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Posts Tagged ‘Painting. Obsessionism’

Throw Me a Rope

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on February 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Tuesday morning and now that I’ve started on the big canvas I showed in yesterday’s post  I find myself obsessed with getting at it.  It’s moving slower than I want but the size makes every decision have more variables to weigh and more angles to inspect.  I’m at the part of the process where I am roughing in the structure of the painting in red oxide paint and even though I am about a quarter of the way through this segment, I can see it starting to take shape and can now see several steps ahead.  Although I don’t yet know where it will finally come to rest, I now have at least an inkling. 

 As I said yesterday, the difficulty is in not trying to hurry the process,  letting it grow slowly and not rushing for my own instant gratification.  And as we all know, that can be a difficult thing to rein in.  But so far, so good and I’m liking what I’m seeing on the canvas and in the forward looking part of my mind.

That being said, I’m going to work now.  I think I need some music today and I think I’ll listen to some Gillian Welch, one of my favorites.  This is a beautiful song with a Neil Young feel called Throw Me a Rope that she’s performing with her husband, David Rawlings.  Oh, and the painting at the top is called Audience, which I will now become.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afoS-uQVw-s

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Painting In Series

Posted in Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged on February 11, 2011| 1 Comment »

The new work I’ve been showing over the past few monthes has maintained a similarity in the color and in the way they are painted.  I often switch back and forth between the two distinct styles I maintain in my work-  the reductive style which is very fluid and transparent  and is about adding paint then taking it away, as though carving the image from the paint, and the additive which is about building layers of paint upon layers of paint to form the image- but when I get in a certain groove where I feel one style is clicking in sync with my mind I will stay in that style for a while, creating a series of paintings that have unmistakable similarities.

I’ve talked about this here before, explaining that one of the benefits of staying in a series is that it reduces the number of conscious decisions, allowing me to focus not on decisions of color selection or composition but rather on qualityand depth of color and brushstrokes.  It also allows me to almost paint without conscious thought, allowing other parts of the mind to enter the equation, which creates a subtlety and nuance that makes each piece distinctive.

Taking away these decisions simply makes the flow of the painting smoother, like a piece of music in the hands of a musician after monthes of rehearsal.  I’ve often thought of my paintings as rehearsals in a way, each often a fine tuning from the last.  Actually, I think performance is the better term.  Each is complete within itself, each stroke being done with the intent of that piece alone, like a note being played for the beauty of its tone at that moment, not as a rehearsal for a later performance.

I am usually pretty excited by the work I do when I am am painting in series.  If not, I wouldn’t be able to stay in the groove long and wwould move on.  Maintaining my own excitement is pretty important for my work, and I think for most artists.  I don’t know where I heard it  but the saying goes that a bored artist makes boring work.  I have certainly found that to be true.  Though there are always exceptions to the rule, if a piece moves or excites me in some way it generally will do the same for others.  If I am not moved by a piece then I know it should not leave the studio.  Simple as that.

So far that has been a good rule to follow…

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Raise Your Eyes

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , on January 11, 2010| 3 Comments »

This is my first complete piece of 2010,  a 30″ wide by 40″ high painting that is tentatively titled Raise Your Eyes.  It’s a continuation, of sorts, of my Red Roof series.  Instead of focusing on doorless and windowless structures, like many of the other pieces in this series, this painting is actually centered around the multitude of windows and doors present.

It creates very much the same feeling, for me, as the earlier doorless pieces, of solitude and maybe even a bit of alienation within an inhabited space.  However, there’s more of a busy feeling as though the windows were actually eyes.  It’s that feeling of being on a busy street yet feeling completely anonymous.  That’s what I wanted to make the lone tree stand out a bit more as the central voice in this painting, as it stands in relation to the sun.

I painted this with  larger brushes than I normally use for this type of painting.  It gives the structures and their doors and windows a little rougher, less precise and fussy appearance.  It creates a rhythm and motion of its own within the picture.

The central tree is also a bit against type for my work.  It’s not the red tree you might normally see.  I chose to go with a green leafed tree for this piece, to counter the reds of the roofs.  Again, it makes it stand out a bit more

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this and there are a lot of things that I like about this piece.  The size and the warmth of the colors makes it  a pretty dynamic piece to view.  Hopefully, this is a good start to a good year of painting…

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