Toward a motif, thoughts about tourist art making...

Incomplete large panel (about 105 cm x 230 cm) Acrylic on canvas

I hit the wall today after almost finishing a first multi-panel piece, per my earlier idea.  It may not work as planned.  I am sure it will pass, but I am today suffering a bit of ennui, a certain boredom with my own impulses. In short, I lack a motif that is adequately mine.

Moreover, I am musing about the entire notion of painting in response to locations, however exotic and beautiful.  As a month-long visitor, the best I can hope for is a sort of tourist response. I find my eye lands first on imagery that is frankly clichéd by over use and would likely end up made into a painting being pure kitsch.  I can't do it.  Even landscape painting is not entirely immune insofar as the genre is so overworked.  The art pales beneath the cliffs, the dark forests, the Roman arches, etc.  I felt this way once before in Paris after walking beside the Seine, seeing tons of historic art, the weight of history.

What to do?  Today I will reengage my work as I have been doing it for the last few years though with attention to the geometry, the bones of local forms.   Already I have sketched a number of architectural details that may serve my interests, provide structure and a sort of armature for the color and intricacy that interests me.  It may be enough.  Here are a few of my recent pieces, done before the trip to Catalunya. While a sense of landscape is, I believe, evident in highly abstract form, the play in color, the improvisation of internal structure and a certain luminosity is present and can be here too, perhaps with some of the special light I am seeing here.