Hallowe'en

Painting Techniques

Thinking about technique in this way:
Suggestion: what if the fruition of technique is confidence? Meaning gaining skill builds one's confidence. Making a collection of skills for skills sake runs the risk of the skills determining the painting, rather than the painting determining what skills or techniques are necessary to bring it to completion. If painters develop confidence in their general level of technical skill, then they are able to improvise technically on the spot–whatever is required by the painting. You've heard the saying, perhaps, that every good idea eventually becomes a business and every business eventually becomes a racket. So with painting techniques.
Isn't technique a beautiful word, with its ch & q?

Filming

Spent the weekend at Mountain Water with film crew filming [ARMY] installation. Great fun. Sorry no photos from the weekend–too busy. Here's an old beauty.

Soldiers in the form of fence pales for the installation [ARMY]. Upper ones face Greenhorn; lower ones face Blanca.

The Yi Singing

Nº11 in the series of songs, singing. Sometimes work can seem like it's going sideways into a parallel and wrong channel, and then the context catches up. Singing is a quality of voice associated with earth element in Chinese medicine; Army (Shi) is Earth over Water in the I Ching. The yi are the creative, receptive spirits of the earth and charged with singing the heart's song.
The character shows the heart below with the radical for musical note, poetry, uttered sound above. Beautiful.

Song

song continues

Theme & Variation

A little variation on "Song," a painting from February, like a story of a face on the moon.
There is a quote from a Barry Lopez story that always moves me (from his Crow & Weasel). In a speech Badger says, "The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. …Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive."