About Beginnings

I have been working in the new studio since Monday. There is still some fine tuning to do: some of the tools I have carefully stored need to be more easily available, and some of what I have close at hand could be tucked away.

But these are minor details in the bright picture; the studio is great. I can see what I want to see on the walls, all of the works in progress that will come to fruition within the loose bounds of the vision I have for them. I work on several pieces at once which for some unexplainable reason works well for me. But always when I am finally finished and satisfied (sometimes more and sometimes less), there will be leftovers which I call “starts”. On my new studio walls now are several groups of starts that I will push home to what I am imagining as walls of color. I like to see the work in groups; the image I have in mind for them is more apparent when there are two, three or more together. Never mind that they usually sell as single pieces (which sometimes saddens me), I will always see them, in memory (and in photos) supporting and enhancing each other.

The last series I painted, the Destinations, were soft and unstructured, before these there was a series of thirty-two clearly constructed pieces called Structures and before these a gentle group of five pieces that were sort of floaty. (These paintings are viewable at my website, www.joangold.com.) The variation owes much to this going back to work that was begun earlier and slipping back into the mood they bring with them.

I plan to bend to my will the starts on my walls now and to play down any structure that remains in them from whatever it was I wanted when I last dealt with them. Paintings often take the lead but these I will tame, say I. They will honor my intentions or back to the holding bin they go.

Here’s writer George Bernard Shaw: Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.