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Posts Tagged ‘Archaeology’

New Look

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on November 1, 2011| 6 Comments »

Now that it’s officially November, it’s that time of the year that time of the year when I reevaluate what I’m doing with my work, both from a creative aspect as well as from as the promotional end of things.  Part of that is how I represent my work here and in my website.  Even though I understand the importance of having an up to date and informative website,  I have to admit that I have not always been completely on top of mine. 

I’ve decided that I must get on the stick with my website.  To that end, I’ve started changing it.  I’ve changed the way it functions, added an acoustic guitar backing loop and am adding portfolios that present a fuller retrospective of my work.  For instance, I’ve added portfolios (with slideshows) that show fuller my Red Roof and Archaeology series.  Before, you could only see current works and shows.  I plan on adding more portfolios in the future to make this a much more informative and complete site.  There are still other tweaks such as reformatting the resume and statements as the new site reads them differently but bear with me as I slowly make these changes.

This promotional end of this business is never a lot of fun and I think a lot of artists let it slide in favor of  doing anything else.  I know I have many times before.  But artists are ultimately small business owners and have to take every aspect of their business seriously.  I know that I am probably as cognizant of this as any artist but sometimes I lose sight of my personal responsibility for my own career.  It takes these built in stops in the year to let me step back and measure  and critique my performance from this end of the business.  From there I can take steps to make necessary changes, such as the  new look on the website.  It probably won’t be the last change.

Time to get to it.  Have a great day.

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Time Dormant

Posted in Recent Paintings, tagged , on July 11, 2011| 1 Comment »

My show at the West End Gallery in Corning opens this coming Friday, July 15,  and this week I will be featuring several pieces from the show. This is my eleventh solo show at the West End and I really try to make each show have its own look and feel.  I think this year’s show, called Avatars, really accomplishes that goal.  I saw the show after it had been hung in the gallery and there’s a real continuity between the works as well as a clean overall spareness that echoes the quiet of many of the pieces.  It has a sense of calm throughout, a tranquility that I have long sought and often wrote about here.

This is a smaller piece, about 10″ by 10″ on paper, that I call Time Dormant.  It’s a painting that uses the exposed strata of the earth below to create a sense of passed time as well as a visual rhythm that plays off the darker trees above that rise in tangents from the earth.  The white of the moon serves as a cool distant eye that witnesses this passage of time as well as being a focal point that brings the elements together.

This use of strata is a spin-off from my Archaeology series and is really about creating the rhythm I mentioned above with strands of color that have an organic quality that seems natural and right to the eye.  My hope is  that this sense of rightness will make them register almost intuitively with the viewer who will immediately sense what these layers denote without much thought.  Again, that’s my hope.   It may not be the overriding factor, or a factor at all, in whether the piece appeals to a viewer.  I can never really know that.

But I do know that I like the calm in this small painting, this feeling of being connected to an eternal pause in time.  There is a soothing quality that speaks of something more than the eye sees.

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Archaeology: Legacy

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , on May 24, 2010| 2 Comments »

I am finished painting now and have started the process of finishing my work for the upcoming show, Facets, at the Principle Gallery in June.   As with every show, there is a final painting completed and for this show this is the last painting finished, a piece from the Archaeology series that is 18″ by 25″ on paper.  I call this painting  Archaeology: Legacy.

This is a piece that I started at the end of last year.  It was one of those times when I got to a certain point and liked what I had in front of me but had decisions to make witht he piece and didn’t feel ready to make them at the time.  So the piece would be set aside.  Occasionally, I would pull it out and add a bit to the underground artifacts but it just kind of simmered, growing slowly. 

As I neared my self-imposed deadline for this show, I began to hover back more and more to this piece.  I think part of it has to do with the feeling I’ve been experiencing in my mind at this point in the process.  Sometimes, as I near readiness for a show, there is a sense of great mental focus and clarity and other times, a feeling of chaos and disassociation.  There is no rhyme nor reason for this.  It just happens.  Maybe it has to do with my view of the outer world at the time  or how often I yell at the moon.

 I don’t know.

But as the prep for the show winds down this year, I find my concentration and attention dwindling.  Thoughts are short and fleeting.  Bursts of thought and image come and go in a flash.  It might be disturbing if I didn’t recognize this as being a sometime by-product of my process.  So, it seemed fitting that the last piece before me was an Archaeology piece where the details underground consist of a free flow of items and associations. 

As it neared completion, it seemed to calm me, as though a great piece of unfinished business that had been hanging like the sword of Damocles above was finally out of the way.  When the last iota of detritus had found it’s way to the surface, I breathed a sigh of relief.  A sigh of finality.

And maybe that’s what this painting is about.  The sigh of relief of a future world growing beyond the legacy passed on to them from a chaotic world.

Or not.

