches, this one is about 7x10 inches, copy number four, the smallest one I've made yet. Before I made relatively free copies, but this time I wanted to work more with what was really there, the Vulcan mind meld. I want to keep developing ways to shift the landscapes away from the pseudo-perfection of digital images. This was on a toned ground, but not quite as dark or warm as the one he used. Technically, without resorting to laid paper over Davey board, everything else is close: black, assorted transparent earth colours, possibly yellow ochre, then for the brighter colours Prussian blue and a little real ultramarine, Chinese vermilion, and something I cobbled together to be the bright yellow, it's probably Turner's yellow: not that Turner, James Turner, lead oxychloride, patented 1781. The ground was not absorbent, but I think his was, I was only able to get into the finer stuff in the foreground on the second day, after the paint had tightened. The development of the reflections on the water is incredibly fine considering the original scale, the complexity of the movement created by these is pretty important to the composition. There's an incredible amount of stuff in this, I hadn't ever seen the second person in this, to the right of the house. So, more accurate, and it doesn't look too bad here, but in life it seems a little static, missing the alla prima brio, a painting by someone willing to look closely at long last, but who has a cold. I'll let it rest in a place where I can see it, it's close enough to finish in the next layer if I look at it a while.

      Ah, Spring. Sort of. After last year, everyone here has been secretly hoping for another early Spring. What we've gotten so far has been more sun, but also almost constant north wind. Waning moon, new moon on the 11th I think. Many different things happened, on this level Spring has begun, but I could feel the energy for the work diminishing slowly as the week progressed. On the one hand, I want to finish up the most recent series of small studies in this brocaded paint approach, it's coming together. On the other hand, I'd like to move on into larger work again. But this may need to happen in increments, I've learned at great cost in the past to simply listen to the process.

      One of the things that has been complex about selling the book over the last few years has been realizing that some people simply do not read the directions. I mean, I was this way as a child, but learned that reading the directions is in fact helpful. The other thing is that sometime people will take a formula that has been worked out literally over years and say, well, I'm the artist here so I'm going to do it my way. So, I'm selling a book with a 17th century attention span, and that this can cause communication issues, because the reader may well not be operating in the same century as the author. Not always by any means, most people get it, but it has happened often enough to cause concern. The most logical solution is simply to write the most simplified text possible. I've resisted this, but am not sure that it isn't actually an alternate way. More developed materials aside, there is a painting system in the book that has never been written about before. My friend Jill suggested this this week in the context of her college students and what they have the capacity to absorb, and my friend Allison at UWM in Milwaukee has suggested something similar in her always gentle way. So, something like that may be next. It turns out that writing simple declarative sentences about painting technique is pretty hard, but I like figuring it out, especially in relation to things like colour which have always been explained, if not badly, then only partially. This leads to the Sorcerer's Apprentice situation of operating with only part of the spell...

      Anyway, as an experiment I've put the book behind a disclaimer. To get one now, you have to agree to the terms of use. I'm not sure whether this will succeed in the long run, since the disclaimer is legalese and pretty intimidating, but I don't see any other way to sell the current text and feel like I am safe from the potential of the irresponsible reader. The book is predominantly about safe materials and safe practice, but does contain the research I did into leaded oils, and these, even though standard in older practice, are toxic. I did a lot of work on this, and learned a lot about the conditions under which these oils work. I guess this defines the difference between an older text like Eastlake -- full of leaded oils -- or Dr. Carlyle's The Artist's Assistant , also full of leaded oils, in that Eastlake is long gone, Dover can simple say the book is of quaint historical interest only, not a textbook, and Dr. Carlyle is merely recording what she read. Although, of course, reading between the lines, it is possible to learn, for example, that she thinks lead acetate is acceptable in very small amounts, a material so toxic I've never used it. And this is not critical of Dr. Carlyle by any means, who is always a great resource. But in my book I have explained how to make things the same way that they would be explained in a cookbook, there are detailed procedures worked out over long periods of time. And some of these things involve lead, a material that is arguably crucial to older painting, yet which is also easy to demonize. But the interesting thing is that, after all I did with leaded oils, I no longer use them, all their rheologies can be emulated in other ways, and the SRO linseed oil dries almost as fast. So, I think in the end maybe the thing to do is put the leaded oil information into a separate text. It's interesting, it's part of older practice, but, outside of the context technical art history, is probably on its way to being more of a liability than an asset. It's too bad, I would like to tell the whole story, but have already edited out the hard resin varnish technology as too dangerous to explain responsibly. I guess this comes down to who the readership is, how much the readership can be controlled, or how much the method of presentation defines the author's degree of responsibility. None of which I have any real control over. So, there's a disclaimer on the text for now, and this is why.

