In conjunction with the play A Weekend with Pablo Picasso, the San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild presents the juried exhibition Contemporary Expressionism: The Creative Spirit at Lyceum Gallery, San Diego, California.
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| The World Is Out There |
I had to write a description of this painting.
This painting is 18 x 24, oil on Ampersand Gessobord. I chose "old fashioned" pigments such as ultramarine blue, Venetian red, ivory black, terre vert, burnt Sienna and alizarin crimson along with Gamblin's Bright Gold (made with bronze flakes) for this painting because it is a painting of painting. I wanted the colors to be as close as possible to colors used to dye yarn used in medieval tapestries and for coloring illuminated manuscripts.
This painting turned out to be a journey into self and into painting. I had begun a painting for a friend on this board, but didn't like it, put the board away and did that painting as a water color. The black underpainting here, that looks like a chalkboard or an asphalt street (which is what it was originally meant to represent) is what remains of that picture. Then I saw a James Bond movie (!) in which Sean Connery walked very powerfully out of a door. That image rested in my mind for weeks, and I realized I wanted to paint it. Later, I saw a photo of this velvet sofa, and I wanted to paint it. I painted the sofa first. Through its many mutations, this painting seemed to be taking me somewhere to show me something. When I realized I was painting myself, I dressed "me" in my favorite dress EVER (owned in the seventies) and red "disco" heels. Then I knew I was painting the tension between the faded word "Stop" and this woman's determined exit. That is the creative spirit; movement, specifically this movement. A painting, before it is begun, still in the mind of the artist, is really unknown; it has not yet happened. It's that doorway leading to life’s tapestry of mystery, color, image and mind, waiting for the artist to have the courage to walk resolutely out the door.
