Discovery and Distillation Through A Sequence of Experiments

While hiking through Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire, a site of inspiration for 19th century Hudson River Painters I discovered a blue-green basin of vibrating water below a shallow falls. The transition from the light at the bottom of the picture to darkening top of the picture caught my attention because, normally we place dark in the territory near to the ground plane, the bottom of the picture. We then experience the picture gaining light as we travel up and back into the image. I later realized that by rotating the photo vertically I re-acquired the dark bottom with a light top but, now I faced an elevated, centered, blurry rectangle of light, that monolithic stone.     It’s rectangular shape too easily suggested a face if I were to abstract this image. Similarly if I were to convert the rectangle into an oval it still suggested a face shape in a reduced, abstracted form. If I used a triangle with the tip pointing down, I also continued to suggest an abstracted face shape. But, If I followed the idea of a triangle pointing up ( like the design in da Vinci’s painting of St. Anne and the Virgin) I finally had a shape which did not prompt an association with the human face.
We tend to see faces and bodies among the clutter of ambiguous shapes. The up-turned triangle carries an association with mysterious sacred objects. Initially, I experimented with the image on a sheet of 18×18 copper. It’s final result is here.  My ultimate ambition was to make a larger image with layered ambiguity, mystery, a sense of reflectance and, the perception of a surface affected by water motion. I began with this 36×36, oil on aluminum, relying on translucent pigments, large brushed and ragged gestures counter-stroked to submerge and blend them into the picture’s surface. I made overt paint brush gestures with a 4″ flat, waving and whirling in my hand. Later, I added glaze colors(red) onto some gesture shapes. I thought this would give the painting more depth by bringing the colored shapes up to the surface.    I tried  a similar strategy on my next effort, another 36×36 sheet of aluminum which you see here. Now, I used hotter colors, with less reliance on red/green contrast. I used counterpoint angles, reversing diagonals, verticals of varying width, and short fat undulating gestures. The translucence of the paint (carmine, gamboge yellow, transparent red oxide, ultramarine blue) and the reflectance of the aluminum provided a luminous effect but, I was unhappy. I let the paint dry then, recommenced with more opaque lighter/brighter color on the image. I felt the urge to simplify this now altered composition after reconsideration of my initial work on the smaller copper piece.(see example 1). I recommenced on the same image with gamboge yellow, white, vermillion and with smaller gestures ( smaller shapes of light will appear to have more sparkle than larger shapes of the same value).      Next, you can see I added blues and increased the density of the small light shapes .   Lastly, I added more blurred contrasts , more semi-opaque shapes floating over the triangle in an effort to subdue and further submerge it. I want to show you how I similarly scaled up another 18×18 landscape into a 36×36. This multi-staged and scaled process lets me extend my experimental reach by trying variations with the same design and motif. This is the 18×18.  
This is the later 36×36.  Lastly is a 36×36( submerged stepping stones with reflections). Here is is initally.  and, here it is with added yellow translucent and blue opaque glazing. My ambition with this last image was to apply a variety of layered design motifs and, diminish value contrasts while suggesting both translucence and reflection.