COG62 700new Copy
City of Glass 62 - (WestSideStory)  40x60cms

 

SAT 17 JUNE

A sad day and a good day - the end of Open Studios and the resolution of my painting. For the title I've gone for the WestSideStory and all the baggage that goes with it, but I like the link to the book-format of the paintings and to the novel.*

Conversations  today: an American couple talking about the new work, joining the debate about City of Glass 61 & 62 as a pair and how wide the gap between them should be....a comment from another artist about this piece '...making New York beautiful, moving away from the ugly, drooping willie of Manhattan' (!) 

Back to the painting: saturated colour, working in density and proportion. The dominant verticality/stripes is disrupted but more visually satisfying because of it. The backward step with the green at the end of yesterdays session forced me to look again at the purple. What is detail? It is what happens at the end of a painting to bring focus and refinement and difference and added complexity and above all, clarity. The addition of snaking Broadway helps the painting a lot - the curve of Riverside Drive no longer stark and isolated. A small area of heavier, knifed purples to break up the flatness... a pattern of 'hovering' green printed city blocks... a new yellow glow on the extreme right ... an almost hidden long 'banjo-pier' shaped mark, revealed again by scrubbing away , now contributing....a long central horizontal, coming forward, cutting the space, pulling the two sides together...lines/marks with beauty and precision, formal necessity and context...triple whammy...the streets where Stillman walks, the boundaries/borders of 110thSt, Riverside Park, 72ndSt and Amsterdam Ave.

With the twin purple angled piers there are possibilities of the illusion of a receding space, the New York canyon thing again, the idea reinforced by cooler colours 'beyond'. The view through buildings...are we getting closer to depicting Quinn's observation post in the alley, watching the entrance to the apartment on E69thSt? 

 

cog62detail1600 Copy
detail

 

cog6261studio2500
In the studio

 

FRI 16 JUNE

Still have doubts (below )- the left panel seems more successful, the right almost decorative and too linear, the angled purple piers cancelled out by the twin paralell lines to the right.  I've been putting in detail/information/references to the story all day to find out what they do to the painting and whether the painting needs them. Feels like there needs to be a further paring down. Tried a green at the end of the day, making a connection with 'EastSide' which didn't work, Maybe it's too much of a fixation, trying to make paintings work as a pair.

 

cog62600
Friday

 

 

cog62day1500 Copyday 1

 

* The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster