LINDA H. POST FINE ART

Remember the unfinished painting that my solo exhibit at R. Michelson Galleries, The Willing Suspension of Disbelief, was organized around? When the show came down, the painting returned to my studio for some finishing touches. Once it was back on my wall, I realized that there were still some major elements that had to be changed. That's the thing about sending art out into the world. You look at everything with a fresh perspective. The sky was desperate for more definition.

When I get to this point in a painting, it's time for me to decide where the boundaries of the finished painting will be. Since the canvas is pinned to the wall, and the size of the canvas is larger than the painting, I often paint outside the edges that were the original borders. It takes about a month for the stretcher to be handmade to my specs and shipped from California. So I have to make my best guess in advance as to the finished size and go ahead and order the stretch

This painting has been fleshing itself out (seriously, I've been working on some of the flesh) and I now have a working title. It's "A Willing Suspension of Disbelief", a phrase written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge about what constitutes poetic faith. In this case, it's about how one creates a perception of reality wholly based in the imagination. This is a pretty complex project. Not just the painting itself, which has a lot of moving parts and hard-to-paint details, but makin

The sky is still red. In order to create the sky-blue-pink I see in my head, it's important to work on everything that juxtaposes it. That way, I can work back and forth between figures, ground and sky. There are always adjustments. Do the heads emerge strongly enough from the background color? Does the sky give a feeling of infinite distance? How do I make the tents almost ethereal, blending with the sky, but still real? Lots of questions. The bonfire on the beach is coming

I often come back to the same models when I think about a new painting. (Not the birds. I always choose new birds.) After quite some time spent manipulating images of people and places, putting them together, pulling them apart, the composition settled down. Allison and Hannah (who have never been in my paintings together before now) became my muses. This one began with a snapshot of party tents my sister took on the beach in Provincetown, MA. I loved the light, which is alw