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