Sumac: A Journey thru Thunderwood

III

Must we conclude that this lie is the very essence of art? I shall say instead that the attitudes I have been describing are lies only insofar as they have but little relation to art. What, then, is art? Nothing simple, that is certain. And it is even harder to find out amid the shouts of so many people bent on simplifying everything. On the one hand, genius is expected to be splendid and solitary; on the other hand, it is called upon to resemble all. Alas, reality is more complex. And Balzac suggested this in a sentence: ‘The genius resembles everyone and no one resembles him.’ So it is with art, which is nothing without reality and without which reality is insignifcant. How, indeed, could art get along without the real and how could art be subservient to it? The artist chooses his object as much as he is chosen by it. Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world. Consequently, its only aim is to give another form to a reality that is nevertheless forced to preserve as the source of its emotion. In this regard, we are all realistic and no one is. Art is neither complete rejection nor complete acceptance of what is. It is simultaneously rejection and acceptance, and this is why it must be a perpetually renewed wrenching apart. The artist constantly lives in such a state of ambiguity, incapable of negating the real and yet eternally bound to question it in its eternally unfinished aspects. …

There is no need of determining whether art must flee reality or defer to it, but rather what precise dose of reality the work must take on as ballast to keep from floating up among the clouds or from dragging along the ground with weighted boots. Each artist solves this problem according to his lights and abilities. The greater an artist’s revolt against the world’s reality, the greater can be the weight of reality to balance that revolt. But the weight can never stifle the artist’s solitary exigency. … That’s just it and yet that’s not it; the world is nothing and the world is everything - this is the contradictory and tireless cry of every true artist, the cry that keeps him on his feet with eyes ever open and that, every once in a while, awakens for all in this world asleep the fleeting and insistent image of a reality we recognize without ever having known it.

Camus, Albert. Create Dangerously. Justin O’Brien, translator. Penguin Random House UK, 2018. pp.21-23

Eight works on paper after Camus’ speech ‘Create Dangerously’ given shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, The University of Uppsala (Sweden), December 1957.

Watercolor, acrylic gesso, acrylic medium, collaged monoprint fragment of oil paint on yellow drafting paper, gel ink, on 300 gram Stonehenge Aqua Hotpress, 10 inches x 14 inches/ 25.40 cm x 35.56 cm.

Photographed in daylight.

Legs

The crura have been standing in the center of the basement half of my studio for about four months; the paintings, that together with these ‘appendages’ form the work Chamber, sitting patiently on top, waiting for what comes next.

I know how they feel.

Each day I navigate around them. It is pretty chaotic.

Chaos is not a circumstance that I freely chose.

However, it seems to be the one I currently find myself in.

Being someone who tends to work with what is before her, and the crura are continually catching my eye, I can’t help but look at the canvases I’ve been painting in the greenhouse

the blue paintings of Franzi’s hanging on the wall

and wonder how might the they all come together?

The expression that keeps coming to mind is ‘does this story have legs?’

Underlying narrative has also been on my mind but more on that to the other paintings in other postings.

Unlike the paintings of Chamber these are all single sided paintings on stretched canvas. Some are 1.5 inch gallery wrapped, others thinner 7/8 inch. The thicker stretcher bars enabled me to balance the canvases on top of the crura, the thinner stretchers I hung on the bars jutting out, this makes the legs appear shorter.

Some are paintings that are being painted over older work which is allowed to peak thru in spots, others are ‘fresh starts’. Oil is what is currently being applied. With the exception of Franzi’s blue paintings all the work shown is still in progress.

Thoughts on refinement include how to treat the backside of the paintings, how to attach the canvases so they are removable, how to construct the crura so they can be disassembled, reassembled, and varied in height.

Thoughts on how this work differs from Chamber and the approaches taken by other artists such as Dona Nelson and Laura Owens.

And what part does the research with personas as tools play in arriving at this point?

Playing with what is standing around I took these pics and video.

My turn to add some oil

This is the continuation of the previous post in which Franzi joined into what Petra and I were working on in May.

