Grisaille Series

I had been working on a deep and beautiful surface of layers and layers of pigment thinned with matte medium which had become the customary way to begin a painting. After a few months of this, or longer, they would develop a deep wax-like surface, very seductive and tactile. I wanted to leave them alone, call them done. But they weren’t done. I tried to just cover a portion of the surface and that only brought me to the “figure-ground” position again and that wasn’t satisfying or correct.

While listening to the radio one Saturday morning I heard the word “kenosis” being spoken by a South African minister. To him it meant “to surrender”; to the Greeks it meant “to be mindless”. Both of these meanings felt true in a way that no other language had felt.

So after a good while of surrendering to the fact that I didn’t have a solution, and furthermore I was going to have to give up that surface in order to find the solution, I covered the entire surface with dots that did not overlap or touch. These dots became a pattern, a new element. And some of the undersurface could filter through which was an element of filigree. The gray color is new and the same value pattern in relation to the surface is new.