A Few New Experiments

I didn't go to work Friday, due to a massive headache.  A few weeks ago I went to the see the doctor about these resurgent pains in the aftermath of the skull fracture, thinking perhaps I was developing a migraine condition, and was told to keep a journal to monitor the pain and check back in with her in a month.  The idea is that apparently a migraine condition's method of treatment has something to do with having established a pattern to it.  I'm supposed to keep track of when and how much it hurts, where in my head it hurts, what I'd been eating, and any other environmental conditions (stress, bright lights, etc) that may have contributed to the pain.  Friday was the third of these major headaches I've had since I stopped taking the pain medication around the end of February, and each headache has been entirely different.  I can't find any pattern to them at all. 

Anyway, the point of all this is that Friday I wore an eye patch for about the first 4 or 5 hours I was awake, because the daylight in my left eye was unbearable, and I think that may have had something to do with how the painting I did that day turned out.

I need to backtrack again so this makes some kind of sense.  I've never had proper bicameral vision.  This is basically that cool thing that beings with two forward-facing eyes do to create a 3D view of their environment.  Your brain takes the two slightly different images coming from each of your eyes and constructs a feeling a relative depth by combining the two images into one.  My left eye has a pretty severe astigmatism, which means its lens is misshapen, so it can't actually focus on anything.  Normally, because my left eye essentially serves only to widen slightly the peripheral awareness of my right eye, I would have no depth perception at all, because my brain automatically discounts information it receives from the left eye.

Ok, so here's an experiment for you.  Pick an object a few feet away and stare at it directly.  Then quickly put a hand over one eye, being careful not to blink or move your gaze.  If you covered your right eye, you should see the object (and everything around it too) appear to jump slightly to the left, and vice-versa if you covered the other eye.  This only works for me if I cover my right eye.  My brain switches gears and starts paying attention to my left eye.  If I cover my left eye, nothing changes, because my brain is already ignoring it.

So I shouldn't have depth perception, but I do, and this is my theory as to why.  My right eye is fucked up too.  My right eye is technically far-sighted, which means I can focus on things with it that are very far away, but the eye has to work pretty hard to focus on things that are closer.  The miracle (as far as I'm concerned) is that my right eye is very strong, and good at making these adjustments quickly.  Despite the farsightedness, I can see things up close very well.  I suspect that because my right eye has to work a little harder to change focus from near to far and back again, it makes some part of my brain able to make correct assumptions about the relative distances.

Back to the point.  Friday afternoon I found myself wearing an eye patch so I could deal with daylight.  I'd napped nearly the whole morning, having originally woken around 8am to a splitting headache, and thinking some rest would help, but it really hadn't.  I couldn't sleep another wink, and I didn't want to be on the computer all day, so I figured I'd try to paint.  Mostly I think I just wanted to have something other than the pain to focus on. 

Perhaps I was thinking about relative distance in both a physical and metaphysical sense. Some things seem impossibly far away only because I lack the requisite contextual knowledge to accurately gauge my distance from them. 

The photo to the left here was taken with my camera  phone nearly immediately after finishing it.  You can see there are a few things going on here.  It's essentially a landscape.  Rolling hills and towering clouds, all receding to a point just over the horizon.  I was thinking about calling it "Moon Obscured by Clouds." The largest cloud though, running up and to the right from the center of the panel is also the torso of a thin girl stretching and maybe yawning, so I thought maybe I'd call it something less cheesy that "Pre-Dawn Yawn."  I took this photo on the phone so I could send it to Meghan to see, I was so happy with it. 

And it's a damn good thing I did.  This is another photo of the piece taken on my camera phone today so the picture quality would be similar enough to make a fair comparison.  The color is actually a lot truer to life in the first photo, but what I want to draw to your attention in this second photo is the lower left corner, where you can see my hillsides have sunk completely off the canvas, and in the process pulled the sky and clouds down with them.  You may also notice in the lower quarter of the painting, about a third of the way from the right-hand side a new black shape that looks like a ">" symbol where in the first picture there was a pristine white hill.  This is a place where the surface of the paint had dried enough by the time the lower left corner started to pull on it that it actually tore, revealing the paint underneath.

Normally, I would consider this a failure.  When a painting starts to do things I didn't tell it to do when I'm not looking, I get a little offended, but in this case, two very interesting things happened.  Looking at the piece as a landscape, there's a white circle that was originally part of the torso cloud but which now looks to be the moon- initially obscured but now revealed.  Secondly, that little ">" symbol is exactly where I would have put the bend in her knee if that cloud were actually a girl, and the hills were actually sheets pulled up over her legs.  So now I think I'm going to call it "She Dreams the Moon Revealed," and be thankful this time the painting finished itself.

