What on earth IS this image???   I don't know yet.  I find this blog helps me to articulate what I am doing, cause sometimes I just have no idea...so here it is. 

Even though I don't want to label it yet, I can already see that this image belongs to the Map of the Interior group, and that just occurred to me right now, by the way, as I saw it appear on the screen after the upload. 

Just wanted to point out that nobody likes this painting...and yet I can't stop thinking about it.  I do love the sort of cheesy autobiographical aspect of course, especially the bend in her neck, but more so it seems to be an image on the verge of illustrating something....yesterday I repainted the right hand background, thinking I was going to layer a dark color beneath a flaming all over cadmium red, but as it turned out something stopped me, and I ended up relegating the female figure to her dark corner....time to decant.

Working in multiples is slightly scary.  You think sometimes it is hard enough to find coherence and simultaneously enough that defies it, in order to create a stirring whole.   You want to avoid the all beautiful.  Also the excessively obtuse ( a favorite pitfall of mine).  You want to walk that fine line between giving a little and then mystifying...and the journey of the light should naturally lead the mind forward.  

You think surely such a process will be very much more difficult when spread out amongst several images...and so it is.  Never mind that all three images portray my own brother a few years ago, swimming in a pool in Southampton.  In each he is rigorously donning his raybans, don't ask me why.  He was a most collaborative subject.   That summer  I remember I dropped my brand new cell phone into the pool, by leaning too far forward...

That was the summer I spent hanging over the edge of pools wherever I went, coaxing any and all  to swim beneath the water surface  so I could take an endless supply of images.  Never mind that I am a God awful photographer, and that a thousand times the click delay stole my best images, or that most of my photos are out of focus.  Somehow, over the years, I have gathered hundreds, and have already started this summer's batch!!! From the worst photograph come the best images, so I like to claim.  The eye fills in the rest.

I am still processing the old,  of course,  as I gather more...I have already started this summer's series, and I am longing for more working space so I can be surrounded.    Some day perhaps I shall  be commissioned by collectors with pools all over the world...please come and paint my underwater portrait in Rio or in Simi...sounds like a good job!

yes, the image is almost finished, but I am waiting for an opportunity to resolve a bit of the figuration (particularly the ray bans) and smooth some of my edges.  

In what seems to have become my process, I manipulate my images usually by magnifying, cropping, messing around with photo programs that I don't really know how to use...then I paint a ground on the canvas and set out a multicolor pastel map.  When at last I get to the paint, I begin with a tentative search for form and balance in a first cautious layer, establishing shadows and what I like to call "a river of light".
 
Then I abandon, I have to let it "gel" in my mind, awaiting clarity, the right brain wave, whatever. Sometimes I look at it online, or through the eyes of someone else.  I might take a photo and look through the viewer, or hang it over my bed... I have to wait until I can see the image with my new empty eyes, something that already exists on it's own, that I can see whole, not as an assembly of all of my bit and pieces.  At this point, if all goes well, with my compass set in a clear direction, I can go on.

Finally I begin over painting a bit, establishing a more valiant gesture in my second layer and yet respecting the initial economy, as if I meant it all along, more decisive now, flick of the wrist over well-known territories.

i will deepen all with a bit of glazing...

I have a feeling that creativity might have common grounds in other media...