4/21/07 Day 2
Yesterday I showed my daughter Blixy the self-portraits and she said, "Do you realize you've made yourself look more male than female?"
"No," I said, "I didn't realize that, but now that you point it out, you're right. I guess my inner image of myself has always been that of a young boy."
"Yeah, but your early portraits look more feminine."
"True."
This morning I tried drawing another self-portrait, but it was coming out so badly that I stopped working on it. Then I did an abstract drawing, which also started out poorly. I was going to abandon it, too, but decided to keep working on it. Here it is:
Drawing #1
Next I tackled the painting I've been working on for a week without success. It was very dark, with no light in it at all. I opened a tube of bright orange and drew thick lines across the surface of the canvas. Then I took a pale lime green and made some marks with that. Finally with a brush wet in a thin wash of orange-green, I brushed over it all. And then I used thin lines of brown umber to outline, accent, and texturize.
I kept working, adding some reds, until I had a pretty ugly canvas in front of me. This is it:
Canvas #1
Have I forgotten how to paint completely?
In frustration, I went to work on another 44" x 44" canvas, using white, black and brown paint directly from the tube. I figured I had to cut back on color and concentrate on line and form, in order to get myself back to the basics.
This is how that one ended up:
Canvas #2
So it's true, I have forgotten how to paint. The only solution is to just keep going, even though I feel impatient and frustrated. I don't know what to do, so I paint faster. That isn't working.
Will I be able to salvage these paintings? I don't even know what I'm looking for. I don't know what a good painting will look like any more.
I imagine my neighbors walking past and looking in my studio windows thinking, "Look at that ugly painting she is making."
(Note: There is a gap between the dates I'm writing and posting because I had to give myself time to get ahead in case we travel and I'm not able to post.)
