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Archive for the ‘Painting’ Category

The Dark Rise

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , on March 8, 2011| 6 Comments »

This was a case of a painting dictating what is was to be, against my efforts to make it otherwise. 

 This new 24″ by 24″ canvas grew slowly and once I was painting  in the sky I kept telling myself that it had to be lighter and lighter.  Since  2002 when I was featuring paintings that featured darker tones (referred to as my “dark work“), I have resisted working in this series.  That work was not as well received as most of my work  and I was responding to the market.  Personally, I felt that this was very strong work, work that excited my sensibilities.  But if they had no place in the galleries, I was hesitant to spend my time on the work.

So when I was in the midst of this piece I began to naturally steer away from the darkness that marked these earlier works.  I saw the sky as being brighter and having high contrast but with each stroke there was a nagging feeling that that was not what was meant for this piece.  I went so far as to load my palette with lighter colors and stand, brush in hand, before the canvas, ready to change this painting in a way that would alter everything about it.

But there was something that told me to stop, that this was where the sky stopped, that this was the destination.  This was what this piece was meant to be.  I stepped back and put down the palette.  It would stay dark.

Now, maybe this will not fit into the marketplace for my work but that doesn’t matter.  When I look at this piece, that is the last thing in my mind.  I am immediately pulled into the picture plane and upward, over the knolls, toward the top of the rise where the sun/moon hovers, urging me to continue climbing.  It is complete and has its own life, its own momentum.  It is what it is and that is beyond me now.

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One from the Pile

Posted in Painting on March 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday I wrote about a piece that I considered somehow incomplete and how I was hoping to somehow  keep it from the failure pile.  Afterwards I decided to take a look at some of the pieces that occupy this pile .  Some are downright failures, just wrong in so many ways.  Drab color.  No sense of rightness in the lines of the composition.  No focus, no point in the whole piece.  Some are just bad concepts that just don’t mesh with my mind.

And then there are pieces like this fellow.  It’s a smaller piece on paper, I think about 3″ by 7″, and was painted several years back when I was in the midst of my Outlaw series, a group of dark figures who often held guns.  I remember very well painting this.  There were things I very much liked in this piece but there were little flaws, little nagging details, that bothered me enough to hesitate in showing it in a gallery.  I remember going back to this image many times back then, debating whether it worked for me.  Ultimately, I moved him to the failure pile.  Actually, it’s a bin but the pile sounds better.

Revisiting this piece is an interesting exercise.  I still have many of those same reservations but I find myself really intrigued by this piece.  It is probably destined to exist only in my bin but has something that strikes a chord for me nonetheless.

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Incomplete

Posted in Painting, Technique/History on March 4, 2011| 2 Comments »

In my studio I have several pieces that sit in varying states of  incompletion.  Some have sat for quite a long time, waiting for the possibility of a few strokes here or there to bring them to life.  Most have obvious flaws, the result of me taking the painting in a wrong direction in some way.  Some still have possibility and I will at some point revisit them.  Others have no chance to ever see the outside world and will be consigned to the failure heap.  I keep them around because often they possess certain concepts that just weren’t brought to fruition properly at the time but might work with a different approach.  So in that way they are useful.

Then there are pieces like the one above.  It’s from early last year, a piece that’s about 9″ by 16″ on paper.  For all intents and purposes, it is done.  But there’s something about it that nags at me, that tells me that it’s incomplete.  So for the past year I have been looking at this painting on and off, trying to ascertain what doesn’t click for me or if there’s a chance of making it work.  Or if it’s even worth trying to save.

In this case, I tend to think it’s worth saving.  I keep seeing things that I like a lot in it and think that sometime soon I might go back in and try to bring it to some satisfactory completion.  At least I hope I see things that make it worth going back in.  It may be that I know how much time I put into this painting initially and don’t want to see it squandered without a fight.

We’ll see.  Hopefully, it won’t be relegated to the failure heap.

