This is my second week of running for an hour three days a week. This sounds like a really long time to run without stopping to me, but it doesn't usually seem that long while I'm doing it. I'm still slow, but I am surprisingly persistent.

That persistence has been useful to draw upon with my painting lately. I'm moving along, slowly, even though the Transcend series looks like a bunch of linoleum tiles right now and my other painting is just big and scary. Sometimes in the past I have kept on with projects, but other times I have just stopped. What seems different now is that I'm not listening to the chatter in my brain quite so much. Or rather, I hear it but I'm not paying much attention to it. Most paintings go through phases when they don't seem quite right; at least, mine do. There are plenty of stages left to adjust and refine and finesse.

One of the things I always want to know in the books I have about painting is what is the artist thinking when she or he chooses elements of the painting? I particularly wonder about this with collages. The technique is usually clear, but I suppose it's my nature to wonder about the psychology and the decision-making process. So I'm going to include why I'm choosing what I do in the Transcend series.



I put a light smattering of white on the clear background to fade the collage a bit. It was too visible compared to the way I envision it for the end result. There isn't any particular reason for this choice other than to lessen the clarity of the original collaged headlines.



Next, I sponged some indigo paint over the surface, more or less randomly. Indigo is a color that has seemingly contradictory meanings to me. It's one of my favorite colors; it's the color of night, my favorite time, and is somehow comforting to me. Which is odd considering that for me it also represents the color of dark nights of the soul, when everything seems meaningless and hopeless. It seemed an appropriate color for this stage of the background-building process. I followed with a smattering of blood red, which represents pain to me.

This all seems rather dark and depressing so far, although I'm not feeling affected by the negative aspects. As the working title indicates, this series is all about overcoming. So it is necessary to identify what must be overcome. A change agent will say that the first step in the change process is to clearly and honestly identify the problem, to tell the truth about what is so. This early part of the paintings corresponds to that part of the process.

I'm planning to carve a stamp for the next stage. I am hopeful the approach I've started to transferring the image is going to work; if it doesn't I'll have to try a different technique.

I have started a new series of paintings. I haven't done a series in quite this way before, and have never documented the process, so it will be interesting to see how this goes. I've been following Robert Elrod's blog and have been inspired by the way he shares his work.


I'm using a working title of "Transcend" for this series of twelve small paintings. The painting size itself is 8"x8", to be mounted on 10"x10" mat. The frames, which I'll build, will fill out the visual border to probably 12"x12" or so.


I wanted to start the background with the feeling of the state of current affairs, so I did a collage of newspaper headlines glued on newsprint. Then I made color copies of this collage at the local office-away-from-home store. The ink on the copies needs to be waterproof (not from an inkjet printer/copier) for the next step. I wanted to start all the paintings with the same background. They could all go together as a set, or be separate paintings on their own. Either way, I wanted a common element. There may be more common elements as I go along. I'm only a few steps ahead in my mind as I plan the work.


The next step is to paint the surface of the color copies with a couple of thick layers of acrylic gel medium. I chose high solid gel for this stage because I didn't have any clear tar gel; both dry clear, but clear tar gel would have required only one layer. Since the high solid gel would take two layers, I painted on the first layer with a brush and let it dry for a day; I applied the second layer with a palette knife for texture, and let that dry over the weekend.

I've made a special worktable for my studio for this project so that I can work on the entire series at the same time. This precludes setting up my easel for the moment because I don't have any extra room unless I juggle some other projects around. I have another painting of an entirely different nature to work on right away; if I can get that set up I'll show a stage or two of it as well.