Still Playing with Paint

I'm still playing with the old abstracts. Today I worked on the red-one-that-became-a-purple-one. This is an interesting process, very different from my normal one. There's a dialogue between the painting and me. It seems to have a mind of its own: it wants to develop in its own way, and I cannot direct it. Jackson Pollack talked about this same experience, saying that when he gets into a painting, "there's an easy give and take". Same with me: I have to listen to what the painting wants, and help it along. Today, it wanted to become a landscape. It already was, kinda, but today it said "forget being abstract, I wanna be a straight-up landscape". Okay. So together, we pushed some things back, lightened other areas, simplified, and painted over a lot of the purples. Here's how it looks right at this moment:

It's still pretty dark. I don't know if it wants to be lighter or not ... will have to sit and stare at it and "listen" to what it thinks it wants. Once the painting decided to switch from being abstract to being a landscape, all I could think of was J.M.W. Turner, the English painter known for his abstracted, highly textured landscape paintings. This one is developing along those lines.

Here's a close-up of an area in the center to show you what the surface looks like.

What's next? I dunno. This one is bugging me because it's not done yet. But I'm enjoying the process.