To this painting of ten panels I added thin layers of oil paint, mostly using a variety of blacks and whites. Some sanding occurred between layers. Eventually I taped off some areas to create slightly solid geometric shapes to connect the panels. I had laid out the panels in two rows of five panels each, taping across the panels and then cutting them apart with a razor blade.

After thin layers of titanium white mixed with some marble dust to make the surface more matte I re-taped select areas and painted a blue black (50% Prussian Blue, 50% Mars Black with some Liquin mixed in) shape which I then removed the paint from by pressing scraps of drafting-sketch paper onto the wet surface. I did this two times for each shape.

The previous postings showed the painting panels in a landscape format. I realized most of the time I painted with oil on these, and while I had them propped on the ledge drying, I was viewing them in a portrait format.

So I am posting the scans of the current state of the painting panels in a vertical orientation here now. Next step will be some final contrasting glazes (black and white with a glossier sheen), after which I will begin playing with the installation. Similar to the painting Black, White and Blue these panels will be mounted directly on the wall using 3M Velcro picture hanging strips. Currently I envision a single line … what Concertinaed would be if stretched out, viewed without the folds and not sat on a mirror shelf. Petra is still slowly working on the drawings she began from the Frottages she began this past summer. One hangs on the wall in the greenhouse studio and I constantly look over to it as I paint on these panels. With there shared origins they are moving closer together but the same can be said for the other paintings on canvas I have begun without the direct input of Franzi or Petra this past month and a half - a brief glimpse.

Finally, here are the scans.

Franzi joins in

This is the continuation of what Petra and I were working on in May.

The mixed media work was mounted on 8 inch x 10 inch canvas board panels using acrylic matter medium. A brushstroke texture was left visible. The paper was taped off and then Franzi applied his layers of thin blue acrylic paint, rapidly drying each layer with a hairdryer. The next day the tape was peeled away to reveal both the hard edge and the thin, feathery blue that had seeped through the tape and collected in the wells of matte medium brushstrokes. Here is a scan of each panel. Next up will be me and some oil paint. TBC

Crura

Before continuing with this post I suggest a quick review of two earlier posts The future of the work yet to be titled and Plinth.

I picked up the steel supports I designed and had fabricated by Ballard Road Art Studio in Wilton, NY yesterday. This is the first time that I have worked with a fabricator and I was very excited to see how my idea manifested itself. Because the distance between my studio and the fabricator's studio is a 3.5 hour drive there were no test pieces or mock-ups. We texted drawings and photos back and forth, materials were ordered and shipped but until I got there I did not know what I would have here.

The work is still 'yet to be titled' and after seeing a painting on the support I wasn't sure of what to call the steel supports. Originally, I was thinking of creating a more solid plinth. That idea morphed into the drawings of the steel supports that were eventually welded together. Many years ago when I was making more sculpture than painting ... or during the period of time when I at least thought of these as two distinct 'things' ... I would have called the steel support a base or a pedestal but those words imply something that an object sits on that is separate and distinct from the object it supports. After seeing the 5 inch squares on top of the steel I saw the metal beneath was too integrated in the work as a whole to be thought of in these terms.

Quick aside, on my way to Ballard Road I stopped by the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY to view the exhibition Dona Nelson: Stand Alone Paintings. Here is a video of the exhibition put together by Thomas Erben Gallery, the representative of the artist.

Having seen the artist's work in other exhibitions (Whitney Biennial 2014) in which the works were hung at an angle to the wall, and thinking of Laura Owen's piece Untitled 2015 which I had seen again (I saw it in its first installation at Capitain Petzel in Berlin) at the Whitney Museum's retrospective in December, I was curious to see how Nelson solved the problem of the double sided painting and bringing it off the wall and into the space.

