Getting started again....

Late November, after my trip to Holland and before the busy season in our business would hit, I started a group of paintings with a landscape theme. It had been unusually warm, or balmy as the American expression is, with a hazy kind of light, the color of the grass a tender almost springlike green while the tall grasses were dry and pale and the trees already bare. I wanted to catch some of that haziness in a combination of the pale-end of season- colors.
Then I got interrupted by the Xmas season, a trip to New York (to see Brice Marden's work), another trip to Chicago and here I find myself again trying to pick up the mood of the paintings at the moment I left them. Not easy!

On top you see the paintings, the one on the left was the furthest, but when I started working on it again I was not happy with the proportions of the color fields at all. Somehow the brown field towards the bottom of the painting bothered me.The paint just did not sit right there, not natural. Reworking it I went through all the familiar phases : Yes, this is much better - Now I should change this a little - Hmm, not sure if I like this at all. By the end of the day I got out my rag and washed away all that I'd done, caught my large tube of underpainting white and covered all that still was bothering me and went home unsatisfied.
The next day I changed the proportions, added more 'sky', let down the fields toward the bottom of the painting - it feels a lot better now.
Years ago I would have had great trouble doing this but over the last decade I discovered that 'fearless painting' does the trick. I used to be very careful with paintings that did not totally work, especially when people had made remarks like: 'but that is such a beautiful part' and I'd try to preserve that part and only rework some other parts. Wrong! It always ended up being an awkward painting with some beautiful parts. Somehow over the last years I managed to let go of that cautiousness, now I just turn the painting upside down, cover parts with underpainting white and continue, it always ends up being better as it was before.
It does need some re-stretching to get rid off the pleats in the corners.

The art of story telling

While in Chicago for business reasons we visited the Art Institute to see the show The Silk Road. This show is mainly a tour through the museum, highlighting pieces from the permanent collection that have a connection to the Silk Road - a wonderful way to take a closer look at some of the departments of the museum we sometimes skip in order to see the show of the moment.

Leaving the museum a brochure about upcoming concerts caught our eye with the announcement of a concert the next morning by the Yo Yo Mah Ensemble. It sounded exciting enough to return the next morning by 10 am. The concerts would take place throughout the galleries of the museum, not just in one place and it turned out that there would be story telling too. We started out with a small group at the starting point of the exhibition, the narrator was joined by two percussionists and started with a centuries old Chinese story about how silk was discovered. Now this was story telling at it's best, it took us back to the long gone days of childhood fairytale telling where you would sit speechlessly entranced in the story, following the voice of the narrator through magical landscapes and adventures.
The morning developed with several performances and very diverse and wonderful music, there were a Japanese and Persian flute player together with a Persian Shanu player who played in an almost dark gallery where all artefacts of a Japanese interior were displayed, they improvised and you really felt like you were inside a Japanese house. Musicians talked in an informal way with the ever growing group of people following them from room to room, while the ensemble grew to a group of ten with violins, a double bass and more percussionists performing music that varied from old folk music to modern classics.
The (world famous) story teller performed two more times capturing both young and old with his performance. Experiences like that make you realise how much is getting lost in an age of technology where hardly anybody takes the time to tell a good story anymore. Just like when I was a child, his words evoked pictures in my mind, pictures that are way more special as any movie can show me because they are mine and mine alone. Probably this is where my painting started, to paint the pictures that my mind made inspired by words...