- A photo of the full sheet of Bristol with this picture as it stands today. You can see how much of the sheet is painted and how much remains to be filled in.
- A photo of the picture itself, minus the extraneous stuff in the previous picture.
- A photo of how the picture would look matted if I matted it to cover all the unpainted areas. (It would be about 10 X 13 inches if I matted it this way and went no further with the picture.)
I have to say that I'm pretty conflicted about this thing. As mentioned in another post, I kind of like looking at it with the perimeter unfinished, mainly because the forms along the outside really tend to jump out against the white area of the sheet.
But that bottom photo tells me I'm going to probably have to continue all the way out to the margins on the sheet. Some of the forms really emerge beautifully when you have to focus more on the interior of the picture.
Now, I will make myself appear an insufferable braggart or someone possessed of a delusional ego: This picture is, to me, remarkable. I don't mean "remarkable" from an art criticism standpoint. I mean: It has things in it that make me sit and stare and wonder ... much of this picture is truly the product of going "off-leash." There are forms in this thing that I have literally been unable to reproduce, even as I sat there with the original a couple feet from me. The solidity, the volume, the heft, the tangible aspects..... these are what I search for and only occasionally find.
The Pinwheel cascade picture I posted a while back is one that has similar aspects. There are forms in it that truly make me kind of happy. This new picture is one where I've grown familiar with many of the forms in it, and I find myself searching for them, knowing they're there but still having to look around and remember when they emerged. Particularly in the bottom half of this picture I inevitably gravitate to some of the forms. Maybe I'll do some photos of a few of the forms, isolated to illustrate what I mean.
At any rate, I'm hard at it with this picture. If the stars and planets align, I'll finish it this week. Maybe I'll hold off posting any further updates until then.
[November 6 edit: Once again I found myself staring at photos of this picture, rather than at the picture itself, despite it sitting not six feet from me. I've never understood why I do that. Partly it might be because when I'm looking at an unfinished picture I focus more on the areas where the picture will resume, but when I look at photos of the same picture I evaluate it as if it was a complete picture. This seems to happen more commonly with pictures that aren't done, but there are pictures I have hanging on my walls or in albums that I prefer seeing in photographs, and that's something I can't explain. The Pinwheel cascade picture is a good example of that. It might have something to do with my eyesight, because I can more clearly see the details in a photo blown up on my monitor than I can in the actual picture from several feet away. I wear reading glasses when painting, and as a result I can only look at finished pictures while wearing glasses, which means having to stand very close to the picture. Sorry to bore you with this postscript.... I think what motivated me to add this was that I noticed how the cropped photo of this in-progress picture really makes the forms more dimensional.]
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