One thing I found is that unlike Owens how Nelson chose to make the paintings 'stand alone' appears as more of an afterthought than truly integral to the work as a whole. Although Nelson's palette is not my cup of tea I appreciate how she plays with paint, the surface, viscosity, the grid. There is a clear generational difference between Nelson's and Owen's approach to painting. Nelson is not using PS and other CAD programs to generate the images. And from the looks of how the canvases are stretched and the supports put together she is not surrounding herself with a team of assistants ... or if she is she may want to reconsider their skill level. Taken together, the works of Nelson and the work of Owen for me both painters paintings occupy a three dimensional space as a two dimensional object; yet Owen's painting remains painting, thumbing its nose at any notion this might be sculpture. Nelson's paintings are paintings that have been put on a pedestal, it's nice we get to see both sides but the only purpose of the foot is so we can move around the painting, they add nothing to the paintings themselves. If anything, the approaches Nelson has taken to the supports detract from the paintings. Sometimes it looks as if the artist by propping up the paintings on milk crates and cinder blocks, suspending using standard pipe fitting might be attempting to evoke an 'unfinished' studio atmosphere but this seems unnecessary and not very successful. The steel bases do not detract to the same extent but they also do not do what Owen's bolting into the floor of the massive canvases to make them 'stand alone' does - without apology claim the space of the sculpture, the three dimensional object, for painting. However, Owen's solution is one that few artists, including Nelson, would be able to to pull off and one few collectors, galleries, or museums would or could accommodate.

Now back to the work yet to be names and what to call the steel portion. The suggestion to call them 'crus' came from the fabricator, miChelle Vara. A 'crus', plural 'crura', can be the lower part of a leg or hind limb, or various parts of support structure likened to a leg. This word makes sense to me in relation to what the steel is doing for the work as a whole, it is distanced from the other terms, and it references the anthropomorphic-ness that the height of the work (approx. 5 feet 5 inches or 163 cm) communicates to the spectator as he or she looks into the painted sections at nearly eye level. There is also a 'dancing' and 'swaying' that the spindley-ness of the square steel rods holding up the heavier - yet lighter - wooden paintings with their light and colorful tones evokes.

So, although the work is yet to be named the steel component is now termed a 'crus' and together the 24 are 'crura'.

Here are some photos courtesy of miChelle Vara, Ballard Road Art Studio, 2018.

And for scale.

Back in Rhode Island I set the work up in my living/dining area to begin playing with configuration. More to come ...

Black, White and Blue : what Petra, Franzi and I were working on, Part 8

It's finally time for me to take over: what Petra and I (and Franzi, too) were working on, Part 7

After Petra added her watercolor I felt the paintings had reached a point where the physical application of the personas as tools in their creation had been maxed out. It was now time to assert myself more forcibly onto the picture plane.

I would do this by returning not just to oil paint but to the black and white palette which has re-emerged as a dominate part of my painting over the past 18 months. This would be a good place for a quick recap - links to previous postings in black and white - from oldest to most recent.

Looking at the development of the collage-painting Good Witches of the Between, Part Two (February 2017) in the end the layers of color become buried beneath glazes in blacks and whites. During the same period the paintings of Patchwork Surface moved from colorful, quilt-like beginnings to paintings with solid forms in mostly black and white tones and a smattering of color here and there. Interesting to note, this spring I dug out those paintings from the studio rack and began taking another look at them. Some I had continued to add colorful glazes to over the Summer/Fall 2017, others just lingered on the shelf. The colorful ones I hung on a red wall to look at some more.

Three I joined together to form a single, long, rectangular painting. It hangs on a wall in the greenhouse.

You might recognize the top panel in this 'new' painting as the source for the first painting Franzi and Petra physically participated in (March 2017), One Painting Three.

The next iteration of Good Witches of the Between, Part Four also tended towards dominant black and white, though some of Petra's more muted tones are contained within. Oddly, this Fall Franzi, after a previous intervention, claimed the canvas for himself and now it is blue.

Franzi is not the only one to over-paint older canvases. During the first half of 2017 I re-worked six 8 x 10 inch canvas I had originally painted in Fall 2013 into black and white (with a bit of collage) compositions. This work is found in the postings Three small asides and Three more small asides.

