Working Title: "Moving On" (new process painting)

So new, in fact, is this painting that I do not even have a name for it yet, which is unusual. Well I did have a name for it before I started it, but already the name is not right, so Moving On will do for now. For those of you who have watched these process paintings, you have a seen that I generally have a pretty systematic way of working on my pieces. But for a long time I have been saying that I want to loosen up, not be so prescribed in the work. I thought that I would try, then, to go back to making abstract work as a jumping off place. I was imagining big textural color fields against one another in basically opposite color schemes. Well already this painting wants to be something recognizable after just a couple of days working on it. OK, it has to be what it wants to be. This is what it looks like the first two layers of working.

What you see are the beginnings of sky, fall cottonwood leaves and water. As always, I am learning as I work. What have I learned in this short time span? Well there are a few things: 1). I really like to paint on a diagonal right to left, top to bottom, particularly when painting sky; 2). Whether I am painting sky, clouds, land masses or water, I use similar linear patterning with all of them. But this linearity is created by the brush strokes, not by the intent of "line"; and 3). Although I have always felt that I am not really very good at painting water, I am finding, in water, the same shapes that I put into clouds. Since I do feel I paint clouds well, then maybe, indeed, I can paint water. No matter what, this entire painting so far has a fairly fast moving right to left flow to it.
I'm feeling pretty good about that learning process revealed in the first two layers of paint, so I'll stop there for now. Stay tuned!