overpass/gutter/reflection

overpass/gutter/reflection oil on canvas 25x30

Another piece of the puzzle as far as Iraq imagery goes. Same overpass and bridge as before but from a different direction now. Starting to get really loose with the marks which is a process I'm really enjoying. Lots of oil and a touch of solvent really gets the paint nice and soupy. I also enjoy the many corrections and alterations that have played an increasing role in these latest paintings. I'm finding that errors are the good stuff that can be used in ways that the planned marks cannot. And if the paint is thinned enough, then those missteps show through. Not to beat a dead horse here, but Diebenkorn was the master of this (via Cezanne and Matisse). I'm no Diebenkorn, Cezanne, or Matisse, but it is fun as hell ripping all of them off in order to pay them homage and learn a thing or two about painting. Where would we be without those great minds to guide us?

bridge abstract

bridge abstract oil on canvas 25x30

Another painting that I've been working on where after many phases, it ended up pretty far from where it started. And yes, I am definitely pulling from the Diebenkorn bag of tricks here. I have another bridge/overpass painting in the works and will most likely have several more to come. The abstracted bridge here is not only referencing an actual bridge where some bad stuff happened overseas, but it's also serving as a metaphor for my recent ability to reconcile some things I've been dealing with from that time. I think we all have bridges or obstacles of some sort to deal with, and often times sharing those experiences can be helpful for more than one person.

a girl, an ax, and all the aspens

a girl, an ax, and all the aspens oil on canvas 25x30

This painting, like a couple I've been doing lately, has sort of taken a life of its own. Initially this was an abstract based on a scanner bed collage. But as I set about painting that abstraction, a conversation in paint began to take place between what was being put down on canvas and my reaction to it. Not to sound too pretentious or anything, but it was like the painting was sort of saying that it didn't want to be what I at first wanted. So I let go of my expectation of it and just let it become whatever it was to become. It's taken some time, but I've learned to appreciate that decisions made during the creation of a piece are not permanent. They can be altered, ignored, kept, or obliterated as one sees fit. And with this one, I would remind myself of that when I would put in something I wasn't sure about. In the end, this painting became a representational piece, but very quickly it could become an abstraction again. It's just a collection of colored shapes that become recognizable because their arrangement and modified margins remind the viewer of things they've already seen. I think this piece goes well inside the arena of representation, but for a while it road that line between abstraction and representation until it veered off that path and became something that I could respond to emotionally.

in the works

Three paintings that I'm working on. All oils, 25x30. In the top two I'm very conspicuously referencing Mr. Richard Diebenkorn in almost every aspect. What can I say; I'm a fan. Both of them were originally based on some digital scanner bed collages that I did earlier this year. But now they've sort of taking a life of their own and are getting farther and farther away from their beginnings. After my trip to the Midwest, I started to see the top one as a study of a landscape in aerial view. The middle one...I have no idea. I'm liking where its going but there's no reference or anything. It's just a formal study I guess. The lower painting is the result of many changes in direction. 4 or so. Underneath the top layer of paint is a snowy landscape, an abstract of a scarf midair, a figure study, a home interior scene, a flooded parking garage scene, and now this, which I guess is sort of a bar scene with 5 patrons. I may add another canvas or two to its left side to expand the space that these people are in. I'm just sort of painting and reacting, painting and reacting, and so on in all of these which is a nice change from the planning that I usually do.

3 colors

3 colors oil on canvas 16x20x3

I was reminded recently of the advantage of limiting oneself when making work in order to eliminate some of the "noise" of a seemingly endless array of options. There are many ways to do this such as sticking with a particular theme or working within a strict time frame. In this painting, I decided to limit my options color-wise by using only French Ultramarine, Cadmium Red Hue, and Naples Yellow (and a white, of course).

I've used this trick before in a painting I did of a group of birds (Territory) a while back. I think the result is that the colors become unified since they all relate to one another physically. In this painting as with the other one, I used different variations of the 3 primary colors. What would be an interesting future project is to make a series of paintings that pull from only secondary or tertiary colors.

Another aspect worth considering is how color choices relate to the subject of the painting. I think the colors in the above painting when coupled with the pose of the model, give a sense of heartbreak. Maybe it's all that red. This wasn't intentional, just something that happened. But I wonder what kind of "read" one would have of the painting if the colors had been slightly different. Would the model look sick or tired or bored? I don't know. Worth thinking about though.

reclining nude with red pillow

Reclining nude with red pillow oil on canvas 18x24

My lastest effort in my figure painting class.

