I see the color electric and open studio
Open Studio tomorrow, 3/12/2022, see details right here...
The following is a blog post from 2014, where the color blue comes up. I've finally started a painting where blue plays a big part. At the end I bring things up to date.
January 28, 2014. Early this morning at 6:45 AM I started out for my first 7 AM yoga class. The sun hasn't risen yet and it was foggy, first light was increasing and the sky was still a deep dark blue. The whole scene was drenched in fog. In the eastern sky the waning crescent of the moon faced toward Venus, the Morning Star below and left of the crescent. It was the finest curved sliver, like a copper-etched eyelash. Sometimes when I least expect it these amazing gifts are thrown in front of me (rather, I'm thrown in front of them). It's like I'm slammed across the mountain and stopped dead in my tracks, then think to take a picture but know for certain I'd never capture the whole feeling. So I just stopped and looked and let it burn itself against the back of my brain, so I wouldn't forget. I've seen this so many times before and was deeply moved by it once again, as though for the first time… Then I started thinking about beauty, wonder, humility and grace, and how it's all so fleeting. This was a perfect way to start my day, and I carried it with me into yoga class.
Back at home, I got an email from my favorite newsletter writer (at that time in 2014), Robert Genn. He wrote about the color blue, specifically ultramarine blue. Deep and resonant blue, and a little like the dark blue sky I saw this morning. The stories of color are so fascinating and satisfying. We forget that some colors were so rare, exotic, very expensive, hard to find, and once upon a time transported on trade routes across Asia. Today we just screw open the cap and squeeze paint out of the tube. I totally appreciate modern conveniences such as tubes of paint, but I do believe that the depth of understanding the many aspects of color empowers me as an artist and adds depth to the content and meaning in my work. I pulled my color books off the shelf with a hunger to read.
and now today…March 11, 2022
I became a painter after about 10 years of making photographs in black-and-white. I loved photography then and still love photography, it's where I learned about Light and the power of it in a work of art and how it's such an easy source of inspiration. But it was that black-and-white-ness that drove me to seek out color; I had wrested all I could as an artist from the beauty of black and white values in photography, but I needed more.
Color and light is my life and paint has been the transporter of it…and I’m finally focusing on the color blue in my painting. I have started a painting for a show that's coming up and this painting, a work in progress, will be at my open studio tomorrow, March 12, for you to see.
Blue seems to be contained in its own universe in the spectrum of colors. It is something that is always just beyond our reach, receding from us in the big blue sky; we can never actually touch it. It's like that certain elemental something that we're always trying to reach, to seek, the deepest of meaning perhaps in the most mysterious things of life, or in a beautiful enigma and in a work of art.
