This is a piece titled Archaeology: Under the Same Sun which is part of my Archaeology series of paintings that was new for this year. It came about early in January when I was struggling to find the direction in which my work was headed. By that I mean, I am always trying to find ways to expand the scope of my work, to create something new in the work that will excite me in the studio and, by extension, viewers in the galleries.
I really felt lost this year though and every day was a battle to create anything that seemed alive. I reverted to a exercise that my 5th grade art teacher in Chemung, NY taught me back in what must be 1969. His name was John Baglini and he was pretty cool, especially to a 5th grader. He drove a late 50’s Porsche, drew comic books and always had really neat projects for the class. It was the year of the moon landing and we made a huge papier-mache lunar landscape. He would sometimes give us a sheet of paper and would have us start at the bottom and fill the paper. He told us to draw a junkyard, to fill the sheet with items that we knew, to stack them from bottom to top. It was a great exercise that made me think of how one item related to the next and how small detail contributed to the whole image. It has been something I have used for nearly forty years so when I felt blocked this time I pulled out some large sheets of paper and started doodling at the bottom.
I did this for several days and eventually the pieces went from masses of objects to a smaller group of objects that grew upward into a landscape. It was at this point that I began to wonder why I hadn’t painted in this fashion before. It made such sense. It allowed me paint my trademark landscapes but to add a new dimension. From a distance one can tell its my work but upon closer inspection one finds a new level of detail that reveals something new with each subsequent look. It also allowed me to paint detail in a very free flowing manner, one object leading to the next.
There was also the opportunity to create a new vocabulary with the repetition of objects within the context of my paintings. There are a number of objects that make appearances in all or most of the paintings of this series. Peace symbols, shoes, bottles, the letter “G”, etc.
The response to this work has been wonderful and its been interesting to see how people study the work. The piece above will be part of my show at the Haen Gallery in Asheville, opening November 22.
Below is a detail from another of the Archaeology series:
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