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Finding Inspiration

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged on February 25, 2011| 1 Comment »

I’ve started working on a few new pieces on paper, taking a short break from the larger additive paintings that have occupied me for the past few months.  One of the first was this painting, about 7″ by 12″, which is a continuation of last year’s black and white series.  I thought it would be best to dive back into this work with some black and white work to regather the feel and rhythm of the medium.

I call this black and white but it’s pretty evident that this is not completely accurate.  I still use bits of color, usually muted tones of red or yellow, and the rest is really black and gray.  Actually, now that I think about it, I think I was calling this my gray work several months back.  Writing or talking about the work is the only reason I try to label the styles I use.  In my mind, they are simply different and labels don’t matter.

This reentry into this work on paper is always interesting because there are always tweaks in the colors.  The time away from this style has cleansed the palette and gives me a new chance to see the colors and combinations in a new light.  While there is a continuum with obvious traits and colors in my work,  going back through the years and reviewing my work on a year by year basis shows these tweaks in an obvious way.  Some years, the predominant work is very bright with almost a gleaming white underneath that makes the work glow.  Very clean, very bright and light.  Other years, the colors are deeper and crowd together densely giving the work a very rich feel.  Some years are dominated by cerain colors. In these years there will be mainly blues or golden yellows or deep oranges that seem to jump out from every piece.

Every year is different even in a similar fashion.  So as I go back in for this year I am eager to see how the year evolves and what trail I will follow.  Looking at this piece allows me to see several pieces into the future.  Many new pieces have that effect.  They spark something, some new idea or rhythm, that I instantly visualize and, if things go as I see them, eventually find their way out into the world.  Sometimes they evaporate before I can capture them and I then find myself struggling to recall that spark, that idea.  It’s like trying to recall a story, something someone told you in passing several before.  You can remember being told something but the details just won’t come.  So you let it go and one day something will spark that thought and suddenly bring back the whole story in detail.  That’s what often happens when I look at my work– it brings back ideas that have laid dormant in my mmemory for a long period of time.

So when I look at a piece like this, I take pleasure in the painting itself but also in the inspiration it provides for subsequent pieces.  When this is happening, I know I’m back in rhythm and the work usually shows this.

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Dissolve

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged on February 19, 2011| Leave a Comment »

This painting called Dissolve is another in the series I’ve been working in for the past few months.  This 24″ by 36″ piece is based very much on the same format as Like Sugar In Water, which I displayed here several days back.  Both paintings grow from the bottom where they begin in structured blocks of color.  The path cuts through, rising from the geometry of the fields up to a plain that flattens out.  The path continues by the red-roofed house and is not seen again as it enters the broad yellow field that runs to the horizon.  The path’s upward movement is continued in  the spreading bare limbs of the distant tree which merges into the broken mosaic of the sky.

It’s a simple concept and a simple composition, dependent on the complexity of the color and the placement of the elements in order to transmit feeling and emotion.  These simpler compositions, when done so that they work well, are often very potent purveyors of feeling and are among my persoanl favorites.  The stripped down nature of the scene takes away all distractions and centers the essence of the work in the willing viewer’s eyes, making it very accessible to those who connect with it.  And that is much of what I hope for my work- to create work that stirs strong emotion within a seeming;ly simple context.

Maybe there’s more to it than this.  I can’t be sure if my thoughts and interpretations are any more valid than those of a first-time viewer.  That’s the great thing about art– there are no absolutes.  It’s also the thing about art that scares a lot of people.  Many people fear the gray areas of this world, of which there are many,  and desire absolute belief and knowledge in all aspects of their lives.   But art most often  lives in the ambiguity, the uncertainty,  of those gray areas and that can be unsettling to some. 

 Dissolve seems absolute and certain at first glance but is all about the gray areas of our world and our belief.  At least as I see it…

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Exile 2011

Posted in Painting, Personal Mythology, Technique/History, tagged , on February 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I first painted one these faces back in 1995 when they became what I call my Exile series.  They were painted in very much the way I paint some of my landscapes, starting with one block of color and letting that block dictate what the next will be.  I had no reference points to work from, just letting the image grow on its own and for much of the time when I was painting these I had no idea how the face would emerge.  Often, they completely surprised me.

