Reflections in the studio

I’ve had a couple of good paintings days (and this is reading week: no classes! So I will have more time to paint!). I am beginning to understand why I have so much trouble putting something in the middle of my paintings. I think it has to do with the image feeling too literal, like it IS something. When the image has a broader feel, when it is pushed to the edge, it feels (to me) more universal, transcending the personal, which is my primary motivation: to make the painting go beyond the impulse that creates it.

Yesterday I was working on a small (30” x 30”) red painting. It began with trying (once again) to put the image down the center of the canvas. But (as usual) I was uncomfortable and started painting it out, erasing the image, losing it. So I made some bold black lines in circular shapes taking up the whole canvas (small as it is, anyway). And this pulled the canvas together for me. Then I felt I understood what I was looking for, why the middle of the canvas has to be so solid, and this solidity works best for me with color, not form.

And as for the horizontal: as much as I appreciate a good landscape painting (such as Elin Neumann’s), I don’t feel comfortable when my paintings refer to external landscape. In an abstract painting, the horizontal too easily refers to landscape. What I want is to create an internal landscape. And perhaps the vertical represents the human body better in my lexicon.