Putting it all together

I’ve been cloistered in the studio, getting ready for my April art exhibit.  Its been a challenge to bring all these images and colors into some coherent form.  Having an art show forces you to bring work to, as Marcel Duchamp called it, “a state of definite incompletion.”

A way to get them up on the wall is necessary.  I’m attaching hooks and wires, trying  think of titles, and bringing  some paintings back from the edge of oblivion .  To do this you sometimes you have to be radical.  Painting is a complicated business, and to narrow the focus can be, paradoxically, liberating.  After putting this painting aside for a time, I covered the whole thing with a coat of indian red.  It was the ground color I began with and I return to it in order to unify the disparate elements again.  I then used my favorite tool, the paint rag, to reveal the under lying color.  This gave everything a reddish tinge and shadows turned from cool blues and violets to warm red.

For a long time I’ve been interested in the Temenos, the enclosed, sacred space set off from worldly concerns.

The figures in this picture suggest gnomon.  This is a greek word meaning both a column on a sundial indicating time of day, as well as one who knows.  The gnomen are guardians of the spellbinding circle where we safely confront the unconscious  and undertake the magic of creative work.