Some notes:
Latest stage first. Establishing more connections. Complexity increases with fineness. Intensification through a simplification. A theatre of thought. A field of cultivation of the idea. Idea and technique inseparable. Permeability throughout. Sensing a way forward in the awareness of that which has gone before – memory is interwoven with that which is happening around – haptic. Intra/extra/ultra.
And remembering the initial poetic inspiration for this painting, still in progress, taken from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:
are crowded with perfumes;
not let it.
correspondences: at this stage of the painting – I/it/you/we are now beginning to breathe the odorless air. Odorless is grey – and in the case where all the colours are brought into a balanced equilibrium. The pervading atmosphere is white, completely fresh and new at every inspiration of the breath. The perfumes, as colour (each individual colour, like an individual perfume having its own character and shape) is embedded in the memory but accessibly so – still visible but veiled transparently.
Remember how strongly the colours asserted themselves at the beginning of the painting – that needed to be contained, organised in terms of the greater whole, the poem. Painting as poem. Poem as painting. The painting is silent, not noisy. Reflective, open, free. Its silence removes it from the noise around and is key to its poem, and poiesis. Pictopoiesis. Rendering this through the translucency of oil paint. Connecting on all levels material and immaterial. A practopoietic mind mirror is emerging?
Biographical: and today is noisy with the sound of the birds! as Spring has arrived as if it were Summer here – the hottest few days for this time of year for seventy years – and I can be in the studio the whole day. Most unusual.
