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Work continues on Outpost. It's going very smoothly and setting up quickly. As I'm working on the piece I'm thinking of how to go about how I could create the piece using silkscreen printing. I think that my work would lend itself to being reproduced using silkscreen printing. A few years back the idea crossed my mind and I produced a few works, but with the old studio I lacked the space and was trying to create a off-shoot of my work rather than simply reproducing the work in print. Now that I have the space I'm considering it again, but this time I'm going to focus on creating prints of the works in the same vein as what I'm creating on canvases in small runs. It's taken forever for me to learn this lesson of not dividing my energies too much. If the screen printing dovetails into my canvas work it will happen easily, but trying to create two divergent bodies of work does not.
I have also lined up the next several canvases after this one. I'm breathing easy to be back in the swing of things and free of the creative block that was stifling my studio production. I know that I will return to my urban environments, but for now I'm focusing on the lonely failed urban outposts of recent past.
I started a new piece this week working title Outpost, but that may change. It's based on a photo I took at Two Guns in Northern Arizona. While I paint the painting I remember the squeaking old metal and plastic parts blowing in the wind hanging by a thread. It was a ambient grouping of sounds that in orchestra successfully unnerved me while I was there. If I was in a zombie movie those are the sounds you hear right before a zombie comes out of nowhere.
I'm focusing in on the middle of nowhere aspect of this scene. I want to capture the sense of isolation that I had while there. It really felt as if you were at the edge of civilization at some abandoned outpost long forgotten. Yet, the place still has a history.
Above is the finished A Sense of Loss - 24x48 inches and Are You Hoping for a Miracle? - 10x20 inches. I finished them two weeks ago, but haven't had a chance to post them. It's been a crazy two weeks.
I almost entitled A Sense of Loss - "The Postman Always Rings Twice" after the crime noir novel, but decided that although the mood was there the station really didn't resemble the one in the book closely enough. I do think the "Postman" title will be fitting for one of the works within this body of work. The novel really does typify the psyche of how these roadside stations and diners were rapidly built in an almost gold rush urgency and boomed and busted just like all the little mining towns throughout