Today’s layer settled the color argument: warm hillside, cool water, one ember at the shoreline. The structure isn’t there yet. The spiral needs a stronger first move, back and to the right along the far shore, before it can sweep the pink slope, drop down the trunks into the reflection, and begin again. The descent works. The departure doesn’t. That’s next.
The layer is down and the structure is set. The next move is light: a sun behind the far row of trees, throwing a reflected path back toward the viewer. From there the eye goes back and right, then across to the silhouetted trunks, then down into the warm reflections. The sky will have to give up some of its brightness so the sun can have it.
— Braitman
The left side is resolved. The right side isn’t yet. The foliage there is still a scatter of strokes, not a structure. It needs one more layer: a more solid mass built with greens, olives and magenta, so the right bank carries as much weight as the left and the blue has something firm to run between.
Both of this week’s paintings are in the same place, one layer from finished.
— Braitman
The top half is working. The foreground isn’t finished. The water and grasses need one more layer, with more density in the grass and more light in the water, so the bottom carries the same charge as the marsh above and the whole thing shines.
Like its companion from this week, it’s one layer from done.
— Braitman
This week’s cold wax workshop produced this one.
A slab of weathered rust set high in a gray field. The left side is one broad combed surface, quiet on purpose. The right side carries the incident: circles, a gray window, scattered teal, a single note of saturated blue. A diagonal runs from that blue down into the red at the base. The edges erode, protrude and patch, so the block never settles into a rectangle.
The plainness on the left is what lets the right side read as event.
The vision behind it is more than thirty years old. In 1995 I was showing non-representational work in Santa Fe, and what I saw there has stayed with me: surfaces that were built and then excavated, closer to adobe and oxidized metal than to paint. Cold wax finally gave me a way back in. I love this piece, old vision and all.
— Braitman
33 x 66. A channel opening toward low light, with the reeds burning on the right and open water on the left. The boat is the one cool, solid shape in all that orange; the eye lands there first. From there, the dock rail carries it back along the channel to the light, the reflection brings it forward, and the blue flecks in the shallows return it to the reeds. Quiet on one side, dense on the other: the format gives each its room.