With Concertinaed and Elegy black and white began to play a greater, perhaps unifying, role in the visual organization and development of the works in which the personas were applied as tools. In Concertinaed Franzi's blue dominates, but the white space surrounding the blue shapes and the remnants of Petra's frottage and black watercolor washes lend themselves to creating additional, visual depth. Elegy, as its name suggests, is a darker work, a lament. Here even Franzi's blue is submerged in the darkness of the non-cradled side of the multi-panel painting. Still, shapes of varying whiteness and lightness find their place in the darker 'oily' side of the panels. The cradled side of the panels, with their un-primed wood and watercolor and thinned gesso flowing forms and washes is the opposite of yet the same as the non-cradled side.

The next double-sided multi-panel painting, Signs Left Behind, emerged from the sketchbook Deciphering Elegy, and is also a predominantly black and white painting. This small 'study' - it only consists of four 6 x 6 inch panels, was followed by 'the work yet to be titled' and as of this writing not quite finished. The intention behind the colors and shapes of this painting was to make a double-sided, multi-paneled painting playing with figure-ground in a simplified composition but not being too black and white, instead aiming for the gray area in between. However, this work is not complete and once I have the steel bases for the paintings next week this may change. I may add an additional layer or two of black glaze to the shapes.

This ends the recap of black and white and brings me back to this post and my takeover of the paintings with layers of black and white oil paint.

In approaching these paintings I knew Franzi's blue acrylic areas would remain prominent to the composition and the qualities of their 'acrylic-ness' would or could standout or be underplayed depending on how I chose to work with the oil paint. I also knew I wanted to maintain a transparency when the work is viewed up close -so that areas of the original inkjet printed paper, Petra's watercolor, and edges of Franzi's blue, might shine thru but also have the shapes read as solids from a distance. I knew the underlying colors would impact the black and white glazes sitting on top. With this knowledge I decided to begin using a thin layer of zinc white paint thinned with Liquin. I then applied a thin layer of asphaltum black also thinned with Liquin. The next layer of white I added marble dust to the Liquin and tube pigment to give a matte finish. The black shapes would maintain a semi-gloss finish. The blue acrylic areas vary. As I built up the layers I switched the pigments from a zinc to a titanium white and from asphaltum to mars black. The later pigments are less transparent by nature but by keeping the layers very thin I was able to achieve the balance between transparency and solidity I sought.

What follows are process pics. In the next post I will post images of just the paintings with no text. I mounted the paintings onto 11 x 14 inch canvas wrapped MDF boards. I liked the flatness of the paintings and wanted to maintain the thinness while making the work a bit more solid which is why I chose not to mount onto the deeper birch wood panels I've recently worked with. Aside from determining the configuration of the panels upon installation - and a better title - these paintings are 'finished'.

Petra comes back to: what Petra and I and now Franzi are working on, Part 6

Watercolor.

Just because she has ventured onto drier terrain does not mean Petra has left behind the flowing wetness of watercolor. Her intent was to bring even more definition to the shapes beginning to emerge from within the paintings via thin layers of color. Additionally, the edges of the glued on shapes and the crevices of the textures in Franzi's layers of blue are hospitable places Petra's watercolor to pool gather and pool, creating thin lines and adding depth.

I give some definition to: what Petra and I (and Franzi, too) are working on, Part 5

After Franzi had added his blues I decided to go back into the paintings with thinned acrylic gesso to once more create space and define shapes. Here are some images of the paintings laid out on the studio table.

Franzi steps into: what Petra and I are working on, Part 4

Not much need to describe once more Franzi's process so first here is a short video of him adding his layers of blue to the collages [which could now maybe be called paintings?] followed by some pics of what resulted.

Sealed (Part 3)

Franzi had been patiently watching Petra and I work. Once the collages were 'finished' and Petra had made her rubbings he asked if he could make his mark on them. This sounded like a good next step to me but I decided it would also help to seal the cut, inkjet printed papers to the paper's surface. So, before I let Franzi have a go, taking a cue from Petra I laid them out on the studio floor, and then using a ratty, stiff bristle brush to add a 'mark' texture, I sealed each collage using acrylic matte medium.

Petra Frottage to Drawing

Last Fall while working on the panels which would become Elegy Petra rediscovered the method of frottage. By rubbing a graphite stick on sheets of hot press watercolor paper laid on top of the collaged Elegy panels she was able to capture as a 'print-drawing' what would become the substructure of Concertinaed. Here is a closer look back at the first Petra Frottage.

