I did a presentation last night for a local arts group, the Elmira Regional Art Society. I’m not sure how well I did in meeting their expectations, or my own for that matter, but I stumbled through. Not my smoothest talk but they were a very gracious group and I thank them for having me in to speak with them. One of the stories that I related was about how the Archaeology series evolved, one that I related here back in April of 2010. I thought that I would revisit it today:
There’s new exhibit that opens at the West End Gallery in Corning next week [May, 2010]. 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
These were 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.
Redtree Times 