I'm listening to talks. Lots of them. Absorbing. Nothing wrong with the input but my brain is so, so foggy, and blank. Still, I'm trusting the work is being done even when I can't wrap words around it. No articulation of a framework or a method possible other than feeling.
I painted a little today, I was frustrated with my gessoed panel. Frustrated with the blank white spaces at the edge of the painting, annoyed with priming substrates and beginning with the lightest values first.
As I was painting (or being annoyed about painting, rather), I was thinking about the fear of saturating the substrate with pigment, the fear of starting with dark values and the way they resist undoing, what it means to fill the tooth of a page, to sink or sag a substrate
I like working with cotton - watercolour paper - because of what it can or cannot bear. So much of what I have been taught, again, is to stretch taut to resist the warping of the paper. But what if I am interested in the warp and what the cotton can bear or not bear?
I tried to translate some of the ink-work I have been doing to a more solid substrate (birch panel) but it was not satisfying or revelatory. The image is flattened, the pigment floats on top of the gesso. This too is a way of putting pressure on the method itself!
Why do I keep telling myself that the art is supposed to inform my writing instead of being my primary mode of thinking through just in and of itself? (Letting go of one's training is hard)
A beautiful thing: the way the gold pigment settled at the bottom of my dirty water cup. How it looks like a little universe when it is stirred up again.
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