In London, in the Tate Modern, there’s a room devoted to the canvases that Mark Rothko was commissioned to paint for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram’s building.
When I entered the room, warmth and ease flooded my body. I was peering into Rothko’s soul, yet at the same time was witnessing the universal soul. I saw Rothko’s deepest desires and hopes and at the same time I felt the universe in its entirety. The world in all of its messiness, misery, beauty and hope made sense to me for the hour I looked at the canvases.
My deepest hope is that my art will one day bring about an experience like this to someone. I want my work to make visible our energetic and spiritual nature.
I’m setting myself up for some frustration.
I have been feeling a strange combination of inspiration and frustration the last couple of weeks. Here are some of the pieces I’ve made over the past few days.
I’ve been working with dark backgrounds:
I’ve been working with an alizarin crimson -like background. Here’s one of the first tests I did.
I feel the figurative work isn’t working with this color. I thought that this color might work with a more abstracted picture. So I made the piece below. I don’t know what I think yet. I’m drawn to it. But at the same time I’m concerned there is not enough to it. It may look a little airbrushed.
I’ve been continuing to work on the lighter background pieces also:
I’m also working on these sequence prints:
And I finished this print the other day:
This is one of my most successful pieces. There’s a good balance of detail with soft, abstracted, shapes. I tried doing an encaustic version of this piece but wasn’t happy with it. There’s a tradeoff with the encaustic. If I want depth and luminosity, the encaustic is the medium to go with usually. But the encaustic usually loses some of the detail of the pieces. Conversely, the prints don’t glow quite like the encaustic, but they certainly keep the detail in a good way.
I’ve been having a difficult time blogging recently. I have nothing to say. I’ve been immersed in my art. And I’ve been wanting to post some of the work I am doing. But by the time I’ve photographed the work and written about it I have made another five or ten pieces. The way my mind works is that I think my newest work is the work worth writing about. There are much worse problems to have.