That foray away from the wet medium of watercolors and into the hard, smeary gray-ness of graphite must have awoken something in Petra. When she say the slightly raised shapes glued to the sheets of Bristol paper she dug out some sheets of 18 x 24 inch 80lb white drawing paper, grabbed her graphite sticks and started rubbing.

Here is a very short video of her at work on the newer rubbings.

Once she had made rubbings of all ten of the collages she laid them out on the studio floor.

Then she packed all the rubbings away into a portfolio, except for one. She took that one into the greenhouse and hung it on the 'clean' side if the wall facing the buildings exterior wall and not the between-space facing the easel.

The thing about frottage, at least when Petra is doing it, is it is not precise. It leaves echo-y, messy textures and marks. Marks that are not quite chance but not really planned. Petra appeared intent on working with the marks, like we did in Concertinaed, but by herself and different.

She wanted to draw.

Where her watercolors are free and flowing her work with graphite pencils and erasers is tight and controlled. She began by using a white plastic eraser to eliminate areas of superfluous marks on the paper in the spaces between the rubbings of the shapes and outside the 'edges' of the 11 x 14 inch paper upon which the shapes were glued. Similar to how she and I decided to make space in the original paintings by cutting them apart and gluing the fragments to the larger sheet of paper.

Here is what the frottage then looked like in whole and in detail.

Slowly Petra worked on the drawing over the course of about two weeks. It must have been a change for her to work standing up instead of sitting at a table. Her preferred pencil is a 6B and she builds up tone using multiple layers marks applied and then removed using a kneaded eraser. At times a mahlstick can be sighted in her right hand. When the graphite smudges and smears too much the white plastic eraser is brought out again. A few pics in natural light on a cloudy day -hence the paper does not appear as bright white and the graphite is not quite as dark as when seen in the flesh.

When she stopped work on this drawing she packed it away into the portfolio with the remaining frottages but took another one out and hung it on the wall. A pic of the second drawing will follow.

What Petra and I are working on, Part 2

As might by now be expected from us, the next step in our process was to take the 7 x 10 inch mixed media paintings back to the digital realm, i.e. the scanner/copier/printer. However, this time we changed it up a bit by not preserving a digital image file of each scan, instead we just made color copies onto standard sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 inch, 98 bright, 22 lb printer paper. What we did do was enlarge the image in the scanner to fit the larger sheet of paper.

The next step was back to me, although, now and again both Franzi and Petra gave their opinions on how I was laying out the fragments I had cut the printouts into with my #11 x-acto knife blade onto sheets of 11 x 14 inch Bristol paper.

Our intention was to go bigger by adding more space between the fragments of the original (sic) images and then see how the new forms, both those created out of the previous ones and the surrounding spaces, developed.

Here are some images of what resulted after gluing down. Photos are taken on a cloudy morning, by natural light on the wall in the greenhouse.

What Petra and I are working on

7 inches x 10 inches 300 gram hot press watercolor, inkjet prints, watercolors, matter acrylic medium, gesso, enamel paint markers, oil based colored pencils, 98 gram paper, glue, acrylic paint with drops of blue paint courtesy of Franzi ...

Working off of ten inkjet prints of two shapes from Deciphering Elegy, Petra encouraged me to break out some materials/tools I hadn't worked with much in the past four to five years. There is something familiar about these collage-painting-drawings reminiscent of the paintings I did between 2009-2013, at the same time there is something different happening here that I need to study closer.

Shelving Concertinaed

Postscript to this post; June 13, 2018.

When I walked into the room where Concertinaed is displayed two evenings in a row I found the following:

Apparently a gust of wind from the open window combined with turning on a whole house ventilation fan blew the piece onto the floor. This is important to remember when displaying this work in spaces where air movement can lead to it blowing away. It did land gracefully.

The future of the work yet to be titled

Presentation as ...

How does the spectator engage with the work?

Ultimately, this is not up to the artist, it is beyond his or her control. The spectator will engage with the work as he or she chooses.

