Canvas

The canvas that I am currently working on is much toothier than I am used to. The texture of the surface is coarse; it is like painting on sandpaper. Which I like. Which I wanted.

The paintings are of the shoppers in big superstores like Wal-Mart and Target. I want there to be an earthy texture to the painting. Like a canvas bag from a health food store or a burlap sac.

I like it aesthetically, the texture, the color and the weight of the cloth when I stretch it. But also I want to emphasize the fact that I am making paintings; real canvas with bumps and texture and a presents.

I have this great place that does my giclee prints. The prints are so realistic and smooth surfaced. I envy them. Like a serf in the Middle Ages I marvel at a photograph, I find there is a magic that a print on canvas plays on me. I yearn for my paintings to achieve the same smooth, faultless surface.

But I am not a machine. And that is a good thing. The Rothko that I saw at the MOCA exhibit breathed in the room and the De Feo had dirty edges and frayed lines, imperfections that makes the thing original, proves it to be handmade.

Anyway, I want all this texture on my canvas but I have to learn how to paint on it. It is greedy. It takes all the paint off my brush before I can spread it to the rest of the hungry canvas. It has made the current image lean, anorexic, anemic for color.

If I could use oils I would be fine, oils are slick, abundant and generous to the canvas. You can share out oil paint like biblical fishes. It slithers on a canvas like a whore on silk.

The smell of the turpentine and even odorless mineral spirit (a misnomer) sends my pregnant body retching. So I am just going to have to re-teach myself the joys of acrylics.

So as not to bugger up what I have done, I am going today to work on a simple landscape. Same MO. A light sketch beneath, and then work the blues of the sky and ocean. I have a few smaller prepared canvases for this very purpose.

Anyway, better get going,