More progress, but still not sure if the top study is complete. I know I will continue to work on the blue painting, but I don't know what step to take next. Guess I will have to meditate on it again...
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Progress is a bit slow, but I have some ideas about what I want to accomplish with these studies.
I found that connecting perspectival lines to varied grid sizes can create more illusionistic depth. I'm also interested in creating more optical tension via transparency and allowing the ground layer of grids to compress three dimensional planes. I will also be working with ideas of mirrors to reference reflection and deeper connections between the surfaces of planes. The color palette will become more silvery and dull.
Spilling paint to create more entropy. Eventually, I want to have less control over the chaos that I am responding to with geometry. I'd like to work with natural forces (other than just gravity) to create changes from which I can map literal patterns and structures. I think this is the stepping stone piece to realizing that potential.
Another goal for these works is to loosen up and lose control. I'd like to learn to make geometric works that are more gestural, painterly and mobile, but still have the solidity to work with bodily subjectivity to create contradictory contrasts of space and surface. Kind of like Richard Diebenkorn.
Questions: One of the incredible feats of painting is the ability to convince the viewer of illusions - that somehow, the paint is transformed into the subjects it describes. It is even more remarkable to be able to convince them of illusions of things they've never seen with their own eyes. I feel that my paintings are more meaningful in how they express the illusions of ideas that are not observed in nature (illusions that use a mix of memory and imagination to reconstruct theories, philosophy, spirituality, music and emotion into visual experiences). If I make paintings that reference the metaphysical, how does working from observations of natural change also relate to painting? Would it be necessary or authentic to use painting as a medium to restate nature's supreme eloquence? Perhaps it's about picking apart layers of change to reconstruct an authentic understanding of natural processes? At that point, does painting become a responsive act of curiosity and learning? It seems so close to science, yet it's also so expressive and authored... What do I want to say with this new goal of using geometry to respond directly to natural change?
*With regard to natural change, I will not learn anything new if I continue to make paintings about what I believe to be true about nature. I have to see it for myself - I have to lose control and collaborate with nature. I have to know what's true, before I am confident expressing it... Perhaps the geometry lies between nature and the painting. It just might be a bridge of understanding.*
