I feel the ominous edges of boredom creeping in..........more razor blade rocks, more wiped out tree trunks. Yesterday I did a portrait using this very same piece of paper. It looked like an illustration for a romance novel, so I wiped it off and used the paper to do another one of Deep Cove. Since I was visiting Diana while I did it, I enjoyed it, but as a serious painting experience, it was a bust. It reminds me a little of the Chinese painting workshop I took once. The point is to create a bamboo branch that looks exactly like everyone else's bamboo branch. Every nuance is judged against a certain ideal and success is achieved when you can't tell the results apart. I can't imagine anyone making rocks any different from my rocks, or trees different from my trees. It's a tecnique that could be easily taught to anyone with basic watercolor skills. I have heard of artists making wonderful abstracts on this paper using all kinds of tricks to move the apint around. I can see the potential for that, but I don't understand where the satisfaction would come from. The paper makes the painting, not the artist.
The experience must be something like what Jackson Pollack used to do......dripping paint to record his movements as he worked. The finished product was the result of a physical action, devoid of conscious emotional content. Well, he was trying to discover the meaning of painting in a world where the camera replaced the artist as a record keeper. We are still wondering about that, but I don't feel that I want to keep asking the question over and over again. Big deal.......I moved a razor blade over some paint.
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