The stuff is nasty to breath around. The VOC’s are intense and it requires both tolerance from the people around it and a very large fan (Patton Air Circulators rule).

I’m trying a Windsor-Newton Acrylic Matte varnish, to see if that will get me enough protection for an acrylic painting, and leave in the color saturation and crispness I was getting from the solvent based products. This would NOT work for oils, but oils are also less permeable and susceptible to dust becoming immersed in the paint over time.

I’ve been using a Golden Acrylics data sheet to determine how to protect acrylic paintings over long periods of time. I use a half matte acrylic medium and half water solution in two coatsd to isolate the paint – to put a colorless barrier between conservation materials (varnish, wax, etc.) and the painting itself. On top of that I apply varnish – if the Windsor-Newton product can seal, stay clear and isolate the acrylic from incorporating dirt, and on top of that not smell so goddawful, that would be wonderful. We’ll see.

—spence

He had a huge presence, he lit up a room. He was there for me so consistently I didn’t even realize what a big part of my life and the lives of my kids he had become.

I will miss him. I hope he knows how loved he is and what a truly good man he was.

— Spence

My daughter went into hospital and into the ICU and onto a ventilator and then onto an oscillating ventilator and then continuous dialysis and complete crisis with Acute Myelomonocytic Leukemia. For several days she was going deeper into shock. At the deepest point she was:

…which became, as I erased dead spaces:

Like sand paintings – discovering process and focus through drawing. Did it bring about change? She lived.

— spence

…and bike trails and sand in that unique light…

I’m going back to winter in Boston in a couple of days. I live there, I have ties there, but I don’t feel in place there.

—spence

That’s become normal. Amazing what becomes normal. Racks of IVs – we are down to four active drips, from a high of 16. Chest tubes – three now, two on the left side, one on the right. The ventilator.

Critical but stable.

I walked in this morning and my daughter’s face lit up. She was breathlessly talking – breathlessly, literally – she cannot pass air through her throat to vocalize. I tried to read her lips and failed completely. But I was ecstatic in the attempt. She is awake, aware, frustrated, angry, recovering, healing.

—spence

In an visual off-the-cuff observation, the pathologist saw healthy new bone marrow.

Not something you hope to have to hope for… But a very good thing.

She has at least managed to knock the leukemia back. A much more microscopic, detailed and clinical look at the smears of marrow will be done over the next day. But that first approximation, without detail, that is heaven. The first step for both of us toward life outside of a hospital room.

—spence

My instinct is to paint it. Just to get it out there. Maybe an abstracted hospital room, the blur and rush of equipment.

I’ve been in California since 14th January. Every day is in the ICU from 6:30 AM until about 3 PM, then I find my way down to the beach and a long walk and a camera and a sunset. Then back to make sure she is still breathing.

I remember just after she was born. I remember going to her crib every evening as she slept. Just watching her breath, in and out, slowly, over and over. I just wanted to be sure it kept going. During those first weeks after she came home and became part of my life I fell so thoroughly in love with her. I also realized how vulnerable I had made myself. To vagaries of life and chance as they involved her.

She crawled up and fell out of her crib at a year old. I heard a thump as she hit the carpet. I saw a dazed but triumphant little girl crawl out of her bedroom – and there was that lurch at my heart, but it passed. This one, this one now, doesn’t pass. This is a hard one. Watching for her breath in a hospital is very hard.

The sunsets were begun for her. They’ll continue for me and for her – I hope to be able to give her the 40th one, and then the 80th one as they grow and evolve. Many photographs of California and sunsets and street corners and hospital roof lines, and palm trees, and waves and piers extending out to the ocean. I can’t paint here but I can dream for and of her, and for and of the paintings to come.

–spence

I was describing, out loud, the process of applying paint to canvas. In the process of working to explain it, I found some insights. I use photographs as a synthesis for an image, for the starting place for space in the painting, for color reference, to see what colors would be, where light moves, how it dances across surfaces and into shadow.

Looking at the quality of the light in the photographs, against the quality of the light in the memory I hold for the painting. The images come first from memory, triggered a photograph or a painting that reminds me of an emotion and from that a space in my mind. The photographs are a catalyst, a trigger for line and drawing and a reference for the image, but the image as it evolves loses any touch to those concrete images.

I do, actually dance in front of the canvas, that ecstatic feeling of weight and motion is very much a part of the process. Music, especially acoustic guitar recently, and the application of paint becomes no-thought.

There really is a point, and some of the best passages in a painting come from this, where I get to no-mind, no-thought, just an action of feeling mentally the surface I want to portray and contributing to a motion in the painting knife or brush or airbrush that is just there.

Fascinating stuff to me.

— spence

I find a dance between the texture and application of paint to the rough surface of the canvas, and the space and the form and movement within the painting. There is a tactile interaction in the action of painting, a feel in the brush or knife in the hand, manipulating and placing physical paint onto the surfac. This works for the work I want to produce right now.

My work reflects a conscious tension between
the canvas- the surface, tactile texture, the mass and form of the paint as color and as paint
and the painting – the subject, space and movement within the form of the painting.
I have an explicite 2D form, a canvas covered with paint.
I have the illusion within the painting, the form and movement in three dimensions, the light cascading over masses, the language of perspective, the conventions of painting that indicate distance.

I work to break the space into enough abstract to requires a contribution from the viewer to have the space of the painting.

I use texture, color, and the raw feel of the canvas itself on the surface to hold the object form, and then dance and bath in the space within the painting, reverting back to color distances and perspective lines and some of the conventional language of space and light in a painting. That interplay, between surface and tactile and space and form and motion, between representation and an abstract color form, that’s what defines my paintings.

— spence

One of the drawings, three pages in, on the Introduction page, was a quick sketch. I’ve never seen it in any other publication. I copied it from the book to hang above my desk, in ink on newsprint, and it did hang there for at least a decade. In some move or another, the drawing disappeared.

I’d thought about it. I found a copy of the original book on ebay, purchased it. The drawing means mystery, enigma, balance, life, simplicity of line and form. It is one piece of art I would not want to be without.

— spence