      Spring means panels for painting outside in the summer. For a while I've wanted to get some sheets of Baltic birch plywood and see how they worked out for panels. I'd gotten some smaller pieces online but these were pretty expensive. I got the 6 mm or 1/4 inch, the full 5x5 foot sheets were a little more than 30 dollars each, less than the price of good linen. The sheets were a little awkward to put over the tablesaw for the first cut, not recommended, but I got the hang of it. The nice thing about this plywood is that it is well made and quite rigid. I put glue size and gesso on a 15x20 panel without a suspicion of warping.

      I'm always looking for ways to get quality materials without the art supply surcharge. Sometimes this works out, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it sort of goes sideways. One thing I've learned is that linen not from Europe is to be avoided, and that linen not from Belgium is iffy. There's a place called Online Fabric Store in Boston that has various types of Belgian linen at pretty low prices, so I decided to try some a while back. It's 14 oz, flat weave with double yarns, softer than painting linen, and has a few minor imperfections. It behaved a little oddly when I sized it, painting linen always shrinks a lot, this has maybe been washed already so it actually buckled temporarily. But it dried flat both with the size and a subsequent coat of gesso. I'll put a thin coat of white lead on this, let it dry, then slice it up into various sizes. It's not bad, about 2/3 the price of similar painting linen, but also about 2/3 the quality. Still, it looks like it will provide a relatively smooth surface with a relatively heavy weight.

      With Spring around the corner it seemed a good idea to dust off the Spring palette. This is the most challenging one, as the greens of May are either Oz-like or the eerie, radioactive colour of Mountain Dew. There's a funny story in Virgina Woolf's diaries about Roger Fry painting with Vanessa Bell in Provence and suddenly pronouncing that yellow green is simply not an aesthetic colour. But, as with all things in the world of colour, it's a matter of degree or proportion, which often means more patience than is typically available. This approach of making the detail with large brushes using thicker paint is getting more reliable, I like the brocaded look, the way the illusion of detail dissolves into paint a few inches away. But I don't think I can do it any smaller than this. I'd call this semi-resolved, I'll leave it alone until the technique evolves to the next level. 7.5x10 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      Then did a series of layers on some of the more promising studies using the same type of paint as above. Also May, I'm getting happier with this one, these lifting fog situations have a specific feeling and this is getting closer. Also, I've always had issues with the in and out edges of these treelets, and this is getting resolved. The issue with these extended layers is how to keep the colour from sinking in on the one hand, and keeping the paint from being too dense or rich on the other. Sometimes my students despair of understanding the greens of Vermont, but I've made versions of this image for literally fifteen years trying to get it right. At this point I'd say that the most important thing is understanding the way the different types of colour are mapped to form. This allows it to be done with a minimum number of pigments. Higby Road, Lifting Fog, 6.5x14 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      Dusty image of late August that came forward somewhat using the same treatment, layer three or four, just needs another layer or two of the same thing. About 9x14 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      Decided to take the same general working method to one of the larger studies on linen over panel. I worked on these in leaner paint for some tine establishing things clearly, but at a certain point, at least for me, things need to get more rococo for something to be finished. This had become a little warm, so moved it towards cooler morning light. Better, but I think more can still happen in terms of integration. In the Mugello, about 12x18 inches, oil on gessoed linen over panel.

      Monday night painting was fun again, it looks like we'll be doing live models when they can be found. This was a girl who helps out as an intern at the school, she's very lively, had a hard time sitting still. With her hair up, and in profile, she had a timeless quality that I liked, but I've never done this before and there was too much to figure out , too much that, in a portrait, has to be absolutely right, since we all know exactly what people look like. I made her too old, too androgenous, and the pieces aren't well connected, eye too small, could not get the balance of youth and determination in the mouth. She has the most amazing nose, it's a world unto itself, but not feminine enough. Still, it was very fun, was happy with how the paint performed, was able to make endless adjustments without a drawing, and have always wanted to do the portrait hair thing. But I think this confirms unequivocably that I see things from a different century. 8x11 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      Had a visit from my friend Jill this week, she is a dedicated painter who lives near here, but also a dedicated Mom and a painting teacher, so it is sometimes hard to connect. Jill gave me some good thoughts about the work, and one especially good thought about the book: doing a version that is simplified totally. She's working with a development of the Fairfield Porter type of realism, and is at the point where the work I've done using fewer pigments and more integration is interesting. So, it is fun to share in this way. When I show most people the Predimensional Palette, they get confused, but Jill got the principle of premixing triads for each colour type right away. It is always nice to share something that seems revelatory and not have it strike the other party as an ineluctable burden. So, anyway, Jill and I have a long history of freezing painting outside, and we decided to try it yesterday. It was too cold in the morning, incredible north wind. We got out about noon, but still froze as usual. This is down by the bird sanctuary,saw some flights of snow geese in the distance, but I didn't see anything over the water that was appealing as a composition. Between the flat light and the empty sky I ended up doing a lot of pushing and pulling on this, but could not get anything that I really liked. In looking over the outdoor work I still have this winter, the ones that stood out to me were the ones with the most charismatic paint application. Of course, this is because the more realistic ones that worked out have sold. But I'm not that interested in the Transparent Eyeball as much outside at this point, I'd like to just make art. So, this means making a very dense, tarry medium again, one that is additive, almost sculptural. As I recall, it used BPO #7, possibly the most bizarre reliable painting material of them all.

