Detail #2: Totem Repair, work in progress
I am still drawing every day on my first color digital decalcomania project: The Totem Repair Shop. That title had started out as just a working title, but I am growing to like it. It will probably stick.
Thanks for following the development of this digital painting. On the left edge, near the top, you can see some raw undeveloped content from the random image source that inspired this work. Most of the rest of the content in this enlarged detail is completed. And yes, that is something of a self-portrait on the right side of this enlarged detail. My ego usually grabs at anything in the random source content resembling me and makes me develop it.
Promises, Promises, Promises
I learned many years ago to never promise to add content to a web site unless that content is truly ready to post. Delays always occur and viewers are left with doubts.
Well, I know that I have frequently mentioned that I would soon be adding posts containing photos of audio experiments and visual works from the past… archival material that is not yet anywhere on the web. But I just can’t tear myself away from this current work. Maybe when this one is completed and no new digital decalcomania gets started I will catch up on my past promises and post some of that archival material that really is ready to post, including The Bolinas Balafon, Power Man, The Covelo Rd. Gong Collection, The First Bolinas Instrument, The Second Bolinas Instrument, and more.
bobcomings.com 
I can see how you can become captured by working this image. Being a color junky, I find I’m a bit more grabbed by this work, even though it’s a limited pallet so far, it suggests living things more vivaciously for me. Maybe too, it’s that you are giving more finished modeling of your characters. Whatever it is, I really am enjoying this totem repair shop. Thanks.
Thanks for the encouragement. While working on this project, I have found myself thinking about the way you treat shadows and reflected light in your paintings. The presence of color, and probably the ongoing gradual improvement of my basic skills with Painter are definitely making me develop the characters more than I did in the grayscale drawings. One surprising thing is that I find that I miss in the color project is the wonderful presence of ambiguity that is possible in the grayscale works. When color is given to an object or form or space it is similar to the act of naming. I have always felt that naming is our very human way of carving order out of chaos and limits how we see what we see. Now in the color project I feel like the color, though very luscious and seductive to play with, limits the ambiguity of the space. My mind is less free to interpret what I see in the image. When any particular color is used at various locations in an image, the mind tends to want to connect it and perceive it as a continuous surface: like seeing bits of blue between the leaves in a tree our mind constructs an understanding of the sky that is above or behind the tree. Phew! It sounds like I am back in the studio giving a lecture on color and composition. Yikes! I thought I had retired!?
Yes, you are dead on about the diminished ambiguity with the addition of color. It’s a brain/history perception I agree, and maybe your skills are becoming more honed, but color speaks to ….uh….for lack of a better word, the appetite of the perception. In a way, the greyscale work embodied a little more chaos for me, made me nervous. Is it the comfort of nature? Who knows, but I find your “drawing” an essence of something out of ambiguity is fascinating and playful. sort of pure imagination. I’ve started 4 small abstract paintings that I want to keep fresh and non representational. I have become terrified to work on them because I don’t trust myself to stay free. Maybe if I put them in photoshop and played with them I could get past that. Looking forward to more totem repair shop parts, or the whole. Once a teacher, …… not a bad thing since you are obviously a student too.
I fully concur with you about color making the perception feel richer, more nourishing, and I am loving working with color in this project. The chaos you experience when viewing the grayscale drawings is actually my intention. I find it to be like a roller coaster ride. It is scary at times, but I know it always ends with me looking at something else (getting off the roller coaster) so there is never any real danger. I have always enjoyed what I have described as polyvalent elements in my images. Images that can be read in multiple ways. I have always wanted to achieve the same effect in sculpture, but due to the absolute presence of the physical object it was always a bit more tricky finding ways to make a sculpture be able to be interpreted in multiple and possibly even conflicting ways. The piece I wrote in the NadaFarm site titled “Not Just Fixed Likenesses of the Named World: WHY I MAKE IMAGES THAT ARE AS ELUSIVE AS THE SHAPES AND SWIRLS OF SWIFTLY MOVING WATER“ describes in detail my thoughts about this whole issue and its vast world of possibilities.
Thanks! I wanted to let you know that your comments are automatically posted on the blog along with my replies. If that is not OK with you, just let me know and I will keep our communications private.I have always LOVED the way you work with light and color in the shadows!bob