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Posts Tagged ‘Early Paintings’

Looking Back

Posted in Early Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , on December 20, 2012| 4 Comments »

GC Myers- Pride and Joy 2003At this time of the year I normally take a little time and revisit some of my work from the past.  I am typically beginning to look ahead to the coming year and am looking for inspiration, hoping to find a new path to follow and examine.  By starting with my own work first,  I look for pieces from the past that have a singular look for the time in which they were created.  Perhaps I was doing something at that time, experimenting with color or the manner in which I apply the paint for example, something that was set aside and never revisited.  Perhaps, now would be a good time to revisit this path.

If I can find it.

The painting above is one example of what I’m talking about.  Called Pride and Joy and painted in the first month or so of 2003, it is a 15.5″ by 16″ image on a wood panel.  While it has the elements of the Red Roof series that was emerging at that time, it has a sky that is different from others of that time and not one that I have painted since.  It has a golden glow in it that gives the whole piece a great warmth and shimmer.

I find it really appealing yet am somewhat baffled by how it was achieved.  That’s one of the drawbacks in the way I paint.  Being self-taught, my technique is always shifting, nudging in small degrees one way or the other by new discoveries or ingrained habits.  I don’t have an anchor of taught technique that I work from.  This was especially evident in my early work  where you could see how the technique would sometimes have wide swings throughout a year.

In this case, could I recapture the look, the golden quality of that sky?  I don’t know.  But it does open up a path for me that I may want to follow for a while, hoping that it leads somewhere new and exciting.  Maybe that path that I double back to will be one that I am now more ready to follow than I was a decade ago.

And that’s the purpose of looking back at this time of the year for me.  I have a couple of more examples to show in the next few weeks that illustrate how there are paintings that were the start of paths that I have yet to fully follow. Stay tuned.

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View From the Lonely Steps

Posted in Early Paintings, tagged , on September 13, 2012| 4 Comments »

I came across a large plastic storage bin in the basement of my studio the other day that I had not looked into for years.  It was filled to the top with sheets of paper filled with clumsy experiments, failed paintings and first steps from the earliest days of my journey into paintings.  Much of it was cringe-worthy, dull and without much life behind it.  As I said, first steps.  Rehearsal pieces where I was working out the process that evolved into that which I practice today.

But occasionally there was a piece that seemed to jump forward.  These pieces were fuller in their conception, livelier and united throughout the composition.  They were the beginnings of the continuum of my work.  They were  in the days before the Red Tree had found its way into my visual vocabulary.  They were often blank wide spaces  filled with only mood and atmosphere.

At my talk at the Principle Gallery this past weekend, I talked about how early in adulthood I had aspired to be a writer but found myself writing about these wide and open spaces, writing only about mood and atmosphere.  Hardly fascinating reading for very long.  I set aside my writing and this image of open spaces until I found painting.  My earliest work in paint echoed this atmospheric vision that had seemed so incompatible with my writing.  The message had found its medium.

This piece, measuring about 5″ by 11″ on paper,  from the first days of 1995, just before I started showing my work in public, had a title scrawled across its bottom edge, View From the Lonely Steps.  When I came across this yesterday I immediately was back in that moment when that piece was formed.  I felt that the painting was existing in the present, the now— an important part of the criteria that I use to weigh the worthiness of my work.  It had life and it sparked a feeling of pleasure within me, like finding something you thought was long lost.  It was a picture of who I was and who I am .  It was different but still the same.  It didn’t belong in a bin of discards.

There were others, as well, which pleased me greatly.  I looked for a bit then I put them all back in the bin and closed it up.  It was good to revisit that part of my past, to see where my road has once ran.  A mirror to the past.  It reinvigorated that inner sense of inspiration that sometimes feels as though it is waning in the busy times.  It was simply good to see it again.

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Strange Victory

Posted in Early Paintings, Favorite Things, tagged , , on March 14, 2012| 2 Comments »

 

I woke up very early this morning with many things running through my mind.  All sorts of thoughts and  imagery crowded my thoughts and I found myself thinking of this painting above, Strange Victory.  It was painted many years ago and this is the only image I have of it, a bit more washed out than the original so it doesn’t quite catch the subtlety of the snowfield.  It has long been a favorite of mine as well as of my wife who calls it the Dr. Zhivago painting.  It is perhaps the piece I regret letting go most of all but at least I know where it is and know that it is well cared for with its current owner.

I particularly like the barren feel of the snowy plain and the way the sky dominates and sets the emotional tone of the piece, its red tones set against the cold setting in a way that makes the moment seem large as the figure trudges slowly forward.  The rifle slung over his shoulder with the gun  barrel down gives it an ominous sense, as though this figure was returning from battle or returning empty-handed from a hunt for sustenance.  The moment just seems to loom large in this piece.

The title came after the painting was complete and was based on a favorite poem from Sara Teasdale, the great and tragic American poet.  It is short and elegant, filled with the grand emotional swing of going from the depths of despair to an elation in finding someone familiar who has somehow survived where others have not.  To find this simple discovery as something to rejoice of in the face of  what seems to be total loss.  Just a powerful statement of existence.

So, while I am up much earlier than I normally would be, I find myself thinking of this painting and these words.  There are worse things…

 

Strange Victory

To this, to this, after my hope was lost,

To this strange victory;

To find you with the living, not the dead,

To find you glad of me;

To find you wounded even less than I,

Moving as I across the stricken plain;

After the battle to have found your voice

Lifted above the slain.

—Sara Teasdale

 

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Early Piece, Early Voice

Posted in Biographical, Early Paintings, Influences, Technique/History, tagged on January 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I think I’ve mentioned here that there is some of my early work where my documentation is a bit sketchy.  There is a handful of pieces of which I have no images, which bothers me a bit now.  The rest of the work from that time is from iffy slides, photos and simple photocopies where the work was small enough to fit on a copier bed.  I was trying to organize some of these old images recently and came across one of those photocopies.

It was the piece shown here. This was a 7″ by 9″ image on paper.   I’m still trying to locate it’s title which is a bit embarassing for me, mainly because this painting rekindles so many memories when I see it.  I remember distinctly how this piece came about.  I had been looking at a framing magazine ( this was a time when I was still uncertain of how I would present my work and hadn’t settled on my own framing which I’ve used for about 14 years now) and came across an ad featuring a painting that caught my eye.

I don’t remember who painted that particular painting but it didn’t really matter.  The painting itself did nothing for me.  I wasn’t crazy about the color or tone of the image.  I wasn’t interested in its texture of atmosphere or all of the detail that painter had used in the fields and trees.  But the composition screamed out at me and in my mind I was immediately transforming the composition into my own work, with my own simple forms and lines.  We’re talking a matter of seconds here.

It was like the composition was merely a sculptural armature, a framework underneath, that served as a foundation but could be transformed on its surface.  While I used the armature of that painting in the magazine, it would be hard to see the similarities between my piece and that original image.  That tranformation and how quickly it happened in my mind always remains in my memory, permanently attached to this painting.  I felt like I was really finding my own voice in that moment, where I could synthesize influences in a very distinct  individual manner. 

I wish I could see this piece again in person, to see if it holds that same feeling for me.  To see how the person who owns it now sees it and to let them know how strongly it remains in my own memory.

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Bradford County

Posted in Biographical, Early Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , , on August 15, 2011| 3 Comments »

I was going through a pile of old work, mostly rougher  stuff from when I first started painting that had small glimpses of promise but lacked real spark or cohesiveness in the way they came together, when I came across this piece from 1994.  It’s about 12″ by 16″ on rough Arches watercolor paper and has the words Bradford County written in pencil at the  bottom corner of the paper. 

It’s a piece that I always found attractive but seeing it really brought me to a stop.  I so recognized that time when it was painted and could now see several potential directions where my work might have headed other than the one it eventually followed. 

This piece was very much in a more traditional watercolor style, with no treatment of the paper and the colors pure.  The colors had not yet come around to the palette that I later adopted.  For instance, the sky is a single uncomplicated shade of blue.  There are no other colors, not even other blues in it.  I had yet to make the move to more complex colors even though there is a hint of it in the foreground and the hills.

It also is a depiction of a real place, as denoted by the Bradford County.  Growing up, we lived on Wilawana Road just a few short miles from the NY/PA border and if you followed the road into PA you found yourself in Bradford County.  That part of the border is at the base of steep hills and is filled with rural valleys that I spent many hours exploring.  This scene was purely based on that place even though it is not any one location there.  I had not yet made the leap into creating my own landscape, forming the felt space rather than real space of Ralph Fasanella that I had mentioned in an earlier post.

To me, this is a time capsule that takes me back to the time when I painted it.  It suggests potentials that seem a million miles away from where I finally landed at the present.  It shows the possibility of staying strictly as a traditonal watercolorist or painting solely as painter of reality.  A depicter of the what is with the proper colors and forms.  I wonder how my work might look today, how it might differ,  if I had followed any of those other possible routes for the work? 

 I suppose many of us can look back at certain points in our lives and see times much like the one captured for me in this simple painting, times when we are at a junction in our lives and must decide which path to follow.  I’m sure some of us would look at such a time with a certain level of regret but for me, I am happy with my decisions made at and after the point of this painting so for me this is a warm memory, a reminder of the path I was about to follow.

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Influences: Death on the Ridge Road

Posted in Early Paintings, Influences, Painting, tagged , , on December 26, 2010| 3 Comments »

Well, it’s the day after Christmas and I’m trying to clear my palette from the holiday and get ready for the new year.  Not the holiday but the actual year 2011.  I’m starting to really begin to think about moving in new directions, even in a subtle fashion.  I’ve talked before about how this change is important to me and how it keeps me excited in the work.

Sometimes this new direction comes in the form of new compositions or a differing use of the materials at my disposal.  Sometimes in entails visiting past work or influences and seeing how they interpret at this point in time.  The same composition painted at different times often brings surprisingly different results.  Maybe my color palette is different at one time versus the other or maybe my emotional state is different, which has a huge effect on my work.

As for past influences, sometimes the time that has passed allows me to see different aspects of the painting I’m looking at and take this aspect into my own work.  The painting I’m showing today is an example of a past influence that I have used.  It’s Death on the Ridge Road from the great Grant Wood in 1935.  I love this painting.  It has so many aspects to ponder and take from.

When I first used this as an influence, in this painting from 2001 on the right, I focused mainly on the movement in Wood’s painting.  The curve of the road and the shapes and positions of the vehicles hurtling at one another, along with the lean of the telephone pole at the top of the hill set against the moving sky, all give this piece a sense of motion and action.

At the time, I wanted my painting to carry that same sense of movement as I felt in Wood’s piece but in an even simpler composition, without the drama of the vehicles potentially crashing together.  In my painting the road and motion in the leaves of the tree carry the action aspect.  It very much a different piece, compositionally and emotionally than the Wood painting.  At that time, when I painted this, that was what I took mainly from the Wood painting.  Now, I might focus on other aspects and create work that is quite different than what I first pulled from this influence.  For instance, today I might want to pull something from his shadowing at the bottom of the painting, something I actually have used in a number of paintings over the years.  Or the symbolic aspect of that lower telephone pole and the way it creates an almost shadow-like effect of a cross on the hillside.  That is filled with possibility.

So I will spend the next several weeks taking some time to look at past work of my and work from those I consider influences, such as Grant Wood, and hopefully something new will merge.  At least, a newer version of my work with a new facet.  We shall see.

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Night Clouds Creep In

Posted in Early Paintings, Favorite Things, tagged , on November 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

This is an early piece, a small painting on paper that was completed in 1996 or 1997.  Called Night Clouds Creep In, it is one of those pieces that quickly left my hands but whose image remains with me vividly, forever burned into memory.  Unfortunately, I had no real image of this piece.  I had somehow either misplaced the slide of it or had not taken one in the first place.  There were times early on, when this happened more than I would like to admit.

But the collector who acquired this painting those many years back recently brought several early pieces of mine that he owned back to the Principle Gallery so that they could photograph them properly for his records.  I was thus able to be reunited with this image and several others that also fell into this category of  lost images of mine.

