Here is what is going on now.......

I am still fiddling around with these journal pages! each move I make gets me more excited about where they are taking me!

You must have seen them in an earlier post adhered to a 3x4 foot panel .......... I have been working on the larger pieces while pondering what to do about this beast! And then it came to me one morning while I was still asleep...The weather had turned to freezing about a week ago. I recalled a painting of mine that had been left in the back of a car during a frozen january a few years ago. When I retrieved the painting from the car it had crack across the surface. I lifted the painting away from the panel and turned it around. It was like looking into a painting from the inside out. From the first marks made to the last. It was astonishingly beautiful and yet had been hidden by the paintings completion. This made me think of all the journal pages lost to the back side of the pages shown. So I put the 3x4 panel on the porch in the freezing cold, where I left it for several days. It did not crack as I had hoped but I did bring it back into the studio where I cracked off all the pages to reveal the foregone images. Now caked with resin I rolled a thin layer of gesso over some of the surfaces and began to think of a new way to show these pieces. I like holding them and turning the pages. They will no longer fit within the confines of the covers. So I built a house of cards.

And then these turned themselves red!

There is a bit more evidence of the journal pages in this group. The mark making, the exposure of some of the collaged imagery from the printed journal pages. It is difficult to transfer something which is beautiful small and have the same success with the same imagery in a large format. I need to have larger hands and tools for bigger mark making to achieve the same ratio. I'll keep trying.....These are not even that big!

The red in this work is actually a permanent marker, rich, rich, rich in hue, yet translucent! And stinky!

So here they are, heavy paper, printed versions of the journal pages completed obscured. Wax, plaster, encaustic gesso rolled over the paint. How do you like the format

The small yellows are on panels and the above pieces are on paper. That was the plan. Some of my struggle is with format, squares or rectangles, long or short, horizontal or vertical? The journal pages are 3.5x5 vertical, there is something about that narrow vertical shape. Two squares on top of each other also offers this ratio. Let's see

hellohellohellohellohello.....I think I like this one. In this size or maybe this size or maybe times, yes , this is much better.

Welcome yellow, so way not mellow! Below are some new pieces based on the journal experiments I have been messing with all term. First, my mentor, Jill Slosberg-Ackerman, loved those little books and wondered why my paintings were so disparate. She suggested I just work on the books for a bit, which I did. I disassembled one and created the 36x48 painting which is somewhere below...way down. Maybe that was a mistake, I don't really know. My next assignment was to scan and print out a few pages from the journal and use those as the basis for a new body. Which I did. What you see here is the continuing evolution of those pages. I am beginning to feel alright about them.

white paint stick

I wasn't really done ,so here i will continue......So, I said the part about the portrait, she said the struggle was the greatest in the face. How much do I let get covered? " Let go even more",she says. Am I preserving too much of the foundation? What do I do about Matthew Barney? The white brings unity between these images. Am I deeply philosophical about my process and intent? Do I make gratuitous marks in my abstraction or is there a convincing logic, Like Rauschenburg? She say's "use more of you as the glue".

Work on self portrait. why? I don't want to paint representationally. Where is the balance? Where am I? Eleven Oclock on sunday.

White paint stick!

these pieces are on paper. They are a combination of wax, oil paint, red perm marker, encaustic gesso and graphite. Oh, also they have below them the printed images from the journal, blown up. I have no idea where I am going......I feel like I am trying to move forward but am stepping backward in order to do so. I am just going to push it until it tells me to stop. Do and undo, do and undo.

It is definitely an excavation, a dig, only in reverse.

I had a conversation with Jill today (she is my mentor) I showed her a portrait I had done from life. The portrait is in walnut oil. I will post it when it is something that I like. It is very loose and gestural. Jill said that in the portrait, gesture is as important as the image being depicted. She continued to say that I was trying to speak two different languages at the same time. One of abstraction and one of representation. And that I should try to bring all that I do in abstraction into representation