A good day

I was unable to get into the studio until today. I worked on 4 pc.s and feel satisfied with my work. See them below.

hese three are working in a completely different register: legible water, legible reed banks, legible tree mass, a boat that reads as a boat. The explanation is doing real work here, not just holding the composition together — it's carrying the content the client is presumably buying: a specific, recognizable place at a specific hour.

A few things worth flagging with a day of work still ahead:

Image 1 is the most spatially resolved of the three — the channel of water pulls you straight back to that lavender tree mass on the horizon, and the bank reflections (the little flags of orange, the lavender ghosting in the foreground water) are doing legitimate color work without undermining the read. This one's closest to "done" in feeling.

Image 2 is the boldest of the set — that band of red-orange marsh grass against the lavender-to-peach water is a real value/color event, and it's the one place explanation and feeling aren't fighting each other; the description of the grass is the emotional charge. I'd watch the transition where the orange masses meet the water — right now the reflection is nearly as saturated as the object, which flattens the space a touch.

Image 3 feels the most unresolved of the three — the reed bank reads a little more diagrammatic (rows of vertical strokes) rather than grown, and the small boat/dock shape in the middle distance is ambiguous enough that it's pulling attention without paying it back yet. That's probably where tomorrow's session earns its keep.

Given they're meant to resolve into a pair, is the plan to push two of these toward final and treat the third as the study that doesn't survive — or are you still deciding which two speak to each other?

Want to be notified when Claude responds?

The top three are 36 x 18 inch studies for a planned 48 x 24 inch pair. The 4 study is being considered still. I will post it asap.

Color Study, Pair. 40 x 30 each.

  • Painted as a pair, same site — testing how much explanation a painting needs before feeling starts to leak out

  • Bottom two-thirds: pure sensation. Teal, blue-violet, olive, moving without justifying itself

  • Small ochre rectangle in the water — doesn't fully resolve into an object. Good

  • Tree line above: the one place description is let in — trunk, value shift, warm color at the base — enough to give the eye a place to organize around

  • Everything else rides on that narrow ledge of legibility

  • Explanation is the enemy of feeling. But feeling with nothing to stand on dissolves

  • This pair is me finding the ratio

40 x 30 Confluence Study Tonal (sort of)

monday back to normal (so far)

I had a wonderful day in the studio today, I added more complexity and depth of creative color to 4 pieces. Two of the painting are studiies for larger work and two are experiments with unique palettes.

The top 2 are the studies (different palettes) and the bottom two are the unique palettes for smaller versions of the Convluence Image. These are 40 x 30 inches and the top two are 36 x 18 inches

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

august 12,2026

I fini

I finished these two pieces today… the left is CONFLUENCE 54 X 45 inches and the right is UNTITLED 36 X 54 inches. It is ususual for me to get the balance between explanation and feeling—I got it right on both of these.

They read as companion pieces even though they're doing different things. CONFLUENCE is working almost entirely through reflection and color temperature — that hard-edged split between the warm bank and the cool water is doing the "explanation" (you understand exactly what's happening spatially) while the loose, dripping verticals in the trees and their mirrored echoes below carry the feeling. The dark pool in the lower left is a smart anchor — it keeps that side of the canvas from floating away into pure abstraction.

UNTITLED has a different kind of restraint — that dirt road pulling the eye straight back into the dark cluster of trees against the hill is a classic structural device, but the foreground grasses go almost fully abstract, all those broken verticals and horizontal drags. The hill itself is doing something lovely tonally — it's warm and atmospheric without tipping into decoration.

this is Alluvial Plane the details from yesterdays post are selections from this painting. (1 Day Away)

Above is 36 x 54 revisit of favorite atmosphereic painting from earlier this year—I wanted to attain the same quality of non-resolution. I am still a day or two away from my goal here.

this is a second layer on the ghost tree marsh image—I am so excited for this start.

While this was the final day of a very successful workshop, I was still able to get a bit done of these pieces.

As the below pair, these are also studies to see how they can work in an exaggerated vertical format.