      There are still some things that continue to be challenging. Some of the more subtle atmospheric situations remain elusive. This is a spot I love, and have many interesting version of, but balancing the logic of the recession with turning the whole thing into art is still not straightforward. In this case, I had a small, somewhat gritty study that I liked, but then began the larger painting from the original image. This resulted in something that I call a bank lobby painting. This is of course better than a dentist office painting, which in turn is better than most restaurant realism, but still, the idea is to actually make art. So, after four passes at this, things are back to neutral in a way. I think what needs to happen next is a layer that is focused on broken paint and a broader interpretation. But the larger thing I've learned from this is that larger paintings need to be made in a larger way. The study can solve some issues, but the change in scale creates a different situation in terms of interpretation. Well, I knew that, but have been working smaller for a while now. But I think if I can get the brocaded look of the first May study above going at a larger scale, it will solve this. Larger version is about 16x28 inches, oil on gessoed paper.

      More sun this week, actual warm sun yesterday, a great feeling. The weather report first said a cold first half of April, but it now looks like warmer weather is coming this week. Full moon Tuesday night, woke up around 1 am with all kinds of nutty energy, cleaned the kitchen. In class the next day it turned out I was not alone, very funny. I talked about personal palette choices in class, various ways I've worked out over time to fine tune colour without ending up with too many colours out. A lot of the specialty colours that have come out in the last decade or so are a mixture of a modern pigment and an earth pigment. One of my favorites is still Rembrandt's mixture of Mars red and rose madder, I use Pyrol red for the bright crimson, this has plenty of chroma for most landscapes. Another recent realization I passed on is that just because burnt Sienna and ultramarine are ubiquitous as a combination doesn't mean to ignore them, they are standard for daylight for a reason. That went on a little long, but it's hard to stop talking about the minutiae of colour, and this is of course what ends up mattering in the construction of a palette.

      After this the week was kind of blown up by a day trip with some painter friends to Boston to go to the Gardner and the MFA. This was a long day, but we had great luck at every turn, and it has been very energizing for the work, I'm really looking forward to the coming week. It is always so good to see paintings in the flesh. Whether they are good, bad, or indifferent, there is always something to learn. I guess the major theme was the difference between fine art and the paintings rich people tend to buy. Another way of stating this is that some painters make work specifically tailored for rich people, and some do not. The new wing at the Gardner was really well done, a modern departure but refined and elegant. Most of the Zorns within were slugfests, he almost seems to lose his sense of balance around oil paint. He was a really good draughtsman and did a great small pastel head of ISG but her portrait was all glowing pastiche, surprising since they were friends and she promoted him in America. I really liked The Ice Skater, though, a nocturne with a great combination of moody Nordic palette and handling with a traditionally lighthearted subject, this painting had surprising depth and conviction compared to everything else. After Zorn, Sargent's massive El Jaleo looked incredibly elegant and accomplished. Really nice use of a restrained palette to set off the flamboyant action. Otherwise, the Gardner is as much an experience as a museum, it's pretty hard to see things, and ISG gets sort of erratic when collecting 19th century work. The palazzo is a work of art in its own right, although of course a relatively looted one architecturally. The central open courtyard with its ancient mosaic floor and scattered sculptures kind of steals the show, it's kind of a time machine, people just gaze into it, mesmerized.

