An odd thing happened tonight while working on Field I:

The little vertical strokes got messier, more complex, and then I started adding the little black shapes above the their usual place in the white field. All of a sudden I felt as if I were looking at a small, inchoate Last Judgment: tiny souls ripped from their frozen waste and sucked up into an even colder empyrean.

Awful. I hope it lasts.

I just remembered that I hadn’t updated my fans on what happened with Field II. It was sold for $60 at the “Tulips & Juleps” affair on Saturday night. I actually do not know who bought it. I’m trying to find out. The start of a brilliant career.

This is a very, very odd feeling.

I stopped working on the painting on Wednesday, if you will recall:

I left it to see if would change on Thursday, and it didn’t. Late last night, I signed it.

This is the first painting I have signed in probably 37 years. It took me a couple of passes, actually. I used to sign my stuff with a sturdy DL, but I decided to start afresh with a more traditional Lyles. I tried a printed version, but finally went with my actual signature. I ended up having to practice for quite a while to get it right.

So now there’s a signed Lyles sitting downstairs, waiting to be picked up today. “Field II,” gouache on board, 15″x20″. I’ve dated it on the back with today’s date, along with the title and my signature again. That was mostly to indicate which way was up, actually.

This is a very odd feeling. It’s going to be displayed in a silent auction next to the work of Martin Pate, Georgie Dunn, and others, real artists. People are going to look at it. Evaluate it. Decide if they want it, could love it, would be willing to pay money for it. Or not.

And I will just have to smile and pretend that all of this is very natural which of course it is not. Even if I make small talk about how I’ve just taken up painting again, I cannot possibly say, “And this is my first painting.” And what if people say, “I’d love to see more of your stuff”? I cannot say, with a bitter laugh, “There is no other stuff.”

Yes, anticipating your response, that would be worse than their not asking to see more of my stuff.

This is the emotion of artistic fraud at its most basic. At least I’ll get a monolog for Bears & Giraffes (now in development by the Lacuna Group) out of it.

But Dale, you might say encouragingly, it’s a good piece. Yes, I think it is. (That does not mitigate its fraudulent nature.) And I want to do more in a similar vein. More “snow” compositions, or should I explore other colors?

It is interesting that what I wanted to do with the subject would be more effectively done with oils than gouache, but oils are for the future. They’re expensive and require a commitment of space and ventilation.

In other news, Stephen Czarkowski has, with prompting, remembered that he has a world premiere at his fingertips and has requested the score for “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way.” This is in addition to the idea we had recently of offering it to the Chinese Youth Orchestra for their Georgia tour this summer. And my goal today in fact is to try to finish the two-piano arrangement so that it might actually be performed by a chorus.

later

Done, for a ducat! I was hacking my way through the underbrush that clogs the “piano score” at “I will give up sleeping forever, I said,” when suddenly I emerged into what was clearly finished material. Apparently I skipped over the middle part and worked on the ending last summer. Which means, wait for it, I’m done. “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” is now ready for choral performance without an orchestra.

I’ll see your Cy Twombly and raise you a Jacob Lawrence.

I know how I want the white paint to look. Let’s see if I can do it.

The taxes are at a standstill while my IRA advisers try to figure out who coded the rollover wrong and why the feds think I was the recipient of a huge disbursement that was taxed, and which if uncorrected stands to have me owe $12,000 in unpaid taxes for last year.

So I thought I’d paint for a while.

Here’s the most recent thing I was working on.

You will notice that I’ve been futzing with it. I am so far from thinking it’s going well that I will not comment on it. And yes, I’ve turned it upside down. I’ll let you know whether that did any good or not later.

At the moment, of course, I have to produce a painting for the Patrons of the Centre event at the end of the month. I served on the committee for the Brooks Arts Scholarship, and while discussing with my fellow committee members what an awesome group of polymaths we all were, I divulged that I had started painting again. I was immediately asked to cough up a painting for the silent auction. My vanity could not say no.

In a traditionally Lichtenbergian maneuver, I am here blogging and putting up this shot of the board with a couple of pencil scribbles on it. You can tell absolutely nothing about the thing, but as long as I keep writing here, I don’t have to break out the paints and actually, you know, produce art.

OK, I guess it’s time to go clean off my palette and get started. It still has gobs of dried up gouache from my recent efforts, including the octopus I painted in fluorescent paint out on Craig’s studio wall last November, and I need a fresh start.

afk–bbs

later

Here it is a little while later, with some color blobs on it. Magnificent progress. That’s what I’m calling it, magnificent progress. Actually, I’m calling it a break for a while, since I have to go to a special Masterworks rehearsal for the “men’s ensemble,” i.e., those of us who volunteered to sing the porters’ quartet in “Moonshine Lullaby” because the men as a whole weren’t getting it. God bless Irving Berlin.

I began my “close observation” painting the other day but haven’t had time to blog about it.

Here’s the first pass:

Bold, ugly, blocking out shapes and masses.

Second pass:

Still pretty “slashy,” but already getting more detail in the handle and around the rim. Also, I reshaped everything: the mug is wider, and the handle is more accurate.

I haven’t really painted anything in a couple of days, on the road, busy redefining literacy assessment in Georgia, that kind of thing, but I thought I’d post a little of what I’ve been doing.

This is a little sketch I did on the backside of a series of little tiny sketches which would be too small even to photograph unless I actually used the camera instead of my iPhone, and I’m too lazy for that.

The goal was do a hardcore study of shadows and mass, and in that I think it’s successful. I had intended to make this a more complex thing, but I kind of like it as it stands.

One reason I like gouache as a medium is that it can be blended even after drying. (It can also be used on the palette after drying; very economical.) In this case, I could go back in with shadows and reblend the edges between light and dark, shifting the edges to one side or the other.

My next study will be to see if I can get even half the reflections right. One thing I do realize is that the “white” of the mug itself has to be gray, because otherwise the hotspots of the reflected lights have nowhere to go. My intention is to layer and layer and layer the paint, probably working in fresh stuff from the tubes in a fairly thickish, flat manner, just keep adding and correcting what I see until I’m happy that I’m nearly correct in my observations and the translation of same.