2017 August Studio New Mexico

The Progress in August, in New Mexico .

2017 Painting Upstate NY, summer

I started the High Water paintings upstate, then made a similar group in New Mexico to see how each would progress.

The Blue figures seemed where they were headed formally, well, and in content. But either idea was vague and the coming together of ideas into something is what I was looking for.

A drawing sparked a new idea of cutting these from plywood and I painted them into a still-life I was making. The idea was growing in directions I was not sure of at this moment.

2017 New Mexico Studio, summer

New Mexico Studio, summer 2017.

Working from drawings and things I figure out in NY studio drawing through the winter.

2017 Painting from 1983, NM studio

I was fixing a damaged painting for a collector and the reality of that time rather flooded back to my painting mind.

The space has been coming back in different ways.

The space was something I had been missing not as a whole but as a glimpse or part, or literally where I was coming from.

2017 drawing in NYC studio

These follow many drawing of similar size in 2016.

They were going into the paintings of 2017.

They were being called

Blue Figure, Western Lagoon figures, or ideas.

All in my mind-- painting itself.

2017 drawing in Mexico, Isla Mujeres

After a couple of days of drawing figures on the beach, these different drawings came out-- from where? I called them the beginning of the High Water-- paintings.

I have had a romantic, chaotic strain of work which seems to lag behind my paintings. Kind of where they come from-- as used to be more prevalently called the subconscious .

2017 drawings from Picasso's Guernica

We were in Barcelona after Madrid seeing Las Meninas at the Prado and then his paintings of the same in Picasso Museum Barcelona.

My head was swimming with this all for a bit.

I made some paintings in my studio in NY.