My favorite painting for the show

West Village Corner is a 50x50 cm oil on canvas, gallery stretcherbars.  What I like about this image is the movement of the guy and the stark contrast.  Like the Macchiaioli used.  What's that?   There is a lame article on wikipedia: Macchiaioli .  I used a palette-knife to scrape off different colored gobs of semi-dried paint from my palette, added them to smooth chunks of luxurious ivory black then liberally smeared the mess all over.  I love the 3D effect of the colored black background.

The count down

Only ten days work days until the show at the Parisian gallery Terre des Arts.   I just started another painting that will be the last before the show.  The last one I did this size took over 30 hours to finish.

I look forward to when they send the chauffeur to collect the 21 paintings so I can concentrate on flying to Florence and finishing the first draft manuscript that I've been working on for the last twenty years.  Less than a month ago I started once again from scratch and it is flowing.  Show not tell. Show not tell.  How can you tell what a painting is about.  You have to see it, show it.  It's the same thing, there's no gimmick.

Back to the easel.

Bogged down by faces

There is so little time to write before June 8.  My upcoming show is taking every breath.  After twenty years I've discovered how to piece my memoirs together and that is all I want to do.  It would be nice to be able to paint and write simultaneously.

The method is so simple that it made me laugh.  Scene by scene, every action or dialog does one of three things.  It builds character or setting or it advances the action.  Now I know the project will pan into a book, the ending is in sight and mind.

It's like making a painting.  Plotting then plodding. A painting must be like a short story and a series perhaps a novel.  Every series of twenty has two or three excellent after 24 years of grinding away at the easel.

Now I've stopped painting faces.

They were killing me. Architecture's replaced people.  It feels good to paint now, my mind free from the sad personalities of people Crossing Manhattan, that painting may go in the trash, cut into pieces.