How A Series Begins

As many of you know, I have been recovering from a late March neck surgery (ACDF, Levels C5-7, if it matters.) I'm doing pretty well, well enough, in fact, to move along in a series I began in early March, just before the operation.

For some unfathomable reason, I felt a strong desire to work again in oil. I also had this idea that I'd like to do some figure work, too. It's been a while, and I think all artists come back to the human figure several times over a lifetime, if indeed they ever leave it.

Several sketches and throwaway paintings happened. Here are a couple of them.

During all this, a thought came and wouldn't leave: why is fifty percent of Western art composed of variations, with varying degrees of sophistication and technical excellence, of the shower scene in Porky's? Can't a woman (or a barely pubescent girl, for that matter) take a goddamned bath without an entire hemisphere's worth of men and women leering from the bushes? Jeez, art people, what is up with all the peeping?

So I made this one. The figure has no face; she's just something to look at, like architecture. But she still seems pretty monumental anyway. I don't consider this a finished, exhibit-worthy piece, but there's something about this one that I started to like.

I decided, in the few days before I went to the hospital, that what I liked was the architectural shapes. The interaction of squares and line, the way elements of the painting came and went. So I abandoned the figures entirely.

These are just cruddy phone pics with a quick crop; these paintings may not even really be finished yet. But this has been a new experience for me: I had to abandon my studio and leave a series just as it's starting to evolve.

Interesting. And enlightening.