I was thinking about painting conventions, and how I was taught in school the rules of painting. The rules of color theory, no tube color, mix your colors, use complimentary colors to bring down tone, dont add black or white out of the tube to your colors. Never highlight with white paint, start with an underpainting, build up colors and shades. I reckon I dont follow any of these rules now necessarily, but I do see the value in learning them as a sort of “best practice”. I continue to add white paint to red paint and continually I am upset at the pink tone I am given. I need to practice mixing flesh tones more, is it bad that I only really know how to mix white flesh tones? But I guess it would be odd if I only knew how to mix non-white flesh tones.

I saw shows today in Tribeca, really good painting shows there. I got to see a painting in person that I was looking forward to seeing, one I fell in love with on instagram first. Its a painting by Olga Abeleva, Underworld. I guess I will try and add an image of it in this blog post, idk if I can do that, maybe I’ll hyperlink it. I love the limited palate, there might be no more than three colors in it, yellow, muted green, and blue, or maybe purple. And I love the paint handling, I think its incredibly sophisticated, even though one might say that it is technically lacking in areas of ‘representation’. I guess that is why I was thinking so much on painting rules and conventions, if this painting was technically handled following all of the rules, I doubt it would resonate half as much as it does.

The scene is a set of escalators going up and down, with only the upper landing in view, the low landing may be the implied descent into the “Underworld” that the title suggests. The primary subject seems to focus on a man in a trench coat carrying a black cat in a caged box, descending down the escalator. He is tucking away his head as if to avoid catching a glance of the couple across from him ascending. It feels like that moment when you can feel a set of eyes starting you down, piercing you, the discomfort of the stare weighing physically on your own ability to turn and meet the eyes of the starer. (I just noticed I used to phrase “I reckon” in the first paragraph as if Im a sweet southern lady accepting a cold glass of sweet tea as I sit in a friends house on a hot summer day). The man wears pointed brown boots, that seem to weigh so heavily on the escalator step he stands on, even though there is no painted shadow or connection between his boot and the metal grid. I like that maybe he was painted first, and then the steps were painted in afterwards, each line of a step ending gently as the paint brush was lifted as to not mess up the brown stroke of the boot edge.

Below that man is a couple, the man laying a kiss on the woman’s left eye, she seems disinterested. They are very darkly and gently painted, her left foot seems to snake around the mans leg as he steps into the embrace. Above this couple is a second couple, painted in full light, their faces sculpted and rounded out like melons, with sharp pointed noses. As if they are maybe a future version of the dark couple who is descending, having found their full filling and expression down below. There is a bushel of black hair below what may be the man’s head, potentially implying a third person, but I prefer to see it as a very thick and well taken care of half of a moustache. This couple suspiciously watches the man with the caged cat as he avoids eye contact.

This might be the last paragraph, but behind the sculpted couple is a cast shadow of two figures locked in a kiss, but the angle of the light source and the couple inbetween the source and the wall suggests it is them, however they are not engaging in the embrace the shadow suggests. Maybe the spirit of the couple has awakened as they ascend from the depths, and it has taken on it’s own existence in the shadow realm. (isnt shadow realm a mortal combat reference?). The way the paint is handled in the shadow feels very physical, which I guess is a artsy cop-out way of saying I can see the visible brushstrokes. It is as if a power washer has drawn on the outline of a couple in remembrance, or an atomic bomb has exploded and left a sort of nuclear imprint.

Jesus this is getting long, but I cant not talk about the figure dashing out of a door in the top right of the scene, he moves with such speed that his body has shifte like harry potter as he does the whole fuckin teleporty magic thing, into a green and yellow gaseous semi-solid matter. Also, are they just going to have us all accept that Harry just figured out how to do that shit over the summer while away from hogwarts? Or maybe there was some rule that wizards arent allowed to do that shit until they reach a certain age, so maybe we can accept that he learned it over time, and was ready to do it when the time has come. Ill look up what that teleporty thing is called to finish this off.

Its called Apparition, ironically.