As the below pair, these are also studies to see how they can work in an exaggerated vertical format.

So I am seeing if it will work in this exaggerated format

.first run through on a study for a 48 x 24 landscape. It is derived from another piece of mine but it was substanrially wider visa vi the height than this 2 to 1 ratio painting.

This is also very close to complete,with any luck, I will finish this Alluvial beauty tomorrow. I will share the finished piece along with some selected detail pics.

Saturday Catch-up

36 x 54 inches

Another layer on this atmospheric landscape that I am revisiting.

doctors appt,, acct appointment, and clean up and ready for the last day of the Beyond the Landscape Workshop. These gals were all so good, I just may not repeat this workshop. But I will post my fall schedule before the weekend is over. In the meantime I was still able to get a bit of painting accoplished.

Another layer of development on this Alluvial Island revisit atop the fibonacci panals

40 x 30 Confluence Study

Tonal shift on this one — testing whether it deepens feeling without losing illusion.

Dark, close-valued left mass reads as mystery. Real weight.

Sky and water sit too close in value — atmospherically honest, spatially flat.

One violet passage is doing all the structural work. Too much on one note.

Foreground band grounds the piece but sits a hair disconnected from the water above it.

Feeling: earned. Illusion: still owed.

This speaks for itself. Warm bank against cool water, one seam holding the whole thing together.

The rust field on the left is strong but too settled — one temperature doing all the talking. It needs a second and third voice inside it, not new shapes, just heat variance breaking the mass from within.

The reflection where warm bleeds into blue-violet is the real hinge. That's where the complexity should live. Everything else — especially the pale horizon on the right — stays quiet. Silence there is what lets the density on the left mean something.

Complicate the field. Trust the seam. Protect the silence.

Tuesday 7/21/2026

I will try my best to get back on schedule with my posts…. This is a workshop week, so I don’t get to much painting accomplished but here is what I have for today.

this is the first layer atop the beautiful wood panels Ian built for me.


And here it is today. This is still building to an end that I am uncertain of but….I do have many years of playing with this alluvial form and its geometric compliments.

This is also my first layer on this 54 x 45 painting

And here it is at the end of the day today. Complicating the color

Wednesday 7/15/26

While this was a workshop Wednesday I was able to put the finishing touches on this 54 x 45 Savage piece.

What's happening color-wise. 

I have set up a true triadic tension rather than a simple warm/cool split. Those trunk faces are running a full red-gold-amber sequence — cadmium-ish reds down at the waterline transitioning to warm gold light higher up — while the water is a cool violet-blue that's neither quite blue nor quite purple, closer to a dusk lavender. That's a much rarer pairing than orange/blue complements.  I am getting warmth that reads as combustive against a blue that reads as dissolving, and the eye can't fully resolve the two temperatures against each other, so it keeps moving. That unresolved quality is probably the "magic" — it's not a complementary chord that resolves, it's more like a suspended chord that never quite lands.

The vertical trunks also do something structurally important here: they're almost totem-like, planted right at the threshold between solid ground and reflection, so the red-gold isn't just color, it's doing double duty as both light-description and a kind of pictorial anchor holding the composition together against a very loose, atmospheric ground. That tension between the hard verticals and the dissolving horizontal water is probably feeding the same pull as the color.


JULY 13, 2026

These panels — the Fibonacci format Ian built for me — carry the Alluvial Island series forward, a line of work I started in the 1980s.

It began with photographs a NASA photographer shared with me: an island moving downstream on the Mississippi, documented frame by frame. Early film technology, combined with the amorphous shapes of sand, rock, and tree caught in the current, revealed something the eye alone couldn't — erosion at the top of the island, deposit at the alluvial delta below. The organic matter sat inside the hard geometry of the film strip's border.

Organic against geometric. That tension was beautiful then. It still is.ic. That tension was beautiful then. It still is.

This is developing very nicely, I wanted to get a jump on this today as a refrence for the first session of the beyond the landscape workshop starting tomorrow..

