Making Circles

I’d forgotten that work on a painting gets tougher as you go. I just wrapped up my third day of work on the painting I started 2 weekends ago (I wish I could work on it more often, but work has ramped up lately). The more elements to work with, the more difficult it is to know what to do with them…

It’s my first time working with a grid, and I’m finding it challenging to figure out when to stick to the grid’s structure and when to let it go. The work I was thinking of when starting this piece was Agnes Martin’s.

This is one of her paintings, “The Peach.” It wasn’t this piece in particular that I was thinking of, but rather her work in general. It’s calm even in its structure. Her grids, because they are pale and a bit ethereal, don’t seem rigid.

I work much more slowly than I did in the past. I am spending more time looking at the painting and reading what it is it needs in terms of color and mark. Working with the grid gives an instant balance, but it stays static unless I keep throwing off the balance in small sections of the painting. It’s difficult to find what the painting needs to work as a whole. Right now, there are a lot of shapes in addition to the grid, so the painting is quite segmented. Do I leave the grid exposed? Will its structure be visible no matter how much I cover the lines that form it? How do I allow the structure of the painting to develop if I simultaneously break down the initial structure of the grid?