Ellington Painting

"There's the blues, and everything else is zippity doo-dah." Townes Van Zandt During the past few months, I felt a fierce desire to spend more time at work in my studio. Maybe I had begun to see a time in which we all might gather again in an environment free of pandemic proportions. One thing for sure: I'd returned to my easels, the raw and blank canvas, the clutter and smell of pigments--something I had done many times before--after a spell of the blues. I started to paint, knowing that you fight depression, but you sing the blues. So I turned up the music. "No colour harmony is of high order unless it involves indescribable tints. It is the best possible sign of a colour when nobody who sees it knows what to call it." John Ruskin, 1859 This time around, I became more conscious of color, using glazes to form transparencies, areas where one can see the various hues form layers of color new even to this veteran abstract expressionist's eyes. So please look closely at these paintings. Know that they were once blank, or more specifically, they were the color of white, a color, because of its link to light and divinity, can scare a painter away from action, and leave a writer paralyzed in front of a blank page. In The Secret Lives of Color, cultural historian and color expert Kassia St. Clair tells us to look at Moby Dick, a whale whose whiteness could strike panic in the human soul. If you do, I believe you will see an artist like me, stranded in the open sea, shouting the blues to the sky. And thanks to all of you who managed to stop by and take a look at this painting. If you aspire toward the arts, know you are one of the lucky ones.