Surprise!

I have been busy in the studio getting ready for my show opening on Monday... but I haven't been posting any works in progress, or finished work. Part of me is dying to share what I've been doing, but I have been feeling strangely protective of it until it's actually hanging in public.

The reason? I want it to be a surprise.

Silly, I guess. But true.

Last night one of the paintings I was working on, one of the houses titled, Wrong Place, Wrong Time, is getting really gorgeous. I found myself really falling in love as the evening went by and I got more layers on it. It's funny how the ones that are rather homely in their beginnings, and even in "adolescence", turn out to be the best works.

It's an amazing process, the development of a painting. Which is why I keep doing it.

***

I also really noticed my development as an artist in a very palpable way last night as I was working. The way I work, the colors I gravitate toward, the qualities that are important to me... all have changed quite a lot since I entered grad school. It's taken some time, but it's so interesting to me how my work has become this hybrid of the representational and the abstract. And how concise I've become with the brush. I love painting edges, or making a curve just so. I'm starting to lose the drips, which is probably a good thing. (Bingyi's comment those months ago really stuck with me, I admit it, but now... I think she was right.)

Last night I was thinking about Alex Katz and Giorgio de Chirico, not for his surrealist tendencies as much as for his architecture and light and economy.


Alex Katz.


Giorgio de Chirico.