05 Dec sketching American Marriage
Pale cold day….very pale blue-green sky covered in burnt rose clouds with violet bellies. Shuttled Gregg around before and after his LASIK surgery in Florence, MA, which I found very scary, and I suppose it will be a while before we can really judge the success. I am not sure I could handle such a procedure done on my eyes. I began to cry when I picked Gregg up, as I found him isolated in a dimly-lit recovery stall, wearing plastic perforated goggles with two diagonal strips of scotch tape attaching them to his face. He said the operation made him feel like he was in outer space because they put these suction cups around your eyeballs so they don’t move…his vision went blurry when they cut his corneal flap. It all sounds so frightening…!
Worked on a second compositional sketch to hammer out my theme for the “American Marriage” painting, for Art of Action. The Halifax center church is featured, and highly contrasted behind a black silhouetted logging truck. Set against the truck in the foreground are two muscular young men operating a wood splitter and severing a large log. In the middle ground are two naked women embracing on a blue tarp outside the entrance of the church, a strong horizontal diagonal points towards their kiss, a cylindrical pipe as part of the splitter.
Setting aside the specific socio-political narrative intended for this piece, I must first construct a set of formal relationships that not only appeal to me but which I understand intimately. It gave me great pleasure to strive to lock together all of these beefy shadow masses. For instance, the belltower/church spire, the logging truck, and the accents used to articulate the sensuous figures.
It is hard to believe I am attempting to orchestrate figures in a real space…the question remains can I pull it off with paint.