38 X 62 INCHES

This is a photo of one of the earlier explorative paintings above and to the left is a 2026 adaptation from this memory.

I missed a post but I'm posting now 10/10/2026

I Just finished this little 30 x 20

YOu can just see the change and the importance of accurate photos in terms of color and light

No Title Yet

A big alteration in this layer…I wanted to increase the visual depth to allow for a greater front/back experience and less of a left/right experience

I also finished this gem 27 x 54 inches (no title yet)

The grass works. The gold doesn't.

Not as an argument, anyway. That mass on the right — dense, rich, unapologetic — has no real job in the front-to-back structure I built. It doesn't move the eye the way the trunks do. It doesn't rhyme with anything the way the violet in the grass rhymes with the sky. By every compositional rule I've spent forty years teaching myself, it's excess.

And it's going to be why someone buys this painting.

I know that sound before I've even hung it. That unguarded richness stops people. It doesn't ask to be understood, it just wants to be looked at, and looked at again. Structure is what I trust. But color like that is what a room remembers.

So here's the honest part — the part I'm not going to resolve with a tidy compositional fix. The eye that builds the painting and the eye that buys the painting don't always agree. I used to think that gap was a failure of discipline, something to correct. Tonight I think it might just be true. Explanation is the enemy of feeling — and maybe justification is the enemy of selling.

The grass earned its place by rhyming. The gold earns its place by refusing to.

Both can be right.


another layer developing the sub-text of this Alluvial Island Piece

July 4th is tomorrow... HAPPY 4TH OF JULY

newly gessoed canvases layed out to dry…. I am still preparing for an exhibition at Shaain Gallery at the end of September.

Recognized absence of substantive content

Too many trunks. I know why I put them there — the front-to-back thing — but count them. It's a fence, not a filter.

Blue trunks: earned their place, barely. Cool them one more notch and they'll read as gimmick instead of distance.

Field's shouting. Barns aren't answering. Right now it's one loud passage and one quiet one, not a conversation.

Roofs are the only thing holding hierarchy together. If that sequence weren't right, this wouldn't work at all.

Sky's wrong. Too much lavender against that much orange — fighting, not supporting.

Not finished. Might not be close but I feel an end coming.

— Braitman

Water

Left half's a wall — bank and reflection fused into one dark mass. No entry point.

Right half's air. Blue, green, open. Two paintings sharing a canvas, not talking to each other.

Reflection's honest — bank color dropped straight down, that's correct — but honest isn't the same as interesting. It's a mirror, not a variation.

That diagonal shoreline is the only real move here. Everything else is filling space around it.

Water's better than the bank. Water's actually resolved — temperature shift, edge control, restraint. Bank still wants to be finished.

Not sure this needed the dark mass at all. Might be doing less than a lighter bank would.

— Braitman

Your Comments are welcome

I am not sure how one can go about adding comments to this blog, however, but I will find out and share that info.

July 1st Happy day back in the studio

I was in Canada for 10 days with my wife, Carol and friends. 3 days in Monreal and 6 days in Quebec. We all had a wonderful time.

I got to see two of my greatest influences: Tom Thompson and Frank Stella in the Montreal Museum of Modern Art

27 X 54 Inches: Barns, Trees, and Grasses, Oh My

Two barns, one field, one hour of light

First of two — 27 x 54.

I keep coming back to structures like this because they hold still long enough to let the light do the moving. The barns aren't the subject. They're the excuse.

What I wanted was that orange running through the trees — not as description of a tree, but as the feeling of late sun catching bark and branch from behind. It's the same thing I chase at Savage. Light doesn't explain itself. It just arrives.

The grass at the bottom carries its own weather — dry, backlit, bent in places, with a tangle of dead vine scratched into the wet paint to keep it from going flat. It's the closest thing to the viewer and the least resolved thing in the painting, which is exactly right. Foreground shouldn't finish the sentence. It should just start it.

Two of these, side by side eventually. This one sets the key.