Ricky as devil

Ricky as devil oil and marker on paper 16x20

This painting is the result of watching (and thoroughly enjoying) Ricky Gervais' performance as host of the Golden Globe Awards while studying Luc Tuymans' washed out, one-shot paintings. Luc Tuymans is a contemporary painter who makes no effort to disguise his photograph or film still source material, and Ricky Gervais is a comedian who acknowledges the realm of celebrity as a rediculous, self-congratulating balloon of self-importance that should be popped every now and again. And I find that level of honesty in both cases very refreshing.

2010 abstractions

Musical Chairs in Hell mixed media on birch 23x32x2

Chairs2 mixed media on birch 23x32x2

These are two funky paintings that I did towards the end of last semester. They are very similar in medium and approach to the Carts diptych below. In the lower piece I was trying build up the acrylic/wood putty to make small "hills" while making patterns with the drilled holes. These wacky (and tacky?) paintings were a lot of fun to make and were a nice break from the somewhat more serious things I've been working on.

Carts

Carts mixed media on birch 49x58x2.5

This abstract piece is made of two panels, so technically it's a diptych. As the title suggests, the inspiration comes from a folding chair cart that we had in the studio one day. I really liked shape of the bars on the cart and so decided to draw it several times. After that I played with the logic of those overlapping carts to create the abstracted image. I haven't had much luck with abstraction in the past, but this seems to be the closest I have come to making an abstract image that I'm fairly happy with. I also used the acrylic/wood putty mixture that I've been having fun with lately. I don't know how archival that stuff is, but it's pretty inexpensive and fun to work with. In the next posting I'll include some other abstract pieces that use similar methods and mediums.

Woman in a printed black dress

Woman in a Printed Black Dress mixed media 24x49

This is a painting that was part of an assignment where we had to combine everyday objects into a piece in order to branch out a bit. The concept is similar to Robert Rauschenberg's combines. I chose to use fabric and wood putty mixed with acrylic paint. I had been looking at a lot of Diebenkorn work and was eager to make a piece that focused more on composition while giving equal attention to every mark made instead of the hierarchy of marks that occur in more traditional work (two aspects of his work I really respond to). The woman and her surroundings are completely fictional and the position, logic, and form of these elements merely stand to contribute to the composition. This process of bending the rules of traditional drawing techniques such as perspective, light source logic, and human (and chair) anatomy in order to enhance a piece as I see fit is altogether enjoyable and liberating.  This is also the first of several paintings using the arylic paint/wood putty mixture (an idea I picked up from a Larry Davis demo a couple of years ago). The stuff dries pretty quickly, so it's mixed in small batches and put on in sections much like a fresco. But instead of having a smooth surface, the texture is more like stucco - all bumpy and gritty.

Note: The white background you see in the lower section of the photo is a white wall and not part of the actual painting. The fabric hangs freely below the edge of the canvas.

Putting a Cork In It

Putting a Cork In It oil on masonite 8x10 $150

Throughout this summer I've been working with several friends on various art projects. The projects are usually fairly simple and normally revolve around a theme or an object or even a podcast that is used as a starting off point for making work.  The point of all of this is to keep each other motivated during the summer and make work on a daily basis. This is not always an easy thing to do, but most artists will tell you it's crucial. As Chuck Close puts it, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up to the studio and work." Meaning, good work doesn't come to those who sit on their laurels waiting for inspiration. Rather, it comes from doing the work itself. And so these projects are designed to keep us working everyday with the understanding that eventually good things will come.

The painting above is from a project where you had to somehow incorporate a wine bottle into the piece - again, a very simple idea. I chose to talk about the decision I made a couple of years ago to severely curb/quit drinking. In the colors of the walls and the freezer, I've tried to incorporate as much variation as possible as this seems to be more like the way we experience color.  Other colors were exaggerated for cohesion or emphasis.

