Lab Book #14, Part 7: The Ringmaster

I'll try to get through the Lab Book 14 series on the blog so I can show some of the new Dominican Republic paintings. In this installment of the Lab Book #14 mini series entitled three ringed flying circus on wheels, we see the Ringmaster of the circus, apparently standing in a desert populated by panicked stags and flying worms. Is he lost? Is he even alive? The form of the Ringmaster is scarecrow-like or even skeletal, his hands and lower torso unseen. Going with the lyrics of a Beatles song I was listening to at the time, the button on the Ringmasters lapel says "Hello Hello". Unlike the other paintings in this series, Part 7 is done in portrait size (taller height than width). My idea would be to hang all nine paintings on the same wall, with this one in the middle and the other eight arranged around it.

In the Lab Book book series I use a style I call doodleism, which puts together small independent doodles into a larger work. I am unsure as to the spelling of the word as 'doodleism' seems alot like 'yankee doodleism' a sort of american cultural term, while 'doodlism' without the e turns up a few references to a painting or drawing style when it is used in google searches. At any rate, the essence of the style is seen in 'The Ringmaster', look into the form of the Ringmasters body and you see dozens of small doodles put together into a torso-like form. Even in the background soil and sky, doodles have been included to represent contours and details. In some cases the doodles were pretty well formed in my original notes and appear more or less unchanged in the final work, for example the deer in the top right, and the desert scene in the top left, both appeared as full-paged drawings in my lab notebooks.

Lab Book #14, Part 7: the Ring Master, watercolour 16 x 20" hot press, 2009 (No. 1806)