V250 Woman Curling in on Herself

V250 Woman curling in on herself
24x24” oil on panel
private collection

June 8, 1998 9pm: This evening I made a sketch on a 2x2' panel, of a woman curled in on herself. She fills the square, almost a circle herself, almost a chair. I want to make her flesh orange, with blue or purple shadows. Beside her is a rock, and this I will make flesh-coloured, the background a blue void. For a few moments, thinking about getting the paint out in the morning, I considered textured or directional strokes, instead of the very plain blended effect I had originally envisioned. It is useless to think about that, though, as whatever feels right is how I will paint it in the morning. It is always at the very moment of creation that the design is truly conceived. The rock, for example, was unplanned and appeared as I drew the lower right corner. The rock has a certain fluidity, though it is just a line or two, as if it too wants to become a woman. It is a piece of statuary about to become alive, or an iteration of the woman's pose. Is the woman uncurling or curling up? She is a knot, or a vortex, drawing to the inner being.

June 9, 1998 8am: I blocked in the under-painting for V250. She is actually a Visage with a body. She is cadmium orange against a French ultramarine background, her hair raw sienna. Her companion rock is flesh tint, looking mauve, a life form in itself, more real than the icon/woman. The rock is a Neolithic goddess, the woman a piece of furniture, product of another decade, overstuffed but somehow renewed.

Orange, transparent and peripherally jarring, is an oddity of existence. Where is orange, exactly? In blooms and sinking suns and the neon of fruits and tubers. There are orange chairs in the bank at the mall, soothingly retro and business-like; "This is not your living-room." When is the woman orange? It is an existentialist question, for the woman has chosen not to be a fixture and has twisted around into herself, refusing to be named. Not without a final pout.

The woman's expression came out of this morning's gestural brush strokes, the oily glide of a nice medium round brush tipped in linseed and French ultramarine, merging sullenly with the pure orange (the colours having been kept well apart on the palette, as I do all my mixing on the painting itself). This produces, in the sometimes backward way of art, the mother colour. Wanting to be green. The mouth turns down, clinging to orange.

June 12, 1998: Yesterday and today I worked up the arm and hand of the woman in V250. The gesture of the hand, palm down, suggests one moment protectiveness or defensiveness, the next moment the rejection of anything beyond the arm's barrier, which stretches like a glowing halo over the woman's head. A headrest. I envy the orange chairwoman her effortless curving. One does want to curl up comfortably, in defiance of angles and corners. I stayed longer at the easel today, painting flaps of hair instead of doing chores. The wind had been howling and thumping under the cantilevered part of the studio, driving great sheets of rain across the lake and against the windows. The sound and greyness outside is soothing, contrapuntal to the silent studio with its hot centre of colour.

July 21, 1998: After a long trip, and a week teaching an Artists Colony, it is good to be back in my studio. As I work on the orange lady curled in on herself, I realize that the reason, probably, that I use unusual body colour in most pictures is to lessen the sexual impact of a naked body. Here, I used orange largely to avoid using flesh colour, which would draw too much attention to the body's nakedness. Clothing, too, distracts from the gesture of the body. The movement and landscape of the body is brought out by an un-flesh colour, where the viewer is freed of mind-set and inhibitions to regard the shapes before him, all the while identifying with the familiar limbs and postures.

September 8, 1998: Several more weeks of holidays and delays, and I was finally able to get back to studio work, most importantly the finishing of the orange lady and her companion rock. The entire composition is a great circle, weighted very heavily now by the rock, which offers to keep the motion balanced as the woman turns on her inner axis. Even the rock seems to curl up on itself.

More than anything else, though, the woman reminds me of the snails I used to represent the brain in the Raven Series, a fitting symbol, since this series is about thinking.

Orange Chair Series