In the past years I have addressed this by ceding as much control as possible to the spectator. However, in doing so I am still in control by not controlling how the spectator engages with the work.

One way I have often done this is by establishing conditions where touching the work - normally paintings' greatest taboo - is not only encouraged but hard to avoid. If the spectator won't touch the work freely it is not guaranteed that the work will not somehow touch the spectator.

I've played with ways of stacking, laying out, suspending from ceilings, working in spaces where the work can be viewed from more than one angle or side, using mirrors, or otherwise displaying and presenting painting in ways beyond hanging on the wall.

I have played around with double-sided works in which access to one side is limited to a very select few - for instance, to the person installing the work or otherwise in a position to handle the work.

But with this still to be titled work I and the others decided we wanted to try something else. To present the painting in a way where the spectator questions its identity as painting the same way he or she might question what is figure, what is ground.

Although the painting is quite long it is rather small at a height of only 5 inches. If the painting were divided into its individual panels it would lose any relation to largeness it had. This inherent smallness of its fragments made me hesitant to present it in ways where the spectator could freely separate the painting into its parts. But I wanted the painting to be seen without forcing the spectator into contortions; needing to stoop to the level of this painting (but its a thought for future paintings!). This meant I would need to bring the painting up to the eye level of the average height spectator which could be done one of two ways: 1. suspending from above 2. supporting from below.

Petra has tried the first approach, suspension from above, with her work A Little Madness in the Spring. It works n conjunction with the idea of the hanging garden but it is a difficult work to install if the space does not allow or is ill-equipped to accommodate this type of installation. I want the work not only to be seen by the spectator near his or her eye level, I also want it to be easily exhibited no matter the conditions of the space in which it might be exhibited.

Option two, supporting from below immediately brought to my mind a plinth. At first I envisioned a traditional, modern white plinth upon which one would sit a small sculpture - a bronze, glass, or ceramic object. It would need to be as unobtrusive as possible as to not detract from the painting. Yes, it would need to be at least ten feet long, and to bring the panels to the average spectators eye level around five feet high. But it should not bee to deep so as the panels would not be swallowed up by the surface upon which they sit. With the deepest panels being two inches deep a plinth as just described would need to be no more than five inches deep.

Hmm, a plinth ten feet long, five feet high and five inches deep ... I don't need Sir Isaac to tell me there are issues with the stability of such a plinth if built in a traditional, modern form.

Not to mention it would be difficult to move/store/build...

There is the option to break it up into sections or even into 24 individual plinths but stability would remain an issue and though weighting the bottom could help in stabilizing the plinth it would make lifting and moving an issue.

So I gave it a few days thought. And suddenly one afternoon while reading on the sofa I looked up and saw the answer staring back at me. A metal sculpture I had made out of aluminum in 1987. The sculpture is just over five feet tall and consists of a small square base plate of approximately four inches, a five foot rod topped off with a plate about 3 inches x 8 inches welded to the top of which is a curling whirl of strips of aluminum - part of my grandfather's lawn chair - that had been run through a roller and pop-riveted together. The work is incredibly light weight and yet stable and easy to move. Metal! I began thinking of other sculptures I had made in the late eighties also using rods and small bases welded together to create a pedestal for a smaller sculpture to sit on top. Of course this is the solution; twenty-four individual supports upon which each panel can sit like a head on top of a stick-figure body, held in place by magnets embedded into the bottom edge of the wood. With nothing sticking out at the sides the panels on their pedestals can be grouped close together, in a straight or curved line, even in a circle. Or they could be spread out, scattered through a space, or clustered in smaller groups. They would be easy to move, store, and flexible in their installation. So I set about designing what I want. I am currently in the process of pricing the materials and eventual fabrication by others - although I do have a welder which I might just break out.

If all goes well I hope to have this work finished and documented in the next two months. Maybe by then it will even have a title. Until then it remains the work yet to be named with a drawing of the legs which will carry it, me, Franzi and Petra to our next collaboration.

Here is the drawing.

The now of the work yet to be titled

Seeing as Petra has posted her interlude scans of each panel before I added the shapes, I am now posting pics of each panel's non-cradled side in its current state. The photos were taken on a cloudy day on the studio wall, hence the variation in lightness/whiteness.