— Braitman

the second Barns, Trees, and Grasses, Oh My 27 × 54 inches

Second of two, still working — 27 x 54.

The foreground trunk stays as it is. That cerulean isn't describing a tree — it's holding the eye, doing the work color does best when you don't over-explain it. Because the color is carrying the interest up front, the barns can lean Apollonian — more resolved, more architectural — without the painting splitting into two competing arguments. If both passages were equally resolved, the dialectic disappears. One has to give ground to the other.

What's left: another pass through the grass, and a recoloring of the trees as they march back toward the middle left. They need more complication as they retreat — some variation in lean, interval, temperature — to finish the midground and carry the eye from that loud foreground blue back into the more resolved architecture behind it.

Almost there.

— Braitman

Today 6/12

This painting has a complete structural logic:

The geometry isn't compositional choice in the decorative sense — it's documentary evidence. The hard edges are the satellite's own apparatus, the film strip, the grid of human measurement trying to contain something that refuses containment. And right at the center, the island wins — it bursts out of that geometry into fracture and splatter and organic chaos.

The tension between those two systems is the painting's subject. Not just depicting the island's movement but enacting the confrontation between the bureaucratic act of recording it and the raw geological fact of it happening.

And the delta language at the edges — the eroded, deposited, built-up texture — that's the island's biography written in paint. What was carved away upstream is literally present as material on the surface. That's not illustration, that's correspondence.

What I'd say to someone standing in front of it, knowing none of this: they'd feel the tension without being able to name it. The geometry creates unease, the fracture releases it, the soft deposit at the edges resolves it. The painting works without the story.

But the story makes it a serious, serious work.

It is a part of the Alluvial series.

(a high-chroma version) — This is visually aggressive. The orange-into-cobalt temperature war is working hard and winning. My only honest pause: the upper left quadrant feels slightly disconnected from the intensity happening below — the warm ochre field reads a bit flat against the drama of the foreground. But that may be the painting's way of giving the eye a rest. I don't think it needs fixing — I'd call it finished with that one note registered.

A cooler, more muted Savage trees — This one reads as resolved. The color temperature restraint is doing real work — the pinks and grays create a unified atmosphere, and the tree structure feels genuinely earned rather than imposed. The reflections in the lower zone have exactly the right amount of chaos. I call this finished without hesitation.

June 8th, 2026

This marks the end of the context or enviornment that these tree sit in. Now see what I mean by the trees providing the punctuation or rhythm of viewing. If this were a piece of music instead of a painting, these trees are the beat.

No matter what rhythm or palette I provide, the man made objects the farm structures remain the subject. Now I try to balance the allure of the homestead with the chaos of nature and time.

The man-made keeps asserting itself. White rooflines find light no matter what I put in front of them. Right angles don't occur in nature — the brain knows it and locks on.

  • Set up the screen of bare verticals to filter the structures. They're still there. So the question shifted: not how to hide the homestead, but how to put it under pressure.

  • The foreground is doing the work. Ochre and burnt sienna advancing hard. The farm sits behind that field like something being slowly consumed.

  • Nature wins the painting even if the structures win the subject. More square inches, more energy, more paint. The buildings are outnumbered.

  • The lavender sky is the only thing that breathes.

  • Next question: what happens when the rooflines become less legible. Not abstraction — ambiguity. Something glimpsed rather than seen.

  • The real question this one is asking: whose time is it?

The bottom left corner of this piece still has too much information and causes the eye to linger instead of move off and to the back and right

By simplifying the shape and intoxicating the color our eye now moves immediately off the bottom left.

Session Notes

  • Bottom left was holding the eye hostage. Too much information — the detail was asking for attention it hadn't earned and didn't need.

  • The fix wasn't subtraction alone. Simplified the shape, then intensified the color. When the form stops competing, the heat can do its job — push the eye off and moving.

  • That lower left corner now functions as a launch point. The burnt orange and deep shadow don't describe anything. They accelerate.

