The little fears

So this is what happened when I painted over the squirty piece (see below for a photo of that one). I see two things that echo the current times.

The first is a Tuscan hillside, and I suspect that's because of a post I read this week from a friend who emigrated to Italy and lives in a village in Tuscany which is now on lockdown thanks to the Corona Virus. Of course I am thinking of her; the news from there is so horrific...

But the second, and probably more indicative observation is that this one looks timid to me; it speaks of fearfulness.

As I mentioned, it started with the squirty one I made, using up the tiny tubes (and less favored colors) of paint I had leftover from a set I won in a contest;
I figured the textures would add to the complexity of whatever the final painting turned out to be.

For the do-over, I started with Christopher Mathie's trick: Having covered the previous day's palette with saran wrap, I lifted off the saran wrap and blotted the paint on it all over the squirty canvas, and then worked from there.  Now this is a fairly small canvas -- 18x24, I believe -- and it's one of the cheap narrow frame ones I bought when I was producing paintings for the doors in the library show (the sliding doors on which they exhibit can't accommodate the thicker frames most galleries prefer) so I knew it would never go to a gallery, so that explains some of the problem; I've always been much bolder when I have a larger canvas to work on.

But all those small strokes, similarly weighted, speak to me of all the fear that's out there right now: and not just fear of the big stuff -- death, bankruptcy, riots in the streets -- but the little fears that mark our days, of grocery carts and door handles; of library books and take-out bags; of hugs and little children -- all the things we used to touch with impunity and now we see as inimical to life.

And in a way, to have taken the boldness and anger of that red squirty thing and tamed it with these smaller strokes and blue is not so different from that sponge I mentioned in my first post: an attempt to soothe, to wipe away, to soften the devastation of the news that's assaulting us daily. For sure the red thing was painted in brighter times, but is timidity our only choice? I hope not...

Learnings: Small canvases don't allow room for me to be bold.
                  Strong darks and lights aren't enough. You need large areas contrasting with small ones.