Today I was sick. I have laryngitis, so I don’t feel that bad, but I felt like I had to take it easy. I wanted to work on graphite drawings but didn’t want to inhale graphite. I wanted to try and push the oil paintings further but didn’t want to inhale fumes, so I got out my gouache and some large sheets Lenox paper. I cut them in half and went to print out some source material but the printer was out of ink. So I decided, hey I wanted to start making up my own maps so today must be the day. I used my usual methods for painting a background in the gouache. It’s my favorite part about working in gouache. I love spraying down the paper with water and dropping watery blobs of paint onto the surface to watch it to it’s magic. It’s so satisfying. Usually I just use this as sort of a background for a more representational drawing, but today I’m using it to make a terrain. Tomorrow I’ll start adding the mapping part.
That was a boring paragraph but whatever, The gyst of it is, sometimes you need a wrench thrown in the works to get you going on something else, and that in turn helps your other pieces.
Here’s the start of the new maps (on the floor) and dig how disastrously messy my studio is.
That got me thinking about Charles Burchfield and all my bee paintings and all my map paintings from before and how I keep using squiggly lines. In the bee paintings it was a way to make a painting of a photograph feel more like a distant source. The images I used for the beekeepers at least for that first part of the series were all images I gleaned from the internet. To me the squiggles can sometimes reference digital noise. So I thought, shit, I should try that with this one painting that I don’t like. And lo and behold, it worked. It’s really shiny right now so the photo is a bit wacky, but anyway, here’s what I worked on today.
And then I thought, Oh yeah, I’d talked about this, adding some element to the foggy tree paintings to reference the computer, like a mouse pointer or something. And I thought, well, I dig me some squiggles so let’s try it. It’s helping me make progress on another tough painting I was about to give up on. So we’ll see.
And then I tried to start another couple of small paintings with foggy tree imagery but I didn’t like how the trees were looking so I wiped down the canvas, and I liked that so I painted some more and wiped some more and pretty soon I had these sexy surfaces that reference the other foggy paintings without having any trees at all in them. Again, tough photos.
So, Today I touched 4 gouache drawings and four paintings. Unbelievable! I thought I was going to be out of practice from the big break. I felt like I had a real studio day. Yippee!
I keep coming back to maps in my work. I always think about the interview I read with Squeak Carnwath and how she used to hide hand drawn treasure maps for strangers to find. That article has inspired me so many times. I made maps about old towns the first time I went to the France Painting workshop with Glen Moriwaki and make believe treasure maps the second time too. I made maps of motherboards and electronics schematics. I made abstract imaginary maps at CCA. I keep going back to the music maps. I’ve been looking at and tracing maps of the Pacific Crest Trail for this series. So, there’s a thread I definitely need to follow. And I feel like these squiggles on the photo based work are sort of maps in some way too.