Artist in Residence

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER JOURNAL

As the opening of the exhibition approaches, the weeks seem to pass more quickly. The Paine exhibition deadline is rushing towards me while holiday excitement begins to intrude on my regular painting schedule. I’m also just now starting a long-planned bathroom renovation. Luckily, my role is mostly supervisory.

This journal installment is about the unusually long, drawn-out production of the next to last painting I’ll be completing for the Paine exhibition, a painting I’m calling Cat/Man. It all started back in 2003, when I made a group of paintings that showed physical conflict between animals and humans, often with the human as underdog. I had also painted two compositions that included a man bent over backwards as if in the middle of an exaggerated back bend. This pose fascinated me, for reasons I haven’t been able to fathom. (Once I figure out something like that, I usually lose interest.)

The germ of the idea for Cat/Man came from a photo in the high school sports section of my small town newspaper. Why it caught my eye is pretty obvious—the figure on the right is bent uncomfortably backwards and the whole group (including the referee on the far right) makes a wonderful sweeping curve.

Onto this photo I immediately superimposed, in my mind, the idea of a life-or-death struggle between an animal and a man. The result was a small (5 x 10 inch) watercolor and crayon sketch that satisfactorily translated the photo into my chosen subject matter but left it looking flat, the figures out of touch with the background landscape. (My more usual method of imagining a landscape first, before placing figures in it, helps me avoid this problem.)

I found a way to make the figures more my own by twisting them into space, bringing the cat forward and pushing the man back. I also removed most of the man’s clothes and relocated the event to the seashore, evoking a sense of mythic drama that was to become a major element of the painting as it developed. The result was a second watercolor and crayon sketch, 8 x 11 inches. The drawing was clumsy but the idea strong.

I felt as if I was on the right track, so I jumped into a small oil painting, 16 x 20 inches. Work on this was interrupted by several other paintings. I made small and large alterations to it over a couple of years, and it still isn’t finished.

Finally I decided to test my emotional connection to the image by starting a large version that I thought would be the end of the process. But I must have had lingering doubts, because the “large” version was only 24 x 30 inches. Here again I learned a lot about the difficult tangle of figures, but I never fully resolved the drawing, as you can see in the man’s right hand with its chalked-in alteration.

Then, sometime early this year, the Paine project influenced my creative process by making me think of the cat and man as smaller figures in a larger landscape. I made a few watercolor and crayon drawings similar to this one, 7 x 8 inches, exploring various possibilities for composition and scale. The outcome was another small oil painting, 17 x 26 inches, that turned out to be the first work in this whole series with which I was actually pretty well satisfied. Finally the landscape (and the gulls) had enough character to play a significant part in the drama, instead of just being a backdrop. At this point I felt confident enough to begin work on the large canvas for the exhibition.

The rest of the process would seem almost anti-climactic, except for the twist at the end. I prepared a large canvas, 47 x 72 inches, drawing on it in charcoal, taking special care with the figures, which were still giving me trouble. The photo shows that detail. Here the drawing is mostly covered with paint. I was very happy with the look of the painting when everything was completed except the gulls, so happy that I began to wonder whether I should include the gulls at all. Feeling indecisive, I cut the shapes of the gulls out of white paper and stuck them to the picture. And that’s how the painting stands at this moment! I still haven’t decided whether to include all the gulls, just a few of them, or none at all. What would you choose?