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Archive for the ‘Recent Paintings’ Category

Off the Mainline

Posted in Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on May 29, 2009| 2 Comments »

Off the Mainline

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path.  Your own path you make with every step you take.  That’s why it’s your path.

           –Joseph Campbell

 

I’m very busy this morning as I’m getting ready for the show that opens June 12 at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA, so I thought I’d make this a simple post.  I like the quote from Joseph Campbell and thought it went well with the accompanying painting,  a new piece titled Off the Mainline.  It’s a piece on paper and has a wonderful glow as I look at it here in the studio.  There’s real vibrancy in the color and texture which, if you’ve read this blog in the past, is something that I strive for in my work.  It has a real spark, a sense of its own life.  I think it’s very strong.

Like the quote above, the painting’s title  insinuates that not every path necessarily goes down the main road, that there is true meaning found in following your own path and daring to leave the main route.  A simple concept but one that’s often hard to realize…

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A Shining Reward

Posted in Recent Paintings, tagged on May 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

2009Here’s another new painting.  It has a very bright and optimistic feel which I believe is the right atmosphere for what I see in this piece.  Like many of my pieces with the fields with rows , this has a certain symbolism for me.  I see the rows running to the center as representations of labor, of working toward ones aspirations.  I see the red tree as a sort of dangling carrot.  A reward for effort and perseverance.  It’s a recurring concept behind my work and something I try to keep at the front of my mind as a reminder of the need for patience in my efforts.

In the houses I see a reminder that one’s toil and efforts might go unnoticed by those around you.  Everyone has their own field to work.

I call this piece A Shining Reward which is a bit obvious after giving my read on the piece.  But if the shoe fits…

 

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Call Ethereal

Posted in Recent Paintings, tagged on May 23, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Call Ethereal It’s a Memorial Day weekend and on this early Saturday the sun is mottling the yard of my studio, filtering through the new foliage on the trees.  Beautiful day.  A stray cat came wandering up the driveway.  Nice size cat, dark striped tiger.  I watch him as he stops to drink from the small creek and wonder where he belongs, if  he’s someone’s pet on an adventure or a stray.  We don’t get so many strays as we once did, probably due to the coyotes that criss-cross our property.  This guy doesn’t get a very warm reception either.

As he comes around the bend in my drive I see two turkeys coming from the opposite direction. Seeing the cat, they pick up speed and begin trotting towards him.  The cat turns and walks back down the drive, acting very cool about the whole thing.  The turkeys continue and get near him and he dives into the brush to one side and the turkeys continue on down the driveway.  At this point I go out to see if he might be friendly enough to approach me.  As I get out there, I see a doe, one that I simply call Mama Deer (she is a great mother to her fawns, very protective)  trotting through the woods towards the spot where the cat has entered the brush.  She stops and begins to stomp her front leg and I hear her loud snort.  She takes another step and this poor cat pops out of the brush and heads back down the driveway in a slow trot.  Mama continues over towards where he was, just to make sure he doesn’t double back.

I doubt that this poor guy will be back.  Too bad…

This painting is called Call Ethereal and is another piece for my 10th solo show opening June 12th at the Principle Gallery.  I like this piece very much and feel it really captures the essence of the Red Tree.  I get a feeling of both contemplation and epiphany from this piece and having this dual feeling excites me.  I think it’s  very strong.  Hopefully it will find someone who will have something akin to my feelngs for this piece…

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Finding Joy

Posted in Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on May 19, 2009| 1 Comment »

The Coming Together


 

Joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself.

          — Mahatma Gandhi  

How do you define joy?  Is there such a thing as joy that is the same for every person or is finding joy strictly a personal preference?  Are there people who live without any joy at all in their lives or are there moments in everyone’s lives where they experience something close to joy?  Maybe it’s not a giddy kind of joy.  Maybe joy for some is a feeling of contentment, an absence of fear, an absence of pain.  

Maybe that’s it.  Maybe joy is finding that which takes away our fears and pains.

I don’t know.  I know that it doesn’t have to be sought.  It’s just there or it’s not.  For me, it might be as simple as laying in the grass and having my dog come over and lay against my chest.  It might be in sipping a cup of tea or watching the deer graze laconically in the yard.  It might be  in laughing out loud at something I’ve seen a hundred times yet still find funny or in making my wife laugh.  It can seem so simple yet I see people who seem joyless and I wonder where their joy might be.

Certainly, they must have something which brings them something akin to joy.  At least contentment.  But maybe it’s not for me to see or maybe they live a joyless existence.  Who knows?  Just something I wonder about on a sunny morning when the sun filtering through the trees, scattering patches of light on the thick grass beneath them, brings me joy.

By the way, the painting above is a new one, The Coming Together, that is part of the Principle Gallery show in June.  It features the entwined trees I sometimes use as well as the field rows.  I really like the feel of this piece and love the texture and color in the surface.  

Makes me happy.

Gives me joy…

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Time Soluble

Posted in Recent Paintings on May 16, 2009| 2 Comments »

Time SolubleI’ve been looking at this new piece quite a bit lately as it rests in my studio, waiting to be sent out into the world as part of my show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA in June.  

It catches my eye whenever I glance its way and there’s a quality to it that I can’t quite put my finger on but gives me great satisfaction nonetheless.  There’s a sense of timelessness in the piece as though the momentum of time has been halted and the moment is captured as a whole, not as just a fleeting flash in the continuum.  

The sky is not typical for my work and the wateriness of it reminds me of how time and moment soon dissipate, like drops of color in a bowl of water,  and once again we’re propelled from the stillness of the captured moment back into the acceleration of the continuum.  It’s for this reason I’ve titled this piece Time Soluble, another title picked from the titles submitted in the earlier Name This Painting! contest.  I send out thanks  and best wishes to Tom Seltz for this wonderful title.

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Loloma

Posted in Influences, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on May 13, 2009| Leave a Comment »

LolomaThis is a new painting called Loloma that was done after I was invited to participate in an upcoming exhibit at Lovett’s Gallery in Tulsa, OK that is called Masters of Influence in which the invited artists create works in their own mediums inspired by the work of the chosen master-artist.  The master selected this year is Charles Loloma, a Native American silversmith/potter.  His multicolored stone jewelry straddles the worlds of Native American art and Modern art, possessing qualities that make it stand out in both worlds.  His work is bold and has an aesthetic vocabulary of its own that I find remarkable.

Charles LolomaIn doing a little research I came across the fact that he had studied ceramics after returning from World War II  not too far away from here at Alfred University, famed for their ceramics program.  That gave me a bit of a connection and made me wonder how his eyes  viewed the landscapes of western New York, if they influenced him in any way.  The works that I viewed online were stunning and modern, gorgeous collages of stone in a multitude of colors that could grace any modern art gallery.  I was taken by how he created a sense of place in such a beautiful and abstract form.  It reminded me, in appearance, of some of the glass art that I have loved over the years.  

I really didn’t know what to do when I began creating my piece that was to be influenced.  I wanted to simulate a typical landscape composition but with colors and shapes that might have been used by Loloma.  Perhaps the yellow/amber color that I selected for the foreground was more my color of choice, rather than Loloma’s, but I wanted my signature in the work as well.  It evolved as I painted it into something that seemed more like a painting of a glass window that was influenced by Loloma.  

It ended up as a piece that has a beautiful range of color and one that may have become far more my piece than Loloma’s.  It’s hard to fully capture the spirit of another’s work because when someone is creating work that is a form of their essence and being it contains a wholeness and intricacy that defies replication.  The best you can do is try to see the rhythm of their work and let it guide your own.  I can only hope that this is the case here.   However it got here, this is a piece full of color and rhythm.

The Masters of Influence show opens June 19th at Lovetts’s Gallery in Tulsa, OK.

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Ozymandias Shoe

Posted in Recent Paintings, tagged , , on May 11, 2009| 2 Comments »

Ozymandias ShoeThis is a new painting called Ozymandias Shoe, using the name of the previously mentioned king from P.B. Shelley’s poem.  It’s sort of an extension of my Archaeology series from last year but more about the rhythm of the the underground strata than the symbols and artifacts contained in the original series.  The piece that was the subject of the contest a week or so back, Laminae In Harmony, was in this same vein.

To me, these pieces are about the organic quality of the layers and the interplay of the colors.  I like having this semi-abstract element in a painting that is primarily representative in nature which is something that I feel is present in my best work.  As I’ve written before, the use of the representative elements in my paintings is primarily a means to engage the viewer.  For me , the paintings are about the abstract quality of the underlying elements, by which I mean the color and texture of the forms that build up the surface.

Okay, that’s enough of that.  I almost wandered too deeply into the land of artspeak.  If you stay there too long you may never come back and if you do, you’ll be wearing a beret and a cape.

Anyway, this piece is meant to speak to the theme of Ozymandias and the futility of believing in our own immortality, our dominance over the earth.  This painting will be part of my show at the Principle Gallery, starting June 12.

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Penelope

Posted in Recent Paintings, Video, tagged , , , , on May 8, 2009| Leave a Comment »

PenelopeThis painting is titled Penelope after the wife of Ulysses who waited in Ithaca for his return, putting off suitors, in Homer’s The Odyssey.  Where I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York state, many of the small towns and villages are named from the classics.  There is Hector, Homer, Ovid, Ithaca, Sparta, Carthage, Romulus and so on.

When I was younger and became aware of the original places from which the names of these local towns were adopted, I always wondered about the people who settled these towns and decided what their new towns should be called.  What was the person like who decided that their new town would be Sparta and they would be the new Spartans?  In what trait in themselves did these people see a connection with the original Spartans?  Maybe it was a matter of dissuading other settlers from pushing into their newly claimed home.  You know- don’t screw with us, we’re Spartans.  It’s hard to see now, Sparta being a sleepy rural township above Cayuga Lake with hardly a sign of any carnage existing.

This painting is another going to my show at the Principle Gallery in June.  As I’ve written before, I am in the midst of preparations for this show , keeping me very busy.  I’ve got to run now but I wanted to leave a song from one of my favorites, Neko Case.  Her live CD, The Tiger’s Have Spoken, is a dynamic set that really showcases her powerful voice.  There’s a certain wistful quality there that I can’t put my finger on.  It’s definitely here in Maybe Sparrow…

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Intentionality

Posted in Recent Paintings, tagged , on May 7, 2009| 2 Comments »

IntentionalityToday’s a busy day, one spent trying to finish pieces in various states of progress in preparation for my show in June.  The month before any show is kind of crazy as I try to bring some kind of cohesiveness to a group of work, try to put forth a group with a somewhat common theme. 

There’s always an interesting dynamic as the deadline approaches.  At that point I’m sharply focused on painting and usually pretty deeply immersed in a kind of rhythm.  New ideas are sprouting at every turn and the synapses are really snapping.  It’s a kind of creative high.  But suddenly I have to completely put on the brakes and switch to prepping the work to be shown.  Varnishing, matting, staining, framing, etc…

I feel a kind of mental whiplash in that week or so before the show.  At that point, the show is set and there is little I can do to change it so any anxieties I’ve had begin to grow.  And all the time I’m just wanting to get back to that creative high, to feel that flow of electric momentum.

So, I know that’s coming in the next few weeks but that is just part of the bargain, so I accept it and just keep painting because I can feel the high coming and even though it has to be cut short as some point, it’s a thrill when it hits.

The painting shown is titled Intentionality which is another title that was submitted in the contest.  This is from my  friend Scott Allen and to him I extend many thanks.  This piece will be at my show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA starting June 12.

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Brilliant Determination

Posted in Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , on May 6, 2009| 6 Comments »

Brilliant Determination

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
      

– Samuel Johnson


 

 

I’ve been thinking about determination a lot lately.  There are times when nothing seems to come easily and it seems like there are any number of things that would be more enjoyable than struggling forward with your chosen endeavor.  But in the end you force yourself ahead.  There’s a greater satisfaction in struggling with that which you have chosen and feel is meaningful than in doing something that means little to your inner self even though it is easier and, in many cases, more entertaining.

This is something I keep in mind when I’m in the studio.  There are many days when nothing comes easily, every stroke is like lifting a heavy weight and inspiration seems to have left the building long ago.  In these moments self doubts begin to stir and I seriously wonder if I have reached an end to my creative life.  It’s like a dull pain that seems like will be with me forever and there are points I want to stop.

But I remember that this is the path that I chose to follow.  With that recognition I am reminded of other times when I have been at this point before and I know, I just know, that if I steel my mind and force myself to move ahead, one small step in front of another, that I will come to a point  where all this forced energy builds and builds and suddenly breaks free.  In this moment of release, everything suddenly seems effortless and inspiration is everywhere.  It’s like going from the dark depths of a stifling mine to the top of a cool mountain.

And the memory of the toil that it has taken to reach this point fades into the distance.

Until the next time.  And that’s where determination is needed once more.

That’s what I see in this new piece above which is destined for my upcoming show.  I was given the title, Brilliant Determination,  by my friend Mary Squire who submitted it in the Name This Painting! contest.  I immediately saw the connection with this title and this painting and felt this piece deserved such a title.  This painting is definitely about the determination I’ve written about.  It has a feeling of that moment of release, that moment when full momentum is realized.  It really is brilliant determination.  Thanks for the title, Mary…

 

 

 

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