      Saw the first version of The Oyster Gatherers (called the The Oyster Fishers ) by Sargent at the MFA, this has a great sense a light and atmosphere, is not really a study as it is sometimes called. The freshness of this painting has always interested me in reproduction, and it was really nice in life as well, clean, accomplished but direct, the relationship of the figures to one another has a great casual counterpoint. In the more famous department,The Daughters of Edward Darley Bolt was also fascinating: in life the emphasis on the innocence of the youngest daughter plunked on the carpet, the metaphor of the recession of the children into the darkness of adulthood as they grow older, is more apparent than in reproduction; that empty dark space is large and pretty ominous. It avoids sentimentality through Sargent's awareness that he must paint the youngest child as she is, not with any idealization, and the execution is strong enough to keep the metaphor from being moody: innocence triumphs through nothing but itself. The whole thing is painted with a sense of purpose, a great deployment, Sargent is really paying attention, this is something he clearly wanted to say with dignity and clarity. The scariest painting I saw was Gérôme's L'Éminence Grise, ultra-detailed, incredibly well-painted costume piece, but irredeemably creepy. The surprise favorite was Children Feeding Geese by Julien Dupré. He did lots of genre peasant women in various versions of a looser academic style, kind of like Sargent meets Bouguereau, realistic but also idealized without drifting into the erotic. This one is a little more formal or blocky, and that works for what he does with the colour. The relatively bright midtone colour was integrated with a prominent gray structure that was also relatively bright. This culminates in a great visual figure-ground pun in the central milling geese. Some of them are in shadow, and some of them aren't, some of them are dark gray, some of them aren't. But all of these grays are on the vivid and cold side, not rendered the typical academic chromatic finesse although this was something he could do. Having the grays effectively challenge the midtones, especially in the chaos of the geese, is truly a recipe for confusion or overpainting, but he got through it really well. The geese are lively and genuine, the way they indirectly become the subject of the painting moves it away from sentimentality. I was not able to find a decent reproduction on the internet, they are all lossy and klutzy in comparison to the painting itself.

      Two small studies from life done on Monday night. A live way to test out a method of working outside that I've been thinking about, mobile but textured and saturated paint that stays put but can also be easily altered by removal or carving with a small spatula. Earth colours plus ivory black and Prussian blue, I wanted to see how this palette performed, again with an eye to a simple landscape palette outdoors, Prussian being the most logical single blue without a green for someone who is allergic to all things phthalo. A little goopy, but I liked how these worked out, the palette took the situation out of 2013, and the style of the medium allowed strongly intuitive application, then refinement, the figure is integrated with the ground. In the past I've tried several of these approaches that are both the bull and the china shop, but this is the best one so far. As an unexpected bonus, it photographs well. About 7x8.5 inches (above), and 7x5.5 inches (below).

      Cleaning up downstairs unearthed lots of different tubes of lead white made over the last few years. In the past it always used to bug me when the white slumped or puddled, a pretty standard feature of lead white made with modern pigment and no additives. Of course, it's possible to add just a drop of two of egg white to solve this before tubing the paint, but I realized last week that, though it appears to be liquid, this paint is actually still pretty glutinous, it doesn't run even when the palette is vertical, as in this photo. I've been finding this really useful for layers on the smaller landscape studies, it creates more cohesion or unity at a scale where more impasto just gets in the way.

      For a while I've been trying to think of a way to explain what happens when grays are integrated with midtone colours. Well, it's sort of like what's going on here.

      More roller coaster weather, about eight inches of wet snow this week, and a few more sunny days. Second week of the moon, full moon on Wednesday, also the official beginning of Spring, always a little ironic around here. Still cold, but there's more light, the pussy willow in the yard is beginning to bud, and every now and then I hear some geese. I don't know what it is, but a I get older these natural sounds have more of an effect on me, basically more meaningful, a language I can feel more than understand. It did seem like something new began in terms of the work this week, maybe it's just the energy to pursue it once again. I guess it's like the sun itself: when it's around, I take it for granted, when it goes away, I remember how much I like having it around.

      There are some people in class who are on their way to being painters. I like them, and root for them, maybe too much in some cases, but there's only so much you can do as a teacher. I don't think teaching painting is a lost cause the way James Elkins does, but then I got out of that world as fast as I could, over four decades ago now. I had a good English class in high school where we read lots of intense books, and one I still think about is The Plague. Even at the time I knew life would be just that way, trying to fix something that probably cannot be fixed, but trying anyway. The same teacher also has us read Plato's Myth of the Cave, a similar story in a way. So, in class, while I explain what I've learned, try to cure the plague of modern life, try to get people out of the cave of preconceptions that hold them back from discoveries, I don't really expect it to sink in. In a sense it just can't be that easy. I mean, if I had actually read Doerner thirty years ago instead of treating him like an old professorial fuddy-duddy, I would have read exactly what I now consider important about colour, namely that hues need to be balanced by chromatic grays. But would it have meant anything at the time? So much of life is simply learning to pay attention through personal experience. It's interesting that, as a species, we're wired to make our mistakes over and over, to marginalize the very people who might have the answers because they've done it. My friend Roland said something similar recently about Eastlake, that he understood him much better after having worked with the materials for several years. But anyway -- not to get off on Eastlake and the way he is consistently abused by modern scholars looking for a sitting bird -- the people I'm working with now are actually beginning to get it, and it's very exciting to see, because their work is starting to take off in terms of the way they use colour. And when even one person is cured, the other patients start to have hope. So, it seems like having hope is actually pretty close to being cured. As we get older of course, it's harder to have hope. I know many people who are cynical and proud of it: it is, after all, the fruit of bitter experience, and we tend to worship that in Vermont, especially in the wintertime. But it seems like the most important thing is to find the functional positive approach. Not to be deluded, but, as Wodehouse says, to be on the lookout for silver linings. The glass may not be half full, but even if it is empty, it was designed to hold something, and something we can always put in it is hope.

