I had a really productive day today. I got up kind of late, and didn't make it into the studio until 10, but I think I've reached the point in my current projects when I have gotten a lot of thinking and planning out of the way, and have the full bandwidth to devote a full day to just making work, and moving paint.
I had a huge breakthrough with the two paintings I just started. for these, I decided to forgo the orange ground that I have been using to start all my paintings in the last few years, and started with a fairly detailed pencil drawing. I blocked in some large shapes last week, and today I decided to go back over the paint with my pencil to reinforce the structures and angles in the two scenes. I've been looking at the work of Andrew Wykes (look at his paintings every day, and go see any show he has). He has a style where he breaks up the space with very bold line work, and uses tape to create really hard edges and bright pops of color to depict scenes that are slipping in and out of abstraction. I'm not attempting to make anything as breathtaking as he accomplishes, but the lines are really helping me think about how the objects in my paintings sit in space. This is especially true in the landscape I am working on, as it is devoid of the rectangular buildings that I'm used to painting. I'm thinking about the natural landscape, and how it can be thought of as existing in some sort of framework, even before humans arrive and impose one explicitly.
I also moved ahead with my series of prints for the show. I'm planning four prints, and finished tracing my images for two of them, and either tonight or tomorrow I can start transferring those images to the linoleum blocks so they can be carved. I think I'll give a detailed account of how linocut printing works on here, because I think it's fascinating it allows you to create multiples of one image, and the because there is such a shift in the way you think about image-making when you go from painting to printing.
I have to go buy wood for two more paintings tomorrow, and I'm a little bit apprehensive. I stopped at Menard's yesterday, but when I saw the number of varieties they had I panicked and ran away. I'll be braver tomorrow.
