Blue #1

It begins orderly at the top left. Then it ripples out into something different entirely.

That is if you can see it. This one changes depending on where you put it and how it's lit.

On a cloudy afternoon with the lights off it is a dark blue block, near black, with bits of burnt sienna coming up through it. That's nearly all you get. In an ordinarily lit room, some of the layers surface and you begin to see what lies within. Light it deliberately, directly, and the whole thing comes forward at once.

In the act of displaying the piece, you become a contributor to the final artwork. A painting with an off switch.

It started as a wash. Oil thinned down with paint thinner and pushed around until the canvas was a fog of color. While that was still wet I drew the four of us into it. Caricatures, really. Eyes as arcs, four big stupid grins, done fast and only there to work out where everybody should sit.

Then I kept building. The paint itself got more interesting to me than the representations. And so I followed the paint. Layer after layer went over those faces until there was nothing of them left to see.

I never took them off. They are still under there.

Safflower gel medium, mixed loosely into the paint. The gel holds the momentum of the brush strokes. Suspending pigments in time.

Twenty paints went into this painting and none of them were pre-mixed on the palette. The work of mixing the paints is left to your eye.

The orange under this one and the orange under After the Ceremony are the same idea. Both paintings are warm underneath and cool on top. Both of them give the warmth back only where the top layer breaks, or where the light drops far enough to let it.

It remains a portrait because we know it to be one.

I gift Blue #1 to Abhi.