Painting #10 (final...done)

Painting #10 of 10       (30" x 31 1/4")

Details:

I'm not necessarily happy with this one. There are a lot of things about it that I now like, some having to do with it being—almost—a lost cause. I think the ground was too uniformly dark from the start. This limited the pictorial depth I could work with, incidental or intentional...it closed up too fast.
The tension between gesture and painted form is there and I like the different types of painting used—impulsive and considered (fast and slow).

Some of the difficulties I encountered with this painting go back a long way for me. They revolve around abstraction and its translation, flirting with the literal (space, color, object) and accepting the importance of a mark, shape or painted field without it feeling decorative.

Update: I struggle to make it not feel decorative, but know that it fundamentally is.

View preliminary states and comments below the break.


State #1

State #2

State #3

State #4

State #5  (figure-ground...figure-ground...)

State #6

State #7 (impenetrable muck)

State #8  (doesn't work)

State #9  (troublesome bastard)

State #10

State #11  (late-stage course correction)

State #12
A head scratcher. I'm not entirely sure if what's (not) happening with this painting is part of my development away from the vaguely familiar (in palette, composition, paint quality) or if this one simply got a way from me. I am stubborn enough (and the stakes are low) to give it a few more tries. If I'm not learning anything from this piece (and just wasting paint), I will set it aside and start a new one.

State #13

I would like to organize the composition differently with this one. The previous paintings are functioning more or less like landscapes; a concentration of shapes and solids at the bottom of the canvas as if there was a perceivable foreground and middleground, implying a horizon at the top of the picture. I would rather have them read as if one was looking down into a box (at the contents of my head)...if the contents of my head could be photographed in black and white, scraped, scratched, scribbled on, erased, painted over and thought about obsessively by me.