finished two

I am very excited about these two—-they are finished in time to include in Shain Gallery’s show for me at the end of the month.

Image 1 — Savage Trees — White

• Flat red-and-white bands as a color-field backdrop for the trunk screen

• Near-black foreground trunk anchors the piece

• Cool mint/blue reflection breaks up the warm palette

Image 2 — Wabi—Sabi Watershed

• Warm, late-day glow through birch trunks

• Turquoise pooling in the stream echoes the cool-note device from Image 1

• Loose, varied brushwork in the central trunks and understory

Image 3 — Stream Waterfall

• Stacked block forms read like river rock or ice catching low light

• Loose black and coral drip work is the most alive passage

• Small yellow sliver at top pulls the eye up out of the rock cluster

• Early-to-mid stage: structure's there, edges and one more color event still to resolve

Image 4 — Yellow marsh with tree reflections

• Strong value anchor: near-black tree clusters against gold field

• Hard-edged reflection broken by a soft coral-pink passage

• Purple accent in the upper cluster keeps the palette from reading too literal

• Quiet, open foreground water as a deliberate rest area

54 x 54 inches. Wabi Sabi Watershed

54 x45 inches. Savage White Tree

I mananged another coat on these two pieces too.

Wednesday 9/9/2026

I have had a busy day today—getting ready for next workshop, ordering 50 canvases and gessoing 1st coat, picking up folder for workshop from fedex, working on my big 54 square redux of Catch and Release below.

54 × 54 inches, Wabi-Sabi Catch and Release

Final day punch list

• Sky → right trunks: Bleed a cool sky sliver down along the closest birch/rock edge — stitches top to bottom, stops that column reading as separate backdrop

• Gold sky → water: Bounce warm yellow-gold into the upper stream, tapering as it comes forward — makes the water feel lit, not just pale/cool

• Extend the sky-colored trunk: Keep it slightly warmer or higher-key than the water so it stays a distinct vertical anchor and doesn't merge with the lightest water passages

• Sharpen center black/white: Place the contrast on the existing diagonal (upper-left dark trunks → dark marks in water → lower-right), not dead-center — should be a stop along the eye's path, not a stall

Wednesday 9/2/26

Another wonderful workshop day…. I also managed another layer on 3 pieces.

TUESDAY 9/1/26

Today was the first day of a build a landscape workshop. Everyone did such a good job today. I was also able to start 2 new pcs and finished a third.

CONFLUENCE II, 40 X 30 inches

This is a classic Violet, Blue, Green palette with a touch of the middle color’s complement.

33 x 66 inches, DOCKSIDE

48 X 36, OAK CREEK FALLS

MONDAY MONDAY

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

CONFLUENCE III. 40 x 30 inches.

At last this is finished. It is a bit too balanced on the explanation side of things, but it is finished.

I am one good day away for finishing this beautiful low country version of STILLNESS. 36 X 54 inches. It already sparkles. It is the pearlescent and opalesque shimmering I am going after and
the warmth and description in the grasses on the right is just a pure bonus.

Day 2 on WHITE SAVAGE, I have tentitively established the structure of this 54 x 45 painting.

New Paintings still in the works

I had a great week of painting and want to share all

54 x 45 inches, White Savage

this is just the 2nd Layer and I want to keep this open and exciting. Working on the small work recently has gotten me very tight and explanation heavy. I really want to keep this piece more about feelings. That is why I have returned to a familiar theme in the Savage Reservoir Tree series.

40 x 30 Confluence I

Confluence II, 40 x 30

Monday in August....hot, hot, hot

I had a very productive day….maybe 1/3 with business and intenet and bills and 2/3 painting. I met with a client for a commission and worked on three studies as well as one mid-sized painting. These are both 36 x 18 inch studies for a larger 2 to 4 ratio paintings. I have another pair and hope to post there progress tomorrow.

36. x 54 inch Stillness redux on the horizontal

my next layer will create a strong sequence, and it solves the transition problem from between the sky and the grasses by working both ends at once — pulling the sky down softens the top edge of the grass mass, while the teal-to-magenta-to-orange layering inside the grasses builds the same temperature journey internally, so the eye gets that shift twice, at different scales. That kind of nested repetition is usually what makes a passage feel inevitable rather than designed.

The alizarin glaze over cad orange is the move I'd be most excited to see. Cad orange is already about as saturated and opaque as you can get straight from the tube — glazing a transparent red like alizarin over it won't just deepen the hue, it'll give you that internal glow because light is passing through the crimson layer and bouncing back off the opaque orange underneath rather than just sitting on the surface. That's real luminosity, not just darker orange. It should read as combustion rather than pigment, especially with the water underneath already carrying quieter echoes of that same red.

Given the magenta is going in as a middle layer between teal and orange, I am thinking of it as a thin glaze too, or laying it in more opaque so it holds its own weight in the grass structure before the crimson glaze goes on top? I will just have to see what happens.

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.

post beach week post

study I 36 x 18 inch for a 48 X 24 final

study II. 36 x 18 for a 24 x 48 final

august 10

study I 36 x 18 inch for a 48 X 24 final

study II 36 x 18 inch for a 48 X 24 final

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