P257 Brachiopod

P257 Brachiopod
11x14" oil on canvas
private collection

March 24, 1999: I fetched a small stretched canvas from the studio store-room, and made a sketch of a large brachiopod shape on it. I am fascinated with its spirals and divided hemispheres, like a brain with wings. Before I went to bed, I stained the background with metallic copper oil paint. How lovely the shape of this creature is, curled in its gorgeous shell.

March 25, 1999: I worked on the little brachiopod painting, which has a copper-fleshy life of its own. I am not sure it makes an actual painting. An oil sketch, I suppose. But the shape fascinates me, and the unusual colour combination. It is interesting to be working on a stretched canvas again, for the first time in perhaps fifteen years.

March 26, 1999: Although I spent several hours painting in the studio today, I did not make the progress I expected. Working on the new fossil creature, I was at first not happy with the Viridian I had added, and so removed it from the picture and from my palette. Then I decided that the French Ultramarine was bothering me, and removed it, which effectively wiped out most of my previous work, so I dipped a cloth in thinner and wiped it all off, leaving a somewhat subdued version of my simple pencil sketch. I decided that it is best to remain with a limited palette when trying ideas; in this case, the palette is, and has been for some time, Pthalo blue, Indian red, and Naples yellow. For this picture I am using the copper oil paint, which is in the same family as the Indian red, imparting now a green, now a purple glow to the other colours. The fossil resembles bone at times, a winged creature at others, a rock or a flower. It doesnt matter which. It is a compelling shape, an ambiguous design from the past, embedded in our memories but nameless.

March 28, 1999: The brachiopod, P257, is coming along nicely now that I have changed the background from copper to Pthalo blue. I realize now that I should have begun with an under-painting of blue, and perhaps added the copper on top, as I have done with the gold in V254. Many false starts on this one. It feels different, probably because of the stretched canvas, and the subject is ambiguous enough to be disturbing at times. I see something different in it every time I walk by, something floral, something organic, a rock, a skull. But its first image, of a winged creature, is still what draws me to the pattern.

March 30, 1999: I am struggling with my feelings over the fossils. In V254, the hanging, and the small canvas, P257, they seem more like objects placed on a ground than subjects for a painting. An odd thing for me to say, since I usually put whatever comes to mind in my paintings. I did not create these fossil creatures, but I have turned them into something, my own creatures I suppose. I want to combine a fossil with a Visage, a creature which will puzzle over it as I have. Again and again, I pick up the fossils in the studio and turn them over, staring into them, eagerly following their curves and their sudden immersion into the rock. The forces behind their creation are beyond imagining, of a different era. But what attracts me is their fractured parts, revealing petrified chambers and imprints of organs, spreading like plants and flowers inside the spirals and fans of their shells. Organic shapes, especially primitive ones, have a wonderful hugeness about them, as if they were entire universes. They contain in miniature the spiral of the galaxy, the wisps of the nebula, the twin curls of the brain.

Paleozoic Series