"Center of Buoyancy" (5 of 25)

8x8", acrylic and mixed media on board

(#5 of 25 for the 20/20 show) When I do one of these abstracts and put down the texture material, it becomes another element in the painting, of course. But how much of an element it becomes differs depending on the painting. It can be a smaller element and add depth and interest, or it can drive the whole composition. This was one of the latter. I had two arch shapes, not parallel, and they were assertive enough that I couldn't just use them to make drippies or highlights. Hence the bold gold in the middle. Also, this might have been the painting where I fell in love with the crepuscular blue. ("Crepuscular" refers to that glowing blue light in the air just at dusk.)

Funny to think that all the artists' paintings are due at the gallery today. I imagine that the gallery is a madhouse. And I find my memory of the painting period is like a like a series of arcs with different forces behind them. There was the trajectory where I played with plaster gauze, where I added a lot of effects with brushwork (tingeing with gold, bleeding colors around edges), where I added egg shells (those went into two paintings).

One arc was referred to in the blog of Rebecca Crowell, who came out here for a workshop last year. She wrote of how, sometimes, you just love this beautiful little portion of a painting, but it's detracting from the whole. You paint around it for awhile, try to incorporate it, try to bend the rest of the composition to make it work, but you can't. In the end, you paint over it. She said the phrase for that is "Sometimes you have to kill the little darlings." It's a kind of uncomfortable phrase, but so accurate. It repeats a lot for my abstracts.