Dennis Hollingsworth

Good Morning

I finished this in the wee hours of the morning after a long tussle.

The trouble was, I was painting in a room with five other paintings hanging in it. And I kept looking to my left at this painting... too much.

This is the second time in as many paintings. In the last painting, I took the portrait schema and smeared figure into field from edge to edge. I couldn't... wouldn't do it agian.

Unsatisfied with the direction it was going, I loaded a knife with Ivory Black and laid a smooth field of over everything that I didn't like about what was happening with it.

An edit, again.

My modus operandi.

Which gave me a horizon line. Another picture.

And since I was drawing again, I thought that I might as well draw s'more.

So I stepped up with a fist sized pillow-pad and scribed two squarish lines circularly, canting the angles for attitude. As I stepped back, I remembered a work on paper I did a while back. I was tracking on the same turf as before.

Funny how that works.

There I was, in the place when I was looking at the early Mondriaans at the Dallas Museum of art. Drawing and painting.

So I relaxed and kept going. I looked for a congestion of paint in the face of the painting. I remember the Rembrant era thing of alla prima highlights at the end of a painting. First, a monadology, a clustering of spiny forms, everything an edit, every act looks for it's reason in parts of the painting that I don't like.

And what don't I like? The scruffy messes. The goofs. You can just tell, or at least I can. I can see them immediately, they stand out. And I want to stamp them out.

Or cut them out.

Or cover them.

Until it's done.