Painting Sketch

This is a little sketch done after checking out some images of Anne Gale's work. She has an amazing ability to make her subject matter(people, mostly) diffuse into the atmosphere around them in such a skillful way. Her paintings remind me of the give and take that occurs at the boundaries of objects. In geology, it's refered to as weathering, but I don't necessarily think of surficial deconstruction when I look at her stuff. But maybe that's part of it. Anyways, I attempted to achieve some of this effect in this painting. Unfortunately, my colors started to get a little muddy and the composition leaves something to be desired. Just a sketch, though, so not a ton of planning went into it. I think I'll try a few more in this style. I like the idea of using small building blocks to create an image that shows a subject exchanging something with the space around it. Those small exchanges of light and shape, and, at a much smaller scale, matter and energy that are found at the boundaries of all things are fascinating to me.

Hangers4

Hangers4 oil on masonite 5.5x5.5

I think these particular hangers showed up in the second painting I did of hangers. Their the cheap ones with the flimsy, cardboard tube at the bottom. As hangers, they kinda suck and don't hold up very well, but as subject matter, I think they offer many possibilities. I also really like how they read as somewhat abstract objects initially.

Hangers3

Hangers3 oil on masonite 8x10 $150

Black Chair with Drapery

Black Chair with Drapery oil on masonite 5.5x10.5 $120

I'm not sure exactly why I'm so interested in chairs these days, but they make for fine still life subjects. I worked on this one after taking a look at a bunch of Degas paintings. His interiors have so much open space, especially his paintings of ballerinas practicing in studios. I never really noticed that before, and so I wanted to make a painting that viewed a subject from as far away as I could get. So I cleared a path in my studio and got to work.

Yellow Chair

Yellow Chair oil on masonite 8x10 $75

In this one, I wanted to show two different views of the same object without changing the setup or the lighting. This meant that I needed to change my vantage point from a seated position to a standing one. Actually I had to stand on a wooden box and lean my easel toward the chair to get the image I wanted. When I was working on the top portion of the painting I was seated, comfortable, and relaxed, and the image was easy to render. The bottom portion, though, was a little unnerving since I thought at any moment I'd lean too far forward and accidentally topple the easel, my painting, and the chair. And this caused some hesitation and frustration in more than a few strokes. I think I'll do a few more like this since I like the somewhat abstracted read from farther away.

Painting Sketch - Van Gogh style study

A little study of an iron. I didn't have the right colors to make the local colors of the iron itself (ran out of white), so I said the hell with it and painted the damn thing anyway using whatever I had. I also wanted it to be a bit more volumetric than other paintings I've done, and so Van Gogh's seemed like a good style to copy.

Jacksonville Buses

Jacksonville Buses oil on masonite 36x48x2 $2000

My biggest painting yet. What drew me to painting this was the composition of a graphite drawing I made a few months back. From afar the drawing read as an interesting abstraction of shapes that only slightly reminded me of buses or train cars. So I tried to keep that ambiguity in the painting and not let myself get too tight. In reality, the layout of this Grayhound station is not a perfect square but more like a trapezoid, and in my admittedly "wonky" perspective it's greatly exaggerated. Working on such a big painting was really freeing, and I hope to do many more this size.

Scissors

Scissors oil on masonite 4x6

This is definitely a Diebenkorn-inspired piece. I couldn't help myself after seeing his paintings of the same type of scissors. I think everyone can connect to those older style metal scissors. They have a certain heft to them and they look dangerous. They're the ones your parents told you not to run with. I also used an old Gauguin trick by putting a hot red in the background to jump forward a bit visually and to challenge the calm of the blue, green, and yellow in the cloth.

Roads

Roads oil and acrylic on baltic birch 19x23

This is a larger piece that I recently completed for my painting class. The assignment was to incorporate screenprinting with oil painting. Working on a larger scale is kind of new for me, and I like it. I was definitely out of my comfort zone on this one for a lot of reasons - abstraction instead of painting from observation, a first time for screenprinting, the larger scale, gouging into the surface of the painting to explore different effects, the subject matter, etc. This one's about the roads we drove in Iraq and the IEDs that we encountered or, perhaps more importantly, the ones we didn't encounter. It's taken me a while to find the visual vocabulary to talk about this stuff, and I'm still very unsure of what it is I'm trying to let out. Perhaps that's why I chose abstraction over representation - the picture just isn't that clear. I don't imagine I'll make a ton of these paintings, but it's nice to let a little out and see how the process translates the thoughts I have about that time.