October 24

Time for the Frank Auerbach Portrait Slam. I ran out of white paint.

To recap, I “channeled” Frank Auerbach’s approach to “portrait” painting. He would search for the “soul” of his subject and would scrap it off and start over a hundred times in order to get it right - his words.

The paint is scrapped off in my last self portrait.

I really enjoyed this exercise. Releasing any notion of “likeness,” I was able to explore the painted surface without limitations. And to remind myself - it’s about the paint not the subject. Ending with this quote by David Park. He was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s.

Art ought to be a troublesone thing - and one of the many reasons for painting representationally is that this makes for much more troublesome pictures.