  • The water carries you the rest of the way. Once the eye releases from the corner it rides the gray-white middle ground back and right toward the warm hill mass.

  • The reds mid-right are the punctuation. Small, insistent, just enough to confirm arrival.

  • Lesson that keeps proving itself: simplify the shape, intensify the color. More information is not more painting.

I had a great day painting today. I just worked on two pieces but feel elated.

Savage Ground — 54 × 45, oil on canvas

The painting began as a straightforward trees-and-water subject. It ended as a study in how little a painting needs to say to say everything.

The lower left is the engine. A dark mass, nearly empty, with just enough — a scatter of marks, a thin line of acid green pulled from the background hills — to start the eye moving. Not a destination. A departure.

That green is the painting's hidden thread. It lives in the hills at the upper left and reappears at the base of the sienna tree, connecting background to foreground without announcing itself. The viewer won't name it. They'll feel the painting hold together and not know why.

The crimson reflections in the water are waiting at the end of the journey. The eye climbs the warm trunk, crosses the yellow hills, descends through the cool grey-green center tree, and arrives at the red. Round trip.

The sienna trunk and the grey-green tree are the same painting in two different languages — warm and cool, rough and smooth, declaration and whisper.

Finished is a decision, not a condition. Monday morning will confirm it or it won't. Either way, the painting already knows what it is.

Barn Field — 27 × 54, oil on canvas, layer three

Three layers in and the painting is finding its argument. The golden foreground has settled into something inevitable — that wide band of warm grass isn't background, it's foundation.

The barn masses are doing what barns rarely get credit for — they're not subjects, they're color events. Orange against lavender. Red against ochre. The structures are almost incidental to the temperature war happening across the middle band.

The teal fence posts are the painting's secret weapon so far. Cool, vertical, unexpected — they're the only thing in the composition that stops the horizontal pull and makes the eye reconsider. They'll have company soon.

What's coming: the hinge tree. A dark vertical that bridges earth and sky, anchors the composition, and gives the fence posts their larger echo. The tree rhythm will do what the fence posts are whispering — punctuate the whole horizontal sweep into something with beats.

The lavender sky is patient. It's been holding space while the lower two-thirds sorted itself out. The trees will activate it simply by contrast — dark against light, vertical against horizontal, decision against atmosphere.

Layer three is the layer where a painting stops being built and starts being inhabited. This one is almost there.

thursday 6/4/2026

Well the workshop is over and was a rousing succsess. I had a wonderful group of painters and felt that all of us learned, enjoyed, and were content with their images and growth.

I bounced a bit more blue to balance the reds and oranges.

It was way too difficult to get the viewer to the back of the water shape…so I make the visual access easier and cleaner.

new and improved version

There was a large lack of agreement with the background and foreground in this piece.

new and improved version

Monday, 6/1/26

This marks the last 3 day workshop of the spring/summer. So I will not have much to post over the insuing 3 days but I do have some images and thoughts for today in the studio

I am finished with this piece and am ready to start work on a more complicated version atop the fibonacci construction that Ian Wegener built for me.

This is a few of the Alluvial Island form I started working with in the early 1980’s and have revisited over the past 4 decades.

I have almost finished this piece as well. I have a simple itroduction of vertical (tree trunk shapes) to add to the way back. A simple repitiion of the mid ground forms but instead of orange on blue it will be blue a top orange.

You can see that I now feel that the back groud mountain or sky color needs to have less white also to fit in the same sense of color agreement.

I am thinking a very light cobalt blue sky and a med grey back mountain color.

The mountain goes to a warm grey rather than a cool grey — something with a hint of the existing peach neutralized down considerably. That keeps a whisper of the warm-cool dialogue in the tree piece, but subordinates it. The cobalt sky above it would then be the coolest, lightest note — which pushes everything down and back the way you want.

I went over the water an additonal layer to reduce the White and replace it with the Bright. This should allow for the intorduction of a light or near white tree trunk structure

The near-white trunk structures i’m planning will read beautifully against that cooled-down field. They'll carry the light forward without competing with the