Here are the two latest. I finished both of these paintings this past week, both have lingered in the studio, languished in the studio, for months. Each one presented certain compositional and conceptual challenges. The painting above presented more of a conceptual challenge. I was pretty much done with it but I felt like it was boring, or missing something. I was painting on it one day, not really thinking about it too hard, and adding in horses and owls and other animals in the buildings. All of a sudden it seemed to relate exactly to some things I am going through in my life. All of a sudden it took on a very personal autobiographical nature.
The painting below started out as a gouache painting on paper. Never satisfied with it, I cut it in half angularly and put each half on either side of a wooden panel, to start another diptych. the compositional problem was how to fill in the space in the middle. After several incarnations, I ended up painting trees that created a portal into another dimension.