      Began this on Monday, a little larger than the usual study size, thought not so much in terms of finishing it literally as in terms of finishing it in terms of the feeling. There is always so much to the feeling, it seems best at this point to acknowledge that as primary. Here I wanted the sense of the late light, the lumpiness of the road, the various quite specific things that add up to a balance between celebration and elegy that is so often part of the land. This image involved a great deal of development of not very much paint. I've always avoided this because it tends to make things look prissy or academic, but thought it was a good idea as a beginning to establish a very specific atmosphere. But after doing it, it seemed too static, and a little too difficult: as John Lennon said during the No Reply sessions, "It's too hard to sing!" Now, having lived with the image for the week, it feels like a good idea again, and about as much work as I always end up doing anyway, nature will never be an easy tune to carry. Not done, but the most evolved beginning yet for me, it may be possible to finish this in a few more layers. Higby Road, 9x14 inches, on on paper (Arches Huile).

      Some painter friends are starting a paint-in on Monday evenings. I'm not sure how long this will last, but it was fun. The idea was for us all to paint a still life, but it ended up being a kind of free for all, the best painting was a Gwen John-like portrait of someone painting. But I just did the still life, I like simple things from life. Used a goopy silica gel variation on a mobile ground, erased the first version of this and made everything larger. It was tricky to get the Granny Smith apple to lay in the same key as the other two, and it had a reflection right on a dent, making it look like a sticker. It's funny how all this stuff stays with you when you paint something from life. A nice vacation, the studio itself has lots of interesting stuff in it, we'll see what happens next with this. About 8x10 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      The spot above was a place I photographed for over a decade; it was near where I lived in Ferrisburg but too near an actual road to paint there. These images are, for some reason, pretty dear to me, and I keep coming back to them in spite of getting beaten up more often than not. This image is one of the first ones I did in the new studio here in the summer of 2009 (below, about 7.5x16 inches). I thought it would be simple to make another version of this after it departed but it wasn't, I made two at about 20 inches across and they were both disasters. Of course, it is a fine line between disaster and opportunity, since disaster always leads to the questions that resolve it. In this case, I eventually realized that I did not have enough control of the world of grays, or more neutral colours, and that my interest in the fact of the light was emphasizing value over unity, which effectively always put finished at risk. Since then, I've been working on resolving that issue, which seems like it has both outer and inner aspects. This beginning was both an evolution of, and a reaction to, the beginning above. Even less paint, as I had to do more in the way of landscaping and cloud control, blending the skies and compositions from two different images from a few minutes apart. So, I just wanted to get this close, avoiding at all costs the locking of strong elements that had become problematic in the past. There are aspects to the image below that I still like, especially the way the foreground tree came out, but on the whole it seems sort of primitive now, more about luck than looking to. Current version is about 16.5x10 inches, oil on paper (Arches Huile).

      Yet another version of the same place, I've made so many of these that haven't worked out it's silly, but there is one at 32 inches across that isn't bad. Second layer on this one, the first pass was a real slugfest of thick paint but after grinding it back firmly I was able to move it forward. Still a little nutty, but there's a painting in there somewhere. About 7.5x14 inches, oil on gessoed canvas.

      Continued to work on older images in layers, I'm getting a better sense of how to do this: how much to grind the older image back, how much paint to add at what level of saturation. The first version of this went to the infamous evil collector of 2010, so I'm especially interested in making this one work out well. Not done, but improving, moving into more balance between graphic and realistic qualities. Was able to put in more in the way of reflections and atmosphere but it will need to be done again. This is fine, my goal with these used to be to finish them, but I found that to actually be counter-productive. Now the goal is to get in, make the most obvious improvements, and get out before the new paint becomes submerged to an official finishing process. About 9x20 inches, oil on gessoed board.

      Something from the same era, the bird sanctuary near the lake where there are often eagles, tons of snow geese congregate just north of here in the fall. A place I've done a lot of outdoor work, it is great if the weather is right, but only good in the morning (the best time for me outside) if it is overcast. This had become a little too specific but I always liked the overall feeling of it, so ground it back and did a layer without the reference. Working without the reference is always good when it wants to happen, again softened the colour with more in the way of chromatic grays. Not done, but on its way to being a painting. About 10x20 inches, oil on gessoed board.

