GEOMETRIC PAINTINGS in WATERCOLOR GOUACHE AND CASEIN

I've been revisiting some mediums I was trained to use, as an illustration student at Paier College of Art in Hamden Connecticut.

What I appreciate about watercolor gouache is its beautiful, clean flatness. Casein thrills me even more, as it embodies an oil paint-like quality, in its depth of pigmentation and color brilliance. Seems perfect for designing these otherworldly geometrical abstractions that I so much enjoy rendering. Moon slivers, squares, triangles, diamonds, circles, spirals, all with clean edges. Curved, wriggling, pencil-wide lines intersecting straight lines, geometrical shapes and solid planes. Makes one heady to view, for they create an arresting depth that one can imagine stretches in all directions, possibly to infinity. In this series, when a sovereign shape intersects another, color changes often occur, clashing off each other. It's about relationship, "ships (flying discs?) passing in the night", space, depth, layers. I'm just beginning to explore this mysterious-even to myself- created reality, and can feel it call to me with further, deeper concepts, as the series develops. The mathematical cleanness and certainty of defined lines and edges, flat colors, so predictable...combined with the less than sure circling, curving, rambling, human unpredictability, added to the mix. Energy? Gamma waves? Electricity? Buzzing? Protons, neutrons, spinning electrons? Definitely movement, and vibration. I believe I might be trying to make sense of the unseen worlds, bringing them into our everyday three-dimensional reality, to understand, combine or juxtapose those often invisible and different worlds, varying vibrational frequencies, and planes of existence. Geometrics and organics, side by side in a painting, both stable and resting. And an element of the mysterious, the unknown: you are being watched. Not only watched, but perhaps, also being pursued. And the ephemeral, floating black diamond is always central.

January 2024 Update: I am translating this casein series onto large stretched canvases, around 30" x 30".

The following images are painted in watercolor casein medium, on heavy watercolor paper or Canson watercolor board; titled: "Pursued Series". I have, at this writing, completed nine paintings....more images to come!