Painting Space

I had a conversation today with a Unitarian Universalist minister about public transportation. He said, "The difficulty is to overcome people's resistance to waiting for a bus. If it takes ten minutes for the bus to arrive, people will say take their own car because they believe that waiting is a waste of time. But it is an opportunity to read a book, look around or even talk to a person who is also waiting.

The image here is a small painting of the parking area near Elizabeth, New Jersey with New York City in the distance. I painted it in gouache during the last class on Highway Culture. I like the odd pastel palette I achieved with my new Acryla Gouache from Holbein. I wanted to explore how abstract brush marks can transfer the banality of a parking lot into something more beautiful than it is in "real" life.

Barnett Newman said in his essay, "The Sublime is Now," in 1948—"The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty." I would suggest that sixty-two years later my impulse as an artist is to look at what may be ugly and to find beauty in it through the medium of paint. Painting space—parking spaces, air over a landscape is the challenge.

Speaking of space, the studio I work in has not been painted since 1995. Today, I embarked on that journey, around the four walls of this room with its 10 foot ceilings. I'm told the room was once a barber shop. The building was built somewhere in the 1850's, the walls are easily a foot thick and the windows have deep sills in them so that I can sit and look out at the street. The walls are getting painted "Featherdown White" because the paintings are colorful enough. I like to think I'm painting space on which objects can sit.

By the time I am finished the painting space will be painted and classes will commence again. The space will become a place in which to paint. Waiting can provide much needed space to create.