This next experiment I actually painted a couple of weeks ago, just before painting this, during my first session with Jen Catalano.  I didn't really have a plan when it was time to get started. Normally in a first session with a model I sit down and do some sketches, to try to get a feel for the model's shape and personality before scheduling a sitting for a painting.  This time though, I had a feeling that I wanted to do my sketches in the same medium I'd ultimately be painting her in, because the process is so different.  In this piece here I sort of accidentally stumbled across what should have been obvious years ago to me, and started working more subtractively (maybe even sculpturally), which made the process feel much more natural. 

The problem I deal with most often in this work is too much paint, as evidenced by the first painting above I was talking about.  Working this way, I realized I could work on a glossy, pre-painted surface and with my squeegee brushes "draw" a line in the paint which would separate the pool and if the paint was thin enough, pin the edges of that paint down the to the substrate with its own surface tension. 

This creates deep valleys in the paint I can then fill with other colours, which is what I did (among other things) in the painting to which I linked above.  In this particular "paint sketch", I left the process alone at this point to remind myself later on of the possibilities inherently implied by this idea.  Pictured to the left here is a close-up of the painting with enough glare on it to make it easy to see the little valleys I have to work with. This is something I suspect I'll come back to in the not-too-distant future and explore more fully.

This next piece I painted last night.  The idea originally was to prepare a simple background with a dark texture so it would be dry enough to use on Tuesday when I have a session painting another new model.  I wanted to be sure to have substrates ready to go when she gets here so I can explore more the nuances of working subtractively.  What actually happened was obviously very different.
Meghan and I had a really nice weekend together.  Normally I have Jarvis here every weekend, which I love, but one of the things I realized during my leave of absence from work after the skull fracture was that Meghan and I, despite living together for a couple of years now in a single-room studio apartment, really don't spend nearly enough quality time together.  So  we arranged to have this weekend to ourselves.  The headache on Friday was pretty intense for most of the day, but by 7pm or 8pm it was mostly faded and the light sensitivity in my left eye had been gone for an hour or two, so when Meghan asked me if I wanted to attend the world premiere at Harvard of our friend Oliver's newest classical composition, I said yes.  The performance was lovely and then afterward we went out for drinks at Noir, where we got pleasantly drunk before coming home to pass out nice and early, maybe around 11.  Saturday we got up not long before noon and puttered around the house doing chores and so forth before going out late that evening for dinner at Ten Tables, which was fantastic.  Our lovely quirky waitress offered us the chef's tasting menu so we combined that with a bottle of wine for one of the best meals I've had in quite a while. Yesterday was a quiet lazy Sunday at home, playing Catan, watching TV together and just enjoying each other's company. 

I sat there after this calm, relaxing weekend to paint thinking I'd just lay down some simple pattern and be done with it, and since I've been learning to listen to and trust my intuition, I didn't come into it with any other other real preconceptions. 

What I ended up exploring is this sense of churning frustration and pent up sexuality that seems so completely at odds with how I feel about my day to day life.  A serene sky filled with sparks from the conflagration  of an entire landscape.  Lava floes writhing and spitting.  A rift opened up in the sky and smoke streaming to fill it.  The creation of this one was especially cathartic for me.  I exist in a mental space which requires me to keep a tight grip on my sexuality to avoid creating untenable and hurtful situations.  It's stressful.  I used to think that if I felt a need to do a thing that I should just go ahead and do it.  With age I've learnt some measure of restraint, but also that real restraint is anything but passive.

There are a couple of places in this painting where because I used too much paint in my fervor, it's now pulling apart, ripping the paint on the surface and revealing textures below while obscuring those on top.  But I won't point them out to you, because they've amazingly all happened (again!  rare as this is, again!) in ways that actually improve upon the piece.  I don't have a title yet, but then, it's not completely dry, so who knows how it'll look when I get back from work tonight.

I was talking to my mother yesterday about this.  Since I broke my head, I've been finding it a lot easier to paint in a meaningful, exploratory way.  Perhaps this has something to do with having become slightly more aware of myself throughout the healing process.  It feels good to know I can paint about a feeling I can't always describe articulately and find it just as satisfying as one of my sexual proclivities without the fear of a potential fallout afterward.  The moral of today's story?  There's no such thing as too much paint.