Art Moment #3

I've enjoyed working on these illustrations for Shantosh Shrestha's book "The Colour of Life". I wrapped up the last one last night and enjoyed working on it the past couple of days. The first day wasn't much; I just laid out a white ground, and the second day started messing about with the dark blue underpainting that you can see fairly well.

I basically approached this last piece the way I'd approach a monotype; I just decided to manipulate the pigments differently and kind of got in my printmaker headspace that I wanted an unpredictable outcome, more so than usual. That said, the underpainting was based on a drawing that I don't have at hand and acted as more or less the base plan for the piece.

The linear aspects of this are directly from the drawing, but the color is based more on another project. I commissioned a thangka from my friend Tashi Tsering at Rinchenling Gallery and Thangka School.

Next up was quite literally, meditating on the next moves.

In a lot of cases, I know that people think those of us who deal in the non-veristic or so-called abstract painting just throw whatever comes into our hands onto the surface. That's an inelegant conceit.

Compositional factors still obtain. As much as, say, Pollock, tried to remove the creator from the result, he still had to make "editorial" choices, if you will. These are dictated by one's one sense of proportion, use of color, etc., etc.

Even in more representational works, I allow a lot of leeway for chance and spontaneity. No work is going to turn out exactly as you might plan. The exceptions to that are if I've really plotted out a piece to allow for minimal improvisation. The Boudhanath stupa gouache is only slightly like that. But exact rendering and more precise execution is fun, but not always exciting. I like to do stuff like that as a way of preserving a certain set of skills.

In terms of non-representational work, one needs to dig sometimes deeper into experience. It's very much a matter of "getting out of the way" and letting the work take you where it needs or wants to go.

Not gonna lie. The elements that present themselves have their origins in layers within and that might be why they manifest as layers without. At this point, I'm at the service of whatever process is under way.

There is still a degree of reflective assessment, but not so much as to drive us into some kind of fussy, anal retentive worrying of the surface or fretting about end results.

It's a cliche that "no work is ever 'finished'" but I'm contending that if you view your entire output as a kind of continuity, then it really doesn't matter, does it? Does it ever?

The final phase of a work announces itself, often with a sense of satisfaction. Is it great work? Is it bad work? I don't care. It took me on this adventure and we arrive at this.

Again, I just stop. I sit with it for a bit and unless there's anything else that I can sense, I declare it done. Perhaps more accurately, It declares that my part in its arising is done. I'm free to go onto the next thing.