collateral estoppal

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 September 2023, 30 X 25 cm

Here are two studies from a few nights ago. They are not without interest, but kind of just OK. Truthfully, I was just super happy to get out to mix a palette and throw some paint around on the dunes. Having recently been sidelined from COVID for so many weeks I feel like a tourist back visiting a new city where I'm familiar with the country but just not this part of it. I'm a tourist nonetheless. The palette also is familiar, the colours too, but it's the resulting work that curiously feels 'too familiar' to me as I am revisiting a problem which I have already solved, I think, I want something different in the work.

Collateral Estoppal is such a funky bit of language, as many legal terms can be. But it's the 'mots de jour' from last week's drama in Trump's continuing soap opera.

    Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 September 2023, 30 X 25 cm

Common Estoppal is a doctrine that prevents a person from re-litigating an issue once a court has decided an issue of fact or law necessary to its judgment,.. that decision preclude[s] re-litigation of the issue in a suit on a different cause of action involving a party to the first case.

Hummmn... Well, I confess that I was so enchanted by the sound of this bit of legalese as it rolled off the tongue of a celebrated journalist at MSNBC that I knew I had to use it somewhere. 

So, I could say that my desire in Painting is not to 're-litigate' an established 'factual' way of working, as per, when I set out to work today. My desire is for something new, yes, but how to get there??

Hence the third image below which is a reconfigured Evening Prayer from sometime last year I think. It was a simple image formed by three wide stripes of colour indicating the sea and the sky. I was playing around with it on my phone and I digitally added the middle portion of pink which I instantly liked. It spoke to me. 

So now I'm now actively pursuing this simplicity in my large square canvas's in the studio on the same theme or subject matter. A technical problem has maybe been solved. How Do I print such a large swath of colour without losing the luminosity underneath? This is never a problem with the small studies done on the dunes because of the size and speed. But the larger ones in the studio have plagued me with both nightmares and failure.

I will continue to go out to the beach because I love doing it but at the same time it does provide new ideas. Yet I do believe that I need to find a new avenue in order not to return to 're-litigate' an established procedural fact.