      New moon, a complicated set of days culminating in the news being delayed due to technical difficulties with a server upgrade. Urgh, I need to switch to Wordpress, but am loathe to get into it. Still mostly overcast this week, but one sunny afternoon where I felt almost elated, amazing to see all that hopeful blue sky.. The weather continues quietly bizarre and I know it's getting to me; winter is both ending and rebeginning on a cyclical basis: a few warmer days followed by cold and snow. Was only able to get minimal things done, not much painting again. This is frustrating but on the other hand I had an unusually good August, a time that has usually been on the rough side in the past. With life lessons that clearly feature patience and endurance, it's best to have flexible expectations. Did my taxes, after much dread they were actually pretty simple. The book sold better than I thought it did, always nice, but still has a way to go. Had a good class midweek, became a little more type A than usual in trying to keep one student from going down the path of copying photographs, but they seemed to get it. Had a good talk about the Munsell system with someone else who had taken a workshop in it the previous week. This had me thinking about colour, and I realized something interesting. We know that all colour is relative to its context, to what is around it. When most people paint using the modern method of two bright triads and white, there are three types of colour involved: midtones, highlights, and some sort of shadow convention. This gives three contexts: highlight-midtone, highlight-shadow, and midtone-shadow. In the 17th century, on the other hand, they worked with grays as well, giving the fourth type of colour -- officially hues, tints, tones, and shades -- and worked a great deal with the optical difference between transparent and opaque paint. This gives four types of colour in two varieties, making for a total of twenty-one different contexts, i.e., possible combinations of two different colour types. Now, some of these combinations are more important than others, but even so, I think that goes a long way towards explaining how, without premixing colour for hours beforehand, older painters were able to do so much with such limited palettes. Colour was not only mixed for value and temperature, but mapped with an understanding of the effect of different contexts. Then had a colour workshop on Saturday morning. It had snowed and was quite cold, the last class had been a real slugfest of different levels, so I was ready for several different versions of the class. But only one person out of four showed up, someone who had purchased Living Craft and drove up from Massachusetts. So, one on one is always the best when possible, and we had a good time. I talked for a while about colour and then they began to ask questions from their own process and this led to a painting lesson that they liked, again introducing the idea of painterly, as opposed to literal, realism. This experience was interesting because although I was set up to do several things, the situation suggested something altogether different, and extemporizing proved to be the better approach. Probably not for the last time in 2013.

      When there's not much energy I work on things that are marginal, something where I like the idea but the painting needs plenty of help. Put a rescue layer on this study of clouds and late corn and left it loose, it did show me that I've learned some things in the last few months about mapping colour to form through context.

      This week's project of note was making more methyl cellulose tempera. I really like this paint but had run out. Water is added to the methyl cellulose and this is emulsified with oil and chalk. Making titanium white here, you can see the bouncy texture from the methyl cellulose emulsion.

      Setting up the proportions for ultramarine blue. There are lots of different ultramarines, this one is the darkest one from Kremer, although this medium is not as dark as oil.

      Pyranthrone orange, with orange ochre and green earth in the background.

      What it looked like in the end, a modest sense of accomplishment, made more colours than before, wrote down everything that happened, there are often odd little things with specific pigments.

      The paint can be used as either a water or oil phase tempera. The water phase tempera is like egg tempera but with more body, the oil phase, shown here, gets a little nutty, but that's what I like about it, it begins to defy a realistic approach and force things to be more painterly. This, of course, is a double-edged sword.

      An early version of the image I worked with done using the mc tempera, three years ago now. Just one layer of paint, moving from the water phase to the oil phase. About 6x8 inches.

      A slightly larger version I started this week, 9x12 inches on a gessoed panel, same approach of beginning with water phase and moving to oil phase. I wanted to see if I could get the paint to be more detailed without being finicky. Learned more about the technique, it's fun but by no means efficient yet, wasn't able to complete it. I cut the merciless titanium with two parts chalk but it was still bothering me, cut it even more on the palette with the mc medium mixed with chalk. I'm not sure the home scale of this paint isn't larger, but I'll keep going on this and see what happens.

      Version of this image done a few months ago in oil, same size, 9x12, worked on this for three days in a row as the paint slowly tightened.

