This is a digital mock up of where I am thinking of going with the original "it's only natural" painting... (scroll down for earlier post showing it at it's present state) the monotone paintings are what I call drawings or underpaintings. They are known as Grasiles, the tonal aspect of certain kinds of old master paintings. For me they are a natual and powerfull way to develop images directly on canvases, so I call them drawings... 20 some years ago I could not figure out a satisfying way to add color and keep all the wonderfull imagery this technique opens up for me, so I switched to trying to get the same kind of energy directly with colors... this lead to an expressive maner and a flatening and cartooning of the images... (a la Soutine) the paint came to dominate rather then the image-ination. When I began painting in Sonoma in preparation for my big art adventure coming up this summer in Santa Fe I was working on producing and perfecting and experimenting with the direct painting techniques I have been largly using this past 20 years (earliler post; man reading newspaper). I would begin each painting though with one of these underpaintings, and Jill kept saying I was ruining the painting by moving away from the spirit of the priliminary painting. So I have now decided to return to my old experiements and see what the 20 years of explorations in color will do...