As I said, this piece resonated with me.  It’s a great example of my early work, with its spase composition and two distinct blocks that make up the sky and the foreground separated bya thin white line of unpainted surface.  It is a continuation of a series that did early on that I called the Haiku series, inspired by the evocative three line poems of Japan.  These paintings were meant to be simply put yet very imbued with feeling.  Most were field scenes like this.

This piece really captures everything I wanted for this series.  Quiet and still, yet filled with the anticipation of what is to come.  There is a calmness and a tension at one glimpse.  Soothing and ominous, but balanced. In equilibrium.  It just works for me as I see it.  I am grateful to have it back to reinforce my memory of  it.

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As Clouds Roll By

Posted in Biographical, Early Paintings, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , on March 2, 2010| 1 Comment »

This  is a new painting that I’ve just finished, tentatively called As Clouds Roll By.  It’s a 14″ by 18″ image painted on ragboard.  It’s a composition that I have visited on a number of occasions, this time at the request of a collector in Pennsylvania, and one that I always get great pleasure from painting.

Even though this is a very simple composition with few elements, the great satisfaction I feel after finishing a piece such as this is something I can’t fully explain.  Perhaps it’s the recognition of the things in this piece that fully jibe with what I want from my own paintings.  The simplicity of design. The quietude of vast open space.  The depth into the picture, even though it is a very simple composition.  The inviting warmth of the house and tree.  The languorous fashion in which the clouds roll by, in a way representing the slow and inevitable march of time.

It clicks a lot of my own buttons.

The clouds in this piece always take me back to the first time I painted clouds in that looked like these.  I was not yet a full-time painter and had obtained a large commisiion that would prove to be very important to me.  I was on a short deadline and was still painting in the dining area of our home at the time with large sheets of paper spread over folding tables.  I was working on a large triptych and was nearly finished when our late cat, Tinker, decided to explore the tables.  Bounding up, she stepped first in a damp part of my palette and ran across the three sheets, leaving perfect little paw prints in a watery blue tint in her wake.  As the echoes of my bellow faded, my mind raced as I looked at my now very unfinished work.

Start over?  No time.  Try to blend them in to the background?  Not with this particular style of painting.  I sat and looked, concentrating.  Wait a minute.  The prints only ran across the sky portion of all the sheets.  And they ran in lovely diagonal manner.

Quickly, I was at it with paint and within several minutes I had blocked in clouds where once there were paw prints.  It worked.  Tinker’s run across the sky fit the rhythm of the piece and the clouds actually gave a fullness to the composition that it had lacked.  It was actually quite an improvement.

So when I see clouds such as these, I always flash back to my initial panic and the subsequent discovery of good fortune in this happy accident.  Since that day, when what seems to be a disatrous event happens with one of my paintings I step back with a much calmer mind and eye with the knowledge that perhaps this is just a new opportunity to see things a new way.

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Odd Bodkins Blue Skies

Posted in Early Paintings, Influences, Technique/History, tagged on November 26, 2008| 4 Comments »

odd bodkins blue skies

Well, it’s the day before Thanksgiving and I’m in the studio on a wintry morning, getting ready to go to work on a couple of commissioned pieces.  I’m watching a group of deer that are laying down in the yard outside my window, not quite ready to start their day.  My studio is surrounded by woods and this is a group of deer that have occupied my property for many generations.  We get along pretty well.

I spent a little time this morning looking at some older small pieces that were done before I started showing my work publicly.  I sometimes do this when I’m starting to think about where the work might be headed in  the future, something that I focus on at this point in the year.  It’s always interesting to see how the work has progressed, how the way the pieces are painted has evolved and how some elements remain and how some stayed behind, at least thus far.

The piece above struck my eye this morning.  It’s called Odd Bodkins Blue Skies and was done in 1994.  I can see my technique coming into shape and the beginning use of what I call complex colors.  I’m very pleased by the strength and clarity of this piece.  I think it has held up very well and even though it doesn’t resemble my typical work I can see my hand in this piece.  This piece always makes me smile when I come across it.

Maybe it will spur something new for the coming year, maybe not.  But it’s part of my history and in some way remains in me.  And for that, I am thankful.  A day early…

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