i’ve had this obsession for years about this diptych, the crucifixion, with the virgin and st john the evangelist mourning, c. 1450-1455:  it is in the john g. johnson collection at the philadelphia museum of art.  it is precisely that i can not explain this that i’m ridding myself of it in this longstanding plan, seen here in thumbnails dating to 2005, from sketch journals dating years earlier, in the triptych radnor  i am painting.  i’ve been ‘stuck’ on the full-size abstract study that i painted in egg tempera with brooms in 2006.  see   http://www.donaldmeyerhome.com/www.donaldmeyerhome.com/recent_work/Pages/Radnor_Triptych_Study.html

the two squares of blood red draping behind the figures beneath a band of depthless black nothingness in this rogier van der weyden annoy me and attract me to no end.  sometimes i think, ‘it’s that there’s two’, that there should be a middle, third panel, which of course there couldn’t have been.  then, ‘it’s that they’re red” , or ‘centered’. 

but mostly, i think that there is something so artificial, abstract and simultaneously beautiful and full of horror in that very color behind such a quintessentially human scene of passion and tragedy that it rivets our vulnerability in the formal range of contrast between the hardness and softness of the sensations we are capable of enduring in the artist’s profoundly felt imagination of the experience.

*Moleskine (mol-a-skeen’-a) is a popular brand of notebook manufactured by Moleskine Srl, an Italian company. Although the name implies otherwise, the notebook is not bound in moleskin, but in oilcloth-covered cardboard. Other distinct features include an elastic band to hold the notebook closed, a sewn spine that allows it to lie flat when opened, rounded corners, a ribbon bookmark and an expandable pocket inside the rear cover. Matisse carried one. Also Hemingway. I carry my moleskine in my wallet where ever I go.

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