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Hierarchy

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , , on May 20, 2010| 2 Comments »

Hierarchy ---GC Myers

The name I’ve chosen for my exhibition that opens June 11 at the Principle Gallery is Facets.  When looking at this year’s show, I realized that there was a very wide variety of my work in this group.  Not focusing on one specific aspect as in previous years.  There are  a few Red Roof paintings, a few fragmented sky paintings , a few with converging field rows, a few with Red Chairs and a couple of  my small, lone figures.  It’s overall a pretty interesting group that I think shows a fuller spectrum from the prism of my work.  Thus, the name, Facets.

There are also a handful of my Archaeology pieces in this show.  I only do a handful of these per year now.  The piece above, Hierarchy,  is derived from that series although it focuses more on the layers below the surface rather than artifacts, although there is one yellow shoe there.  This painting is a  30″ by 40″ canvas so it has some size which gives it some visual wallop. 

I’ve been working on this piece for about six months, doing a bit then setting  it aside.  I would keep glimpsing at it when I wasn’t working on it, trying to figure where I would go with it.  But I never wanted to rush it, never wanted to push it too hard.  Wanted it to grow naturally, organically.  It wasn’t until yesterday, when I dragged the last few strokes on the canvas, that I felt I finally saw where the painting had settled and it felt whole.

That’s always an interesting feeling, this sense of the work being suddenly complete.  Full.  Alive.  As though the last few embellishments stir something that make it more than mere paint smeared on canvas, make it an entity with a history and a future all its own.   It’s exhilarating  but sad at the same time, as though the life it’s taken on will soon be gone from my life.  I can’t fully explain it but that’s the feeling I felt yesterday with Hierarchy. 

So, I share my studio for the next few weeks with this breathing, living creature as it impatiently waits to shows its true self to the outside world…

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The Start of Something

Posted in Technique/History, tagged , , on April 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »

There’s new exhibit that opens at the West End Gallery in Corning next week.  It’s titled The Process- Start to Finish and features the gallery’s roster of artists showing sketches and studies for finished pieces of work.  The idea is to give the viewer a better understanding of how a piece of art evolves through the process. 

Now, I never really do studies and very little sketching for my paintings so this didn’t really seem like a show fitted to my process.  But I remembered that a couple of years ago, at a point when I was floundering a bit and somewhat lost direction, I did a series of sketches (actually, I call them doodles) that eventually evolved into my Archaeology series.

Archaeology: New Day

Done on 12″ by 24″ sheets of watercolor paper with a finepoint Sharpie marker, which I liked to use because it forced bold lines and better simulated the way I used a brush as a drawing device when I painted.   They were basically exercises where I would start at any given point on the sheet with a mark and simply fill the space with shapes and lines.  Kind of  a stream of consciousness thing.  There was no intent .  I was just trying to find something that would fire my then faltering imagination. 

I did this for about a week, filling a number of these sheets until I began to realize that this sketching  process could lend itself well to a different type of painting for me.  One that combined my typical landscapes and iconography with areas of this intuitive doodling.  Thus came the Archaeology series.

So I guess I do have a sketch of sorts for this show.  The piece shown here, Archaeology: New Day, was one of the first in the series.  You can see this by way the underground elements are formed in the same marker-like manner as the sketches as opposed to later pieces in the series where each element is painted as though it is almost floating in an underground basin.  This piece, which remains a personal favorite,  will be at the West End for the show. 

This exhibit opens May 7.

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Artifacts

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , on February 26, 2010| 6 Comments »

This is a new painting I’ve been working on for the last couple of days.  It’s a 14″ by 18′” piece on ragboard and fits well in my Archaeology series.  The upper and lower sections of this piece are painted in two different styles, with the upper being painted by adding layers of paint ( what I call my obsessionist style) and the lower painted in a predominately transparent fashion but with quite a bit of opaque touches.

Shown at the top, I wanted to show the lower section of this piece in a little more detail, to give a better idea of how this section is put together.  It’s  a chance for me to paint spontaneously, but in detail.  I  start at one corner and bounce all over the section, basically using my brush to draw the small items.  As I’m moving along, I’m constantlly weighing each new artifact against those around it then against the section as whole.  This weighing process has to do with color and shape, not what the item actually is.  I don’t really think about what the items will be in these pieces.  I prefer to let them take shape as the piece progresses although I do fall back on a number of recurring artifacts.  Some of these are the peace symbol, my initial, a shoe, a mask of some sort, books and a few others.  This particular piece also has a self-reference in the form of a small painting.

This is only the second piece in this series that has the upper section painted in this way,  showing the simplified  roots of the tree and having the sky painted with multiple layers of rough strokes.  So far I am liking the contrast between the top and bottom.  I may lighten the foliage of the tree and adjust a few parts of the sky but I’m not sure yet.  This is at a point where it requires a little time to sit and be taken in, almost with a peripheral view.  With paintings like this, with a lot of detail and action in the color and forms, I find that I need to see it but not focus on it completely to get the best overall feel for it.  That’s the real test.

So, with this piece, we’ll see over the next several days in the studio.

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On the Shoulders of Time

Posted in Recent Paintings, tagged , on February 19, 2010| 6 Comments »

This is a new piece, a little 6″ by 8″ canvas, that I finished in the last few days.  It is in the same vein as my Archaeology series although it is without the artifacts beneath the surface.  I personally refer to them as Strata pieces.

The Strata work still exposes the underground timeline but relies on the rhythm and color of the layers to carry the painting.  There is also a chair aboveground in this painting, something that I never used in the Archaeology work, which was intentionally left devoid of human evidence outside of the underground artifacts.  The inclusion of the chair puts this piece more in the present time, the time of man.  The Archaeology series hinted more at being in the future, in a world without man.

I call this piece On the Shoulders of Time.  It is just a reminder of how we are the result of all that has come before us.  Every decision, every action, everything good and bad that preceded us, has brought each of us to this juncture in time.  Our decisions, our actions, will determine how and where that chair sits for future generations.

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A New Archaeology

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , on February 10, 2010| 4 Comments »

This is a new painting from the studio that I finished yesterday.  It’s a 16″ by 20″ canvas that combines, for the first time, the elements of the Archaeology series with the painting style that I call obsessionist.  The difference is visible when comparing the finer, more detailed work in the detritus of the Archaeology section at the painting’s bottom with the way the tree and sky above are painted, with more expressive, visible brushstrokes.

Also for the first time, I show the roots of the tree above.  I had been thinking of doing this in the past and many people had inquired but I didn’t want to do it unless it maintained the rhythm of the piece for me.  I don’t know how to explain how I judge this rhythm.  It’s just a matter of looking at the piece and determining whether a sense of rightness exists.  Do the elements flow easily together?  Is there anything that makes the eye stop because of something, a line for instance,  feeling unnatural?  Just intuition, I guess.  So far, I like the roots showing and feel they maintain the rhythm of this painting but I’m still taking in the piece.

It’s the time of the year when I can hold a piece for a while and soak it in, let it live in the periphery of my vision for weeks.  This gives me a better sense of the piece’s cohesiveness.  Sometimes a painting will feel complete and ready but, with a little time to let it be, reveals a need for something more.  It may be a major change such as the addition of a whole new compositional element or just a tweak in a small bit of color in a small section of the painting.

It will be interesting to see what this piece reveals over the next few weeks…

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A New History

Posted in Favorite Things, Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on December 20, 2009| Leave a Comment »

This is a painting that is currently being displayed at the Kada Gallery in Erie, PA.  It’s a 36″ by 48″ piece on masonite that is part of my Archaeology series, titled Archaeology: A New History.

It has a real aged, sepia-tone feel that is different than most of the pieces in the series, a feel which is central to my own feelings on the group.  I see the items under the surface as a type of old family photos, evidence of time here on this earth.

The fairly large size of the painting gives it a bit of oomph and emphasizes the simplicity of the overall composition, letting the tree do all the speaking from across the room.  But as you close in the subterranean objects begin to take shape and tell their own stories.  The whole idea is to present a variety of items and let the reactions of the viewer form a narrative for the underground part of the painting.  Hopefully this jibes with the overall feel of the piece for the viewer.

Well, that’s the idea…

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Ozymandias

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, tagged , , , , , on May 3, 2009| 2 Comments »

Archaeology: A New WindI was going through some old books that I hadn’t looked over in some time and came across a thin paperback I had bought when I was in the third grade.  It was a Scholastic Book and the mere sight of it brought back memories of those days when the boxes of books we had ordered weeks before were delivered to the classroom.  There was a mix of excitement and anticipation until the teacher, white-haired Mrs. Rogers in this case, would finally open the box and hand out books to those who had ordered.  The smell and feel of the new books as they were came into my hands is as vivid now as it was so many years ago.

This was a book of poetry selections and across the cover was a photo of a group of British soldiers of an earlier times, astride horses in a desert setting.  It was depicting the doomed soldiers of Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, one of the included verses.  Inside, going past my crude scrawled signature on the title page, there were poems from Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Poe and others.  Looking at it now made me realize what a great influence this slim volume printed on rough paper had on my youth.

Turning the pages I came across a poem that still remains a favorite and whose theme has always resonated in my work, particularly in my Archaeology series.  It deals with time and the ephemeral nature of our existence,  how we cannot control our place in the future despite all the wealth and fame we may acquire now.  This sonnet from Percy Shelley still has legs today…
 Ozymandias of Egypt 
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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