This 12″ square canvas was my first new Exile piece since that time and it took a while to reengage.  The originals were painted from a very emotional personal standpoint and  I am in a different emotional place now, sixteen years later.  But after I haltingly began there came a point where it began to take hold and pull out its own emotion, with which I began to empathetically identify.

Call it an existential melancholy.

I see some of these figures in that way, alienated from their past and haunted by memories.  They are, in a way, prisoners of their own experience, trapped in a moment long gone and never to be seen again.  Not all of them, but many, fall into this category.

I’ve been wanting to restart the Exiles series for some time.  To what end, I can’t say.  I don’t know if I will show these anywhere but here.  I don’t know if they would want to venture from the safe haven I offer them here. 

We’ll see.

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Like Sugar In Water

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged on February 15, 2011| 4 Comments »

I call this painting Like Sugar In Water.  It is a continuation of the group of paintings that I have been working on over the past few months and is by far the largest of the series at 36″ by 60″.   The larger scale gives the piece a real sense of  space and depth that I think carries the work.

This painting evolved in a much different way than I originally thought it might.  As I started, I first saw this as being a piece about movement and saw a large tree bowing in the  gusting wind with leaves being released out into the large space created by the sky, which had its own sense of motion in the brushwork.  But as the sky came into being it changed and I found myself sensing a much different feel for this piece.  It became quieter and the sky didn’t feel frantic but rather had a sense of light breaking into particles and quietly dissolving into a multitude of colors.   Because of this change, the central figure in the painting, the tree, changed for me.  It had to have a calmness but it had to have a different function than my typical red tree.  Here I saw it as a connection between the landscape and the sky, like a conduit of energy from the earth upward.  It would have to be less dominate than my typical red tree.

At this point I set this piece aside so that I could fully consider it.  I really felt that the landscape and the sky were strong and could stand on their own but I wanted to make sure in my own mind.  So I went to work on other work and kept an eye on this piece, continually looking at it and pondering what lay in store for it.  Finally, after a couple of weeks, I decided it was time to let this painting complete its metamorphosis.  I had come to see the tree as being bare of leaves with the branches stretching up into the sky, almost dissolving into the particles of the sky. This feeling of dissolving is carried through in this piece by the landscape as well.  I see it in the road that runs through the structured geometric pattern of the field of the foreground, moving up through the spreading branches of the tree and into the breaking sky. 

I see the red chair here, not as I often do as a symbol of memory or of the dead, but as a symbol of the temporary nature of our existence here, living as we do between the solidness of the earth beneath our feet and the particulate nature of the heavens above our heads.  This is reflected in the title as well.  Perhaps the universe is like a large body of water and we are but a bit of sugar.

I don’t know about that.  But I do that I think that there is a lot to be found in this piece and I find myself pondering over it quite often,  taking in whatever message there is in it.

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Prism

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged on February 8, 2011| 2 Comments »

I wasn’t going to show this.  Part of being an artist is in creating and maintaining a certain facade,  playing up the more favorable facets of one’s personal prism.  To show something that might be perceived as contrary to this nurtured persona is always a risk, at least in an intellectual sense.  People don’t always want to know anything beyond the single dimension they might know and to offer more than that imperils their regard for even that single dimension. 

For instance,  several years back I did a series of dark figures that I called the Outlaw series.  Whem they were hung at my annual show, the gallery asked for a separate statement to explain these figures out of the fear that my collectors would think that this was the new direction that my work had headed, instead of it  merely being another view of those same emotions that had created the more calm and placid work that they recognized and were drawn to.  I did, in fact, have several folks ask if this was the new direction and some even asked me to promise that it was not.  I tried to explain that this was not new but merely a different part of the same person.  Another facet on the prism.

I’m not sure they were convinced.

