The Meandering Life of a Painting

The Meandering Life of a Painting
Whenever I believed that I had ‘completed’ a painting I would engage in a ritual that I practiced for well over thirty years. It required that I set up my heavy free standing masonite panel somewhere in an evenly shaded patch of ground, drape a black cloth down the front of it, bang a nail in the center, hang up the painting, and sometimes enduring a full range of weather conditions, snap four Kodachrome slides and then repeat the entire process with a role of Kodak 100 print film. It was a tedious sometimes arduous process that had me constantly battling the wind and flapping cloth panels, or snipping away frayed or errant strings of canvas. I could really have used an assistant. A week or so later I would get the pictures back only to discover that the images were flawed because I forgot to adjust the camera properly.
And then everything changed over night with the advent of the digital camera. Actually I was a bit of a slow learner. I still persevered with my traditional set up, slides and prints until I could no longer find people to process them any longer. Suddenly I was left with only one choice : the digital camera. What surprised me above all else was easy life as a photographer suddenly became. Suddenly there was no need to set up anything in order to photograph the paintings. I could shoot pictures virtually anywhere and then crop them and make other adjustments on the computer. If the picture was flawed I could easily rephotograph and upload it in moments instead of weeks.
Since the early 1980’s when I moved to Chicago I had diligently been documenting my work. As I had said earlier whenever I completed a piece I would try to photograph it. However in almost every case I would no sooner see the slide than I would detect some compositional flaw that needed addressing. Once correction would reveal the need for another correction and over time completely new image would evolve and on and on, With all the changes and constant rephotographing I began accumulating hundreds and hundreds of slides that marked the progression of virtually all my paintings.
Although slides are wonderful, they are useless without a projector. And that’s why I have decided to digitize them.
These images that you see represent of a few but by no means all of the stages of development of a particular painting that I've been working on off and on since 1985. You can see how the image has twisted and turned over the years. Ironically as I revisit the various stages I feel a tinge of regret at having painted over what looked to be a perfectly fine painting. Yet regardless of how good or bad they were, the bottom line is that the current painting would not exist without having made all those earlier stops along the way. Although many images are now buried and invisible under the layers of paint and color, they thankfully still exist digitally and as slides, and like life, art goes on.