For me, one of the biggest challenges in creating a double sided painting is how it is to be presented to the spectator. This is clearly not a painting meant to be hung on a wall. The blue side painted by Franzi is to be viewed on equal footing with the non-cradled side containing Petra's and my contribution to the work. The next post presents my thoughts on this work's presentation.

Petra's Interlude

Before I post about the final stage of the work still lacking a name Petra has requested I post the 24 scans of each panel she made before the shapes were added.

Still no title but the next steps

It turns out what Petra planned for the large painting on paper was to make it even bigger, at least in terms of length. Spinning off of Signs Left Behind Petra envisioned stretching this painting out into a ten foot painting by using 24 of the same gesso board panels, only 5 inches square instead of 6. Twelve of the panels would be 2 inches deep, the other twelve would only be 3/4 of an inch instead of 1 1/2 inches deep in order to provide a greater difference in depth. Franzi would do his blue thing to the cradled side of the panels making this another double-sided painting. Petra would cut apart and mount her painting on paper to the non-cradled side, sealing the surface with acrylic matte medium. After which I would paint shapes derived from one of the Deciphering Elegy which I would take apart further in order to stretch it across the ten feet of the painting. These fragments of the shape would be the building blocks - letters - of the paintings grammar; when combined they form the syntax of its language [Foucault, 1970: 34-44]. The shapes would be simultaneously light and monolithic, complementing and contrasting the white, airy, fluid ground of Petra's painting and Melusine's writing upon which they stood or rather in some cases create a space receding from the shapes formed by the white space flowing around leaving the spectator to ask not only what is front or back of this painting but also which is figure and which is ground?

Here are the photos of what took place.

The last two pics are only the first two of approximately 14 thin layers of oil paint, a layer a day for two weeks.

Origins of the work yet to be titled

I did not know what Petra had in mind while she was combining watercolor with the inkjet prints. It was obvious that she was applying the paint in thicker, more saturated layers. As it turned out she was thinking of Concertinaed and transferring the ink or paints using water. And she wanted to work larger, incorporating transference into her process as she contemplated the deliquescent identity.

She asked me to cut her a piece from a roll of Stonehenge 250 gram printmaking and drawing paper; it was approximately 50 inches x 60 inches. She proceeded to lay it out on piece of cardboard on top of a work table in the center of the basement half of the studio. She sprayed it down with water and then picking up one of the smaller inkjet print/watercolors from the grid laid out on her worktable she carefully sprayed water onto the smaller piece of paper and laid it paint-side down onto the larger sheet of paper in the same configuration.

After applying pressure to each print with her bamboo baren, sopping up the excess water pooling in the ripples of the paper, and allowing the paper to just sit for a while she carefully removed each sheet of paper -much less saturated as when she began - to reveal what had been left behind.

While the paper dried Petra foraged through the piles she found on the tables and stools in the studio. There she found the prints and scraps of Melusine's writing Franzi and I had printed out and used bits of in Signs Left Behind. She sprayed down the larger sheet of paper with water once more, then the printed side of the pages with the writing, and carefully laid them face down onto the painting she had begun.

Smoothing them out, blotting up the water, allowing them to sit awhile, removing the larger sheets before adding another layer.

The next warm and sunny day Petra did something new. She moved the large sheet of paper from the basement half of the studio into the greenhouse where she hung it on the 'clean side' of the wall. There she began to paint with watercolors in a vertical position. After a while I went in and she pointed out to me what she was doing.

On the exterior wall behind her still hung the sheet of mylar I had used in my playing Elegy and Concertinaed in December. She photographed herself looking at the reflection of the painting drying on the wall.

Petra took the painting back to the studio table in the basement and continued transferring prints of the shapes from Deciphering Elegy she had sprayed with water. Some of the areas of the transferred shapes and the Sütterlin script she painted back into.

And then began adding layers of very thin acrylic gesso with a slightly blue tinge and employing Franzi's quick dry-hair dryer technique.

Eventually bringing it back to the wall.

And then she told Franzi and I what she wanted us to do.