Work in Progress

I have started painting the new work and polishing some of the work that I started a couple of months ago. I'm pretty happy with how the fault piece (below) is coming along although I'm probably going to tone down the colors a little more as I polish it (adding some brown tones).


And I really like how the circle pieces are looking. I'm going to keep the circle sections clear on both of them.

With this striped piece I'm experimenting with two black stripes. Not sure about it yet. There is a fine line between making it identifiably black and completely covering the grain. I want the viewer to still see the curls and grain pattern. It might work, not sure yet.

And I've painted the hole piece (cut from the one above) as I said earlier, with a gradation of color. I think it is coming along but could be darker red in the middle and a little more orange gradation needed. The figure in this wood is just spectacular.
I was struggling with this piece until I decided to add a red rectangle. I like it now.

And I like how these two "Mondrian-esque" pieces are evolving. I like the balance of beautiful with hideous colors. I'm finding that a good level of hideousness is good for a painting. A hideous color isn't really hideous next to a beautiful color, and a beautiful color becomes more interesting next to a hideous one. Together they are definitely better than on their own.

And even if people do mention Mondrian too much when seeing these pieces, at least they have different colors than he used and they include interesting grain patterns/coloration.


But these two I'm still struggling with. This small one has an imbalance of hideous colors but I'm not sure how to make it better yet.

And this one just isn't very interesting yet. There might just be too much color in both of them. I would consider adding a couple of black rectangles, but there are already a lot of black in them. I might remove color from some sections. Not sure yet.

In Praise of Mistakes and Piet Mondrian

I welcome mistakes in my work because I often find that mistakes force me to find creative solutions that result in designs much better than I originally envision. With the piece below, I had originally glued it up in the wrong order. After recutting and reglueing it the lines between the old and new cherry pieces was too visible so I inlaid the black opaque epoxy over it. The result is something that reminds me of Piet Mondrian's work. I had been thinking that it would be interesting to do a Piet Mondrianesque piece but wasn't planning on doing it in the immediate future - but then it just showed up anyway. Not that I'm a fan of his art, I just think it would look better if it were done in wood. My distaste for his paintings derive from seeing his retrospective at the Smithsonian. I thought his early work was interesting but then it looked like he slowly went insane and he was trying to draw the view down with him. Oh the monotony! They just got bigger and bigger, painting after painting, room after room, the same thing over and over. By the end, I couldn't look any more. Definitely a Mondrian overload. If only he had worked in wood he might have been able to continue making something interesting.