poemimage

The visual & the poetic.

Category: painting

GIF Experiments: 29 (Goodbye, a painting)

I said ‘goodbye’ to a painting this week. Sprayed it with four sweeps of archival varnish half an hour between on a warmish day and packaged it the next. I wanted to write the title on the back but couldn’t find it. So I just started calling the painting ‘Goodbye.’

The canvases with blues I’ve done the last couple years psyched me for using blues on the 5′ X 33′ roll (scroll) of Italian paper I began in late April. That work is now 70% complete. There is no chance of forgetting the title because I rework it often. One word is Druidica.

As for Photoshop 5 and troubles with ‘scratch discs’ – if I save a simple GIF to Web & Devices at the first warning the program won’t shut down on me. But no large files and nothing tricky! So it goes.

Bird Vision

I did this painting titled ‘Bird Vision’ this summer on a large sheet of mid-weight mixed-media paper. I liked the paper’s softness. I tacked it to a piece of plywood resting that on my easel. Then just started. The artist Marc Cohen described it as ‘Neo-Neolithic with a touch of Fauve.’

Language in a Landscape

One of the images I used for a backdrop in Zoom during my virtual poetry reading at The Art Bar Poetry Reading Series on April 6th. During the first lockdown I painted this 18″ X 28.5″ work (acrylic & water-soluble graphic pencil on cardboard) while exploring concepts of lost text and mystery languages. My reading (video filmed and edited by Charles Hackbarth) can be found @ https://www.facebook.com/groups/artbarpoetry/permalink/10165105586530503/

30″ X 40″

Finished this last summer and spent the last two days ‘touching it up.’ More like completely reworking it. It’s part of a ‘blue-ish’ series called Welcome to The Ice Age.

I needed to do something tactile after an overwhelming slew of ‘conceptual’ stuff generated piles of paper (& text) over a month or more. And then the GIF experiments.

What’s strange about Photoshop is how it reveals something when you manipulate the image. Now I see a Druidic figure in the upper right  observing the central image in the painting.

It seems he was there all along. And horned no less. I didn’t notice. Cernunnos? Celtic shaman?

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