Lady by the Window

Erika said, Paint me a picture.

Last fall, I saw a show of Georgia O'Keefe's early abstract paintings at the Whitney Museum in New York. This spring, by coincidence, I caught the show again in Washington D.C. at the Philips Collection. It was then that I realized how great O'Keefe's early abstracts are.

Erika had actually said, Paint me a picture in the style of O'Keefe (Erika is in a Writer's Workshop in Iowa and gives assignments.) I had said, No way.

When she got this painting, she said, oh yeah, like Klimt. Yes, the face appeared first, and everything else was secondary.

This lady is now on a wall in Iowa.

Mountains in the Mist

I recently began visualizing these fantasy landscapes. Places I go to for comfort, often with combinations of mountains, oceans, and sky. It could be on earth or it could be elsewhere. Sometimes it's California, probably because I lived there for awhile.

I usually arrive there by some circuitous route. This one began as a painting of Craig.

After a few hours, it was clear that things weren't going well. I momentarily lost control, and just smushed up the paint into a messy directionless collision of the colors that were there. The skin color became a sort of mist in front of the mountains. Doesn't seem to be planet earth. The yellow in the sky is too strong for dusk, too deliberate for noon.

I put in the moutainous ledge in the foreground, just to have a place to stand.