Dennis Hollingsworth

Cadmium Red Deep

Usually it works this way:

I saw in an earlier painting (see the July 14th post) a interesting direction, an inkling. As I flesh it out, I find the extents of the imagined destination and I discover things along the way. Which is to say, I am disabused of certain preconceptions owing to an overripe imagination... and as I mash into the material facts, I learn something new. Something indifferent to my original agenda, if I'm lucky.

In this case, I was looking at the third painting I did since arriving in Dallas. I like the Cadmium Red Deep, deepened by a little Alizarin Crimson. In this painting, I was tracking a (familiar) strategy of figuring the work into a ball floating in the upper center of the canvas. The problem is dynamically merging various ways of markmaking in suspension so that each mark has an integrity whilst being deformed by the others.

Integrity and Deformation. Yea, thats' it.

There's a moment of failure where the additional mark deflates a certain charm of the work... and I look to a ramping up of the action towards-but-not-touching chaos... a maximal fugue that still has a fullness of beauty to it.

And now, I'm thinking something not so deep in saturation. The linen panels are very blond. They are not the usual deep brown of the Belgian Linen that I have used in the past. And I like the difference, and the colors in my mind are lighter, whites and yellows.

Inklings.

This is the first painting done on panel since coming to Dallas. It follows a few works on paper, two of which went to Mark M?eller Gallery, who took them to the Basel Art Fair this summer. The central mark in red was something new, done first in the long horizontal paintings I painted before leaving Los Angeles. I've got a good feeling about them. I want to do more.

"Overland II"