Untitled is one of those paintings where I started it setting up problems that I could not have known how to finish until I dove into in - and indeed, was not happy about displaying until a key, nearly final little market brought it together enough to feel it was worth showing. Like many of my large paintings, including Patricia, Population, and another large Untitled piece in my studio, it is a of jazz, begun with a melody guessed and something of a color structure, and weeks, months, and sometimes years of refinement; it's executed reactively, in the moment, like jazz, but its structures emerge and are refined over time, like a classical work.
I've grown to like this one- it's also in that group of abstracts where
I worked on the edge of losing it constantly (painters will know
exactly what I mean). There are some paintings that you "give up" on
early, but keep working on, ready to follow where it leads only after
you surrender all your assumptions about what it SHOULD be.
If you look at the detail photo, the relationship between the two final marks: the isolated, complex and bilaterally symmetrical blueish mark in the upper right, and the leaf like folded mark in the lower right, after a lot of refinement, made the whole work well enough to show. The energetic forms that I forced into illusionistic space elsewhere in the painting (DeWitt Cheng ties this to Abstract Illusionism) could be much looser, but these two demanded very specific forms that were organically "believable," meaning that look less like paint and more like a painting of something specific.
But what? Here's a way to look at this: paintings are often about what is heard and felt, not only what is seen: if it works as visual music, I'm doing ok.
"Untitled" is available for view at my studio by appointment. Sales information is on my website, www.JamieBollenbach.com.
If you look at the detail photo, the relationship between the two final marks: the isolated, complex and bilaterally symmetrical blueish mark in the upper right, and the leaf like folded mark in the lower right, after a lot of refinement, made the whole work well enough to show. The energetic forms that I forced into illusionistic space elsewhere in the painting (DeWitt Cheng ties this to Abstract Illusionism) could be much looser, but these two demanded very specific forms that were organically "believable," meaning that look less like paint and more like a painting of something specific.
But what? Here's a way to look at this: paintings are often about what is heard and felt, not only what is seen: if it works as visual music, I'm doing ok.
"Untitled" is available for view at my studio by appointment. Sales information is on my website, www.JamieBollenbach.com.