Energy of Bliss

Notes taken directly from my reflection journal, uncut and unedited:

This view emphasized the twisting motion of the manipulation process. I particularly enjoy how the green allows the orange to feel more intense to the point it appears to be absorbing the green. The contorted mattress springs look as though they are submerging into a thick, orange liquid (except where there is too much overlap and where the springs are over the concrete floor – that falsifies the illusion). I welcome these issues and believe I’ve been aiming at the creation and denial of illusion in almost every work of art I’ve created since the 80’s. It is what I appreciate most about mattress spring units. Again, this view included a strip of the concrete floor which provides for more diversity and sets up a visual challenge for me to integrate. In this painting I ended up mixing a blueish gray which ended up more blue than gray. When I applied that color to the canvas, I realized that blue began to operate similarly to something in reality I notice daily and have thought to include in a work of art “one day.” Well that day was now with this painting. It is similar looking at white blinds at dusk in a room with incandescent lighting – the blueish, dusk lighting effects against the warm incandescent lighting effects create the illusion of vibration/simultaneous contrast. I see this happening in the lower left. This effect is enhanced in part due to that I painted the blue negative spaces allowing the background orange to appear as the positive, coil springs’ shadow there is no positive or negative spaces in shadows anyway. Painting the negative spaces also works well in the middle shadow area. I intensified the hue of those shadows with alizarin crimson first then added a pure, saturated orange in the negative spaces. I also added a few pure yellow zips at the edges of the orange working wet into wet ensuring a blend instead of a line-like strip. I wanted to call attention to the twist mainly and so I mixed a spring green color and applied it to the twisted steel rod parts/lines. I also began adding glazes of phthalo blue over the inner ‘zones’ and then stepped back and stared at the piece. Before the glazes I had painted various shades of orange in the negative spaces for the sky between the leaves affect. It came to me to add a yellow glaze to zones opposite the phthalo blue glaze zones. I liked how that both enhanced the feel of the twist as well as asymmetrically balancing the composition. The last glazes I added needed to be less in whole zones and because the ovals of the coil springs in succession add to the spiraling, I applied a pure orange glaze to the negative spaces inside the coil springs mainly on the lower right side of the bend and balance them out in a few negative spaces around the composition.