Log Jam

My works typically form a narrative related to my process over time.

Log Jam began its journey from various places. As I took an old construction apart, it left black threads from buttons I had sewn on the surface. These threads kept a grid-like pattern I later used to tie in broken grape vine limbs. I stared at this canvas on stretchers occupying my easel for weeks. I gessoed it three times but it continued silent. I employed it for a time as a work surface, once, accidentally adding purple splotches working on another painting.

I realized when speaking about my ‘practice’ to another artist that I felt like my brain had a log jam I could not break through. I decided to take charcoal and write on that looming white surface all the things about how the log jam and other barriers were affecting me and how I felt about it. It was illegible—my intent—my thinking. This underlying state remained in front of me for days. Then, in one of my old sketchbooks, I came across an ancient out-of-my-head drawing of logs overlapping. I loosely recorded this sketch in charcoal over my writing to layout the painting. 

This state again rested for a bit. Components began merging when my granddaughter joined me in the studio to paint. While she worked on her painting, I grabbed a tube of cobalt turquoise and began mine. Woah! We loved how this beautiful color danced with the purple splotches. Here the painting started to suggest water--log jams occur on the surface of rivers—which suggested to me more connections to past works, both in content and in the construction process.

After researching log jams, rivers, alluvial fan formation and dragging barky limbs into my studio, I began my composition by painting a line across the canvas. I poised logs receding toward the shore above it and below it a fan projecting outward. To shape these opposing directions of movement I used masses of acrylic gel and modeling paste to build an underlying texture. Drawing a line is something we do when things may not be the way we need them to be. Log Jam is complete and holds seeds for future works.