It was painted yesterday in about ten minutes, without much thought or care.  It’s about 16″ by 20″ and painted with one large brush.   Over the years I have periodically dashed off these characters,  calling them my angry pictures.  I am not necessarily angry when I paint these figures.  Perhaps frustrated or anxious. I don’t really know.

 I have had these guys in me since I was child and periodically they emerge.  I don’t know if they serve a purpose or what part of myself, if any,  they represent.  I always feel a bit of release after they are on the surface and perhaps that is the purpose.  They usually go into a sort of file and aren’t often seen after that.  Occasionally, I will pull them out and be slightly baffled by them and very seldom do I show them to anyone. 

 But I felt that I would show a bit more of the prism today.  They don’t change the  visble light coming from the other facets.  It comes from the same source but out in a different manner.

At least, I think so.

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H.R. Pufnstuf

Posted in Current Events, Favorite Things, Painting, tagged , , , on February 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’m kind of wired from watching the conflict in Egypt on the tube in real time as though it were some sort of twisted sporting event,  the momentum of each side surging back and forth under a rainstorm of rocks and Molotov cocktails.  The term I heard several times yesterday was medieval and it certainly brings to mind the stories of the siege battles of that era.  Fire falling from rooftops on to the crowd below.  Men with whips racing through the throngs on horses and camel, flailing away as they rode.  Sheets of steel used as shields behind which the advancing forces marched forward.  Men carrying machetes and clubs.  I’m still waiting for someone to drag out a catapult or trebuchet.

Crazy stuff.  I need some sort of relief from the tension of merely watching this horror show.

How about this painting of  H.R. Pufnstuf from my friend  and great painter Dave Higgins?  It’s a tiny piece, about 3″ square, of the title character from the old Saturday morning kids show.  From Sid and Marty Krofft, it ran for a couple of years back around 1970 and featured life-sized puppet-like characters in a storyline about a young boy who is lost and trapped on this enchanted island where everything is alive.  For instance, the houses talk.  The island is ruled by its mayor H.R. Pufnstuf who protects the young boy from the evil Witchiepoo and her minions who constantly try to steal the boy’s companion talking flute.

Actually, it was pretty awful and I remember thinking that as a kid even as I kept watching .  But the awfulness has transformed into a certain  kitschiness over the years and it has achieved a sort of iconic quality.  It’s still pretty hard to watch (you can see episodes on hulu.com) but it has a catchy theme song that uses Paul Simon’s 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) as its melody.

This little painting is part of the West End Gallery’s Little Gems show which I’ve written about here before and opens tomorrow night.  I took a walk through the show late last week and when I saw this piece, it stopped me dead in my tracks.  It was such a lovely little piece, mixing the pop quality of Pufnstuf with Dave’s ability to paint beautiful landscapes with the feel of the early Luminist school.  He’s known for this juxtaposition, most notably for his Pimp in the Woods series, shown here.

Long story short, I bought this little gem.  It makes me smile and that’s so much better than what I’ve been seeing on the news.

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Centered

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged on January 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

This is a new piece that I’ve been working on for the last week.  It’s fairly large at 30″ by 40″ and carries the size well, drawing my eye back to it on a regular basis from across the studio.  I am drawn to the rhythm of the landscape and the quiet of the central red tree against the action of the confetti-like sky.  It has a calming effect for me, one that centers my anxieties and slows me down a bit.  Applied patience in a turbulent world.

I’ve talked about this here before.  The purpose my work holds for me is to act as a  sort of pacifier, to create a world and landscape that takes me just a bit further from the reality of the world in which we actually live.  I consider this alternate landscape  a world based on reason.  At least, that’s how I see it.

I documented this piece in a series of photos as I was painting, snapping shots after small bits were done.  I am in the process of putting them together in a video similar to the one I posted last week, Growing a Painting.  This video would be more in depth and detail as far as the way the piece comes together.  I’ll post it when it is done. Hopefully, it will turn out well.  We’ll see…

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