I wanted to revisit Cascade and attain more of the energy of the falling water, its noise and chaos. Less description and more emotion. Explanation is the enemy of Feeling.
Wednesday’s second layer (end of the day so I stopped here)
This is Yesterday’s work more personal than Cascade…I already want to start an even more intimate piece on a larger scale 54 × 45 is next
Cascade 48 x 36 inches
Cascade — and What Comes Next
Cascade, 48 × 36 inches, is finished. Enclosed, intimate, the rocks holding the water like a channel carved over centuries. Intimate without being quiet.
But finishing a painting starts a question. Here: what does the water want to say that I haven't let it say?
Chaos. Noise. Force.
The next one pushes harder — hotter palette, darker rocks, the surrounding world compressed so the water has somewhere to explode into. And before that one is even resolved, I already feel the pull toward another. More compression. More silence in the stones so the release can be louder.
This is how a series starts. Not with a plan. With an appetite the last painting created.
Untitled 36 x 54 inches
The foreground pulls hard. The mountain holds firm. And between them, the subject — barn, fence line, a ghost of a village in cool lavender — dissolves back into the land it came from.
Same value. Same temperature. A geometry that feels almost too deliberate to be natural.
The painting asks you to finish the sentence. What you find there is yours.
48 x 36 (The Eye Wants to Travel) working title
This painting tries to deny it — holding the farmhouse cool and quiet so the eye keeps moving toward that hill. Cadmium Orange Pure, glazed with Alizarin Crimson. It doesn't reflect light. It holds it.
The next one I'll push harder.
So this is all yesterdays work, Not every day is this productive. I will get in again tomorrow and while these peices continue to dry and take the time to come up with a few slight alterations to the last painting (I think I will try a bluer roof to the house and the base of the trees to see if that sets the orange hill even stronger.
The turn of the river 36 x 54 inches
Work in Progress
The road's perspective needs to commit. The trunks need to own the ground before they earn their branches. And the willows at the water's edge need to stop decorating and start directing.
The bones are there. Now it's about discipline.
33 x 66 inches
One Corner
The more I sit with this one, the clearer it becomes.
One corner of that structure — white against the golden hill, light catching the edge — that's the painting. Everything else exists to deliver you there and hold you when you arrive.
Sometimes the solution is surrender.