Alexandra Castelli
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Map of the Interior III, 2010 - final stretch

25/5/2010

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Picture
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.

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jungle bros - a tiny series of tiny canvases

25/5/2010

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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!
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Jungle Brother 1,2, and 3

23/5/2010

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jungle brother update

8/5/2010

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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...
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    Author

    Give me a minute please to boil myself down to a single descriptive sentence...I am still working on this!

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