This piece went through many changes before I arrived at something I was happy to call finished. It were the same panels of wood but was it the same painting?
It started out on a panel of plywood, approximately 24 by 24 inches. I cut the panel in half, at an angle as you can see, and painted horizontal bands of oil colour on one and vertical bands on the other. You can just make out these bands in this first version below.
Over the top of the bands, I mixed and poured gloss paints out of empty tuna tins and let gravity take it where it would with some help from a brush, until I had what you see. You'll also notice horizontal cuts making four panels now.
A few days later I reconfigured the arrangement quite dramatically, and thought I might have a finished painting.
I give a lot of thought to the titles of my paintings but I'm often dissatisfied with them, thinking they convey the wrong tone or hint at a meaning I never intended. In the past I've usually given them one word titles (Trip, Bliss, Blast etc). I've consciously tried to come up with more imaginative titles recently and I baptised this one 'The mountain I made just fell on me', which was a variation of a line I'd recently heard in a song I liked and was intentionally meaningless and absurd. So, the painting was finished, photographed and stored behind a couch at home to gather dust. In August I looked at it again, restored the square and made a few other changes.
The new incarnation lasted until October when I stripped the picture back to the bare wood with a chisel.
I added a new rectangular panel at top left shortly after, covered with wondrous ivory black oil paint spread thickly with a knife. The new arrangement immediately made me think of a star-spangled banner from hell. This idea would eventually find its way into the title of the final version.
I didn't leave it like this for long though. Too much noise. I added some simple fields of colour, stripped some panels down even further by way of contrast and thought it could be finished, though I was in a bit of a dither about the yellow; whether to expand it or get rid of it entirely.
As I do, when I'm not sure what do, I put it aside for a couple of weeks and worked on something else. When I renewed battle with it again shortly before New Year, I got the red and ochre glosses out and arrived at the final version.
The stars of the star-spangled banner were blacked out. Blacked Out Stars. A few days later, I flipped it to portrait and there it stayed.
There was a postscript to this story that I will describe shortly.
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