      Last week of the moon, new moon tomorrow, whew. Two weeks of overcast ended yesterday, some sun again today, it's warming up slowly, bringing a sense of relief at a basic level, everyone was happy yesterday when I did errands. Not, I mean, because I was doing errands, but, already, on their own initiative, so to speak. Complicated week, a lot had to happen, and not always smoothly. Small but persistent challenges in terms of doing what needed to be done, as well as wanting to do it in the first place. This continues to look like the theme for 2013, juggling balloons and bowling balls. Last March I stopped working downstairs and started working upstairs. The downstairs is underheated, and pretty cold in the winter, and was getting pretty full of work, materials, and history. Upstairs gave me a fresh start, and a way to slowly remove and assess the downstairs work. Now the upstairs is getting full but that's another story. Oh, sorry, unintentional, that was really a bad one. Anyway, this last week continued the imperative to clean up and reorganize the downstairs studio. It was still hard to figure out how to do it, but I made progress.

      Between running around for the school and cleaning up the studio, not much happened with painting. This occurs now and then, especially during the last week of the moon, especially at the end of winter, especially when there's been no sun for a long time: the trifecta. But I did get in a day of layers on smaller studies from this summer. Accidentally took these at a high ASA but they look more accurate in a way as a result, less digital. Not done, but in the place that makes them fun to continue on, small increments, layer by layer, creating a more complete sense of the day. Above, Higby Road, Clearing Fog, about 9x14 inches, oil on paper. In life this one has a nice sense of sun and fog coming. Below, Farr Cross Road, August, about 8.5x13 inches, oil on paper.

       An image I've been thinking about a lot, this lives on a wall full of small things of interest. There are three or four of these, small studies made a few years ago with methyl cellulose tempera. I really liked this paint when it occurred, it dries quickly so is spontaneous to work with, the final look is matte but saturated. The most interesting aspect is that it can be used either water phase or oil phase, and that these can occur in the same session, water first, oil on top. As with so many things that happen technically, it had an initial heyday but its greater potential only became clear over time. So, this is an approach I want to visit again at some point. About 4x8 inches, mc tempera on gessoed paper, just down the road from the first image above. Detail below, about four times life size.

      The later half of the week was spent cleaning up the downstairs, which had become a complete rabbit warren with all the research for the book. This also involved getting plywood and 2x4s with which to make new shelving and tables. The goal was to free up the center of the room so larger work could be made on the back wall with lots of room to step back, and slowly but surely, this happened. There is a certain twisted logic to the way a mess develops, untangling it is kind of like a time machine, going back over the last few years.

      Plywood and 2x4s meant dusting off the little Bosch table saw, a well-engineered and co-operative being.

      Having gotten plenty of wood, I was still pretty confused about what would work, so decided to focus on one area at a time. There's my first shelving unit full of pigments, with the book shipping department on the left, tons of trash waiting to go out to the left of that. The alcove? Let's not talk about that.

      Sometimes in these transformative activities the energy gets a little intense. Someone may foolishly try to move a shelving unit without emptying it first. Thus, the great Paliogen Orange spill of 2013. This was in some plastic bottle from Kremer that had become quite rigid with age, shattered after falling three feet. A powerful opaque non-toxic cadmium alternative, similar to pyranthrone orange.

      Still plenty of work to do in this room. The panels need to be organized, the table on sawhorses needs to be replaced with one or two made with 2x4s as legs.

      Waning moon, one strangely Spring-like afternoon on Friday, complete with soft cumulus clouds, and a rare appearance of sun, but otherwise cloudy with endless snow flurries. This is a typical vacation time for people around here, winter is getting old. A sense of needing to keep expectations low, enjoy the little things, compassion begins at home. Not many paintings happened, worked with a few different versions of 19th century landscape, the paint evolves even if I'm a late winter zombie. A sense of trying too hard, pushing, in these, nothing quite gelled although the paint itself is better. Did start a new project, details below.

      Had a relatively zippy class, though. The group features some pretty different personalities but they're getting used to one another, which means more cross-fertilization can happen. This aspect of teaching is fascinating, the larger personality of a group, how it develops, learns from itself. A question was asked about the divine proportion or Golden Section. This proved really interesting as there's somebody in class who's done much more with this than I have, so I learned a lot about how this is used in practice. The question was about the Golden Section as a compositional tool. I like that type of rectangle for landscape -- 3x5, 8x13, 13x21 -- but I think the concept became important when they were dealing with invented architecture as a way to make it intrinsically harmonious: everything created is already involved with the divine proportion, but man made stuff needs to be actively designed that way. As is often the case in class, I had a sense of an idea that wanted to come in but needed a little more room. Woke up in the middle of the night and realized a few things. The proportion is a way of taking one line and turning it into two, so that the ratio of the whole is to the big part as the big part is to the smaller part. Everything else is based on the choice of that particular point of division. Unity -- the original line -- becomes diversity -- splitting the line in two -- while maintaining harmony: all the pieces share the same relationship to one another. So, there are three elements, the original line, and the two new pieces: a triad. As with the way a triad of primary colours can be arranged to emulate three dimensional form in smaller and smaller increments -- more and more dimension from closer and closer mixing -- the line representing unity can be broken down endlessly, the smaller piece being divided again and again, with all the pieces remaining in proportion. In class this was exactly where the discussion went: to the way atoms are shaped like solar systems. I wonder if this is the same proportion as a major triad in music, with it's basic sense of affirmation or resolution. I like this because it's where science is confronted with the inexplicable, and this is built in: the divine proportion is involved with the square root of five, a living number that refines itself infinitely. This seems like the doorway to reestablishing the concept of the sacred without all the baggage of conventional religion. What is the sacred? Unity in diversity, diversity in unity. That paradox, and it's infinite permutations, proportional divisions of triadic fractals. I've been trying to think of people this way too, looking for the unity behind the diversity. It's easier in day-to-day life, living in a place where people have made similar life choices to mine, more challenging when factoring in national or international issues. But things seem to be moving along more quickly all the time, as though the fabric of reality itself is getting tired of being under all this tension.

      Last March I got frozen out of the downstairs studio. This old house has a cinder block knee-wall, and this makes the first floor pretty cold in the winter, especially without snow to insulate things. Maybe the room was just too full of work, making it hard to think straight after a while. So I moved upstairs and bit by bit moved the work too. Now this room is filling up, but at least it's just with the paintings themselves.

      So this week's spontaneous project was to start cleaning up downstairs. Oh boy! Bad ideas! Failed experiments! Endless detritus! I want to be able to make larger paintings again on that far wall. But the Feng-shui is all wrong. Just like a landscape, I need to make a new composition with an empty middle. But this means a new table system because the saw horses take up too much room. There's a banquette full of insulation that runs around the room, but this also keeps work tables from being against the wall. I think it just involves buying some two by fours and using them to attach the tables to the walls. I'm trying to think about it, rather than just throw effort at it. There's still plenty of stuff to just organize and throw out.

      Well, I thought green was complicated until I came to terms with blue. I've ended up liking cerulean, I get it from Kremer, it's actually cheap compared to good cerulean like Blockx. It's hard to keep it in suspension, this tube started out nice and dense but then fell apart. I compared this to an old tube of W&N cerulean, it has more strength and chroma, they probably used chalk to keep it in suspension. Vasari is calling chalk an adulterant, going after Williamsburg no doubt, but it's the adulterant of Rembrandt, Chardin, and Vermeer, and I'd rather have a mineral extender than aluminum stearate. Anyway, the end of a tube that served me well, I'll try another way of getting it to stay together this time.

      I've had the V&A book on the Constable studies for a while now. At first I was disappointed in it, I think I was expecting something more over the top, but they are subtle paintings, records more than performances the way many of the Corot studies from Italy are. So I finally began to go over this book in detail, and it has a lot of very interesting information in it. The most interesting part was that they've established that, in the sky studies, Constable used water paint for the blue of the sky, then adding the clouds themselves in oil. So, the pattern of the composition is established by the blue interacting with the warm ground. This means he can't get confused by the clouds moving, he know where they have to go regardless of where they've gone. I had to try this, and although it didn't quite work out, it is not the fault of the technique. Detail here, the watercolour underpainting with a little bit of oil paint left on top after I scraped it off. The problem was the disposition of lots and lots of trees in the foreground involved in both sun and haze. I need to rethink this and try it again with something a little more graphic. But after this I began to look at some of the close-ups in the V&A book and it really seemed like, not only was there watercolour underneath, but watercolour on top of oil as well. There's beading, pulling in some places, especially on the cover photo. So, this is interesting to think about, I can't begin imagine having enough presence of mind to think in two mediums at once, let alone outside. Of course, this doesn't mean I'm not going to try. What a natural genius that man was.

      Worked on this for a day with a variation of the silica gel, got it close but the portal of the day is pretty small. Got the sense of atmosphere, but again, the music of the trees could use some tuning. It has that fine overall texture that the silica gel makes, the next layer will be interesting, want that slightly brocaded look of overall fine impasto. Snake Mountain from Far Cross, about 9x12.5 inches, oil on gessoed paper.

      Did this yesterday, still wet, again looking for an overall sense of unity with chromatic detail within it. Again could not quite close the door, partly this is winter, partly this is the paint being semi-layerable, not really setting fully. I set this ground up to be a little absorbent, but the paint trumped it quickly. About 7x9.5 inches, oil on gessoed paper.

      Something older I found in the clean up campaign downstairs, one of the few images from this series that has worked out, just needs a concluding layer with mobile, saturated paint. Farr Cross, late June, 12x16 inches, oil on gessoed board.