Glaze bonanza

Ongoing experiment with pseudo abstraction.
My new brush allows for some fun calligraphic marks

Limited

Quick limited palette study
Alizarin , ochre , white, black

underneath

Pix from the day
Wandered around Potrero Hill with camera. Using the lens as a sketchpad to frame bits of sky and city. I have simple abstractions in mind for clay and glaze. But while I was out, also keep finding panoramas for paint. Clumsy with the camera, but loving how close I can get to some surreal collisions of metal & cement.
Continuing to think of city as nature. SF holds appeal due to its scale and variety - in the smallest slice, theres an ecology of commerce, persuasion, and inhabitation. Place is created by the contributions (both conscious and un) many people over time.

Invisible Cities

"Isura, city of a thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake."-Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Calvino's imaginative abstracts craft city structures and networks. I found some attempts to illustrate these vignettes. Off to sketch myself. Instead of my current mode of photo-image translated into paint-image, or recent attempts to capture hazy image memory with paint, I will start with words.

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

Tangentially related reading to revisit on anti-romanticism

Ugly 2

Pass 1 on the hiway- my bit of reality to work on in tandem with the
imagi-marsh below. Want to keep this pale but not insipid. Favorite
quality is that big curve - other elements may come and go.

Ugly - part two

As an exercise, spending the week on an abstract (marsh inspired)
canvas. No cheating by looking at mini iphoto pix. Concepts in mind--
radiance of water- organic shapes (a tough one considering my hands'
bias toward horiontal blocks), suggested perpective. Extremely
frustrating to work without a visible subject. Stan Brakhage referred
to working towards an "aesthetic ecology" in his scratches and a
scribbles on film. Will this emerge from pseudo abstraction? - a
vibrant aesthetic, whole undiverted by the form of a specific subject.
Working on a highway painting simultaneously to contrast the two
processes. I love human-built shapes, and still enjoy starting with
some visual structure

The outside is all shades of white. Sky and water are delineated a shift in color temperature. The air carries a warm pink, the water, a slight green grey. Sky haze encapsulates land, housing strips, the pattern of triangle roof and rectangle window. Status, size, and finish level of homes are obscured by weather. Climate is a great equalizer. Watched a show on refrigeration last night- and the air conditioner was blamed for driving people from common social places (breezy porches in the southern heat) to solitary coled indoors. While I am hermetic, I feel the error of indoor isolation. Enduring severe weather with neighbors, brings unavoidable unity. Weather reminds me that human control over nature is a temporary illusion.