Deciphering Elegy had the needed effect of getting me back into the studio and making again. It reconnected me to the process through process however, I still felt in many ways disconnected to the work and this project. If I were to reconnect to these then Petra and Franz would need to come back from wherever they had crawled off to. Although the scenery had changed, in order to find my way back I also needed to clear the detritus from the path I was following prior to the end of 2017. It was time to begin tidying up the disarray in the studio and find my tools.

To find Franz I went looking for him in the work he had made over the course of last year. Two places you can find him on this website are Franz Painting, Part One and Franzi Blue. Three things stand out in Franzi's work: the color blue, the square, and how he quickly builds up layers of very thin acrylic paint using a hair dryer. To entice him to return I needed to bring these three elements into the next work.

The weather was still unpredictable, conditions in the studio and my head were too. I had been deciphering the shapes from Elegy and wanted to somehow bring them back into paint. Concertinaed, with its double-sided unfolding into a long and thin painting was also on my mind. I thought I might want to go longer with the panels, paint a line, but I wasn't sure if I had the energy. So I decided to start small. At the local art supply store I picked up four 6 inch x 6 inch gessobord panels. I have not previously worked on gessobord panels, preferring non-primed birch or basswood instead. However, the 2 inch cradle enticed me. I selected two 2 inches deep and two 1.5 inches deep. The overall height of this painting is 6 inches, the length is 24 inches while the depth varies.

In the paintings done together with the persona-tools during Autumn 2017 Franzi's contribution tended towards smaller fragments of his blue acrylic applied using his hair dryer technique to the non-cradled surface of the panels. On the other hand the paintings done just using the tool Franzi were all blue squares on gallery wrapped canvases with 1.5 inch depth. The squares are stronger and so I decided to give one side of the panels to Franzi. He generally does not get fresh surfaces such as these so this was pretty big for him, and not to go unmentioned I wanted to reserve the non-cradled side for the shapes deciphered from Elegy. There is also something about having Franzi 'at the back' or core of the paintings that was helpful to me in taking this next step. As a tool his presence is as a 'studio assistant' taking on supportive tasks, having my back. He has been physically described as blob-like, able to melt into spaces. The idea that the paint would mold itself around the edges of the cradle -the interior of the panel- fit.

A short video and some pics of Franzi applying himself.

After Franzi did his part I removed the tape from the edges of the panels. I played around with the scale of the shape I scanned from the Deciphering Elegy sketchbook, shown below.

I followed this by cutting out the scanned shapes of which I'd made inkjet prints on 300 gram hot press watercolor paper; then I played around with the layout a bit.

Because I intended to use oil paints on top of the collaged shapes, next I sealed off the side of the panels Franzi had painted and the edges with paper and painters tape. I gave the taped edges and the non-cradled side of the panels a few coats of matte acrylic medium to minimize any paint leaking through.

And also used the matte acrylic medium to adhere the shapes to the panels. The ink from the printer smears a bit giving a reddish tinge to the panels.

At this point Franzi was not content to be present on only one side of the painting. He was also still mourning Melusine. In the post Eight by Ten by Twelve by Four: Elegy I mentioned Franzi had taken it upon himself after Melusine's death to learn Sütterlin as a means of keeping her present. We had received a few bags from Brooklyn containing pages of Melusine's writing, correspondence and poems mostly. Some of it was in English, some in German, some printed from a computer, some handwritten in standard script and some in Sütterlin. While I was writing Franzi had been holed away on a shelf, sorting through these bags, and practicing this lost script on his own. He showed me some of the pages and we decided to play around with some of this writing on the scanner together. One letter we found had been written on vellum in a way so the lines on one side showed through in reverse on the other side. Below a pic of our work.

Those prints, on 22 lb, 98 bright white paper, were collaged using matte medium onto the panels too.

I moved the panels into the greenhouse which had begun to warm up between the March snowstorms. A thin, dry glaze of asphaltum black followed by an even thinner, even drier glaze of mars black was applied to the deciphered shapes. Some slight sanding with 220 grit paper also occurred. Over the text I used thin, liquidy layers of titanium and zinc white, letting the paint pool around the invisible clumps and uneven surface caused by the matte medium; sanding and dabbing as desired.

By March 15 the photo below shows what the panels look liked; and Franzi had copied in Sütterlin the lyrics of a song by a poet-singer-songwriter he'd found on a scrap of paper in one of Melusine's bags. I wondered why Franzi kept playing that song each time I sat down to paint.

Then I went away for a few days. When I returned I gave the panels a few final layers of white paint, including a very thin layer of a milky, translucent white that has a bluish tinge to it in certain light over the dark, collaged shapes.

When everything had dried, the tape and protective layer of paper removed, and the edges sanded to a silky smoothness I moved the painting panels out of the studio and began playing with their set up and the various angles from which they might be viewed. The remaining photos show some of these configuration.

I am still playing with Signs Left Behind.

More to come.