Sabbatical
John Swanstrom was at lunch yesterday… that’s where I took his photo… We reminisced. Our memory, together, goes back as far as 5or 6 days. Then things get foggy.
However, we did recall sharing in the purchase of a huge reame of watercolor paper (”48x “55 ) each sheet…. heavy duty. I was preparing for an upcoming sabbatical leave.. one full semester. I intended to paint acrylic on paper during the entire period. It worked perfectly. Each day I tacked a large sheet of W.C. paper onto a board and blazed away without further preparation…. no priming, stretching, nor framing. It was here that I finally switched from oils to acrylics. And it was here that I left the burdensome, self imposed formalism of the abstract expressionism that I had saddled myself with. It was a joyous period. .. no restrictions, just flailing brush strokes, followed by arbitrary gridwork installed.
Nearly every painting you see in my collection with the grid motif idea was done during that sabbatical period. Every thing went great. The combination of chaos and order fit well.
I worked in a rented studio downtown over the hardware on Main
I had not realised until then how I had restricted myself to such formal, compositional rules of the game.
Only after the sabbatical ended was I faced with the perplexing task of how to mount and frame the 30or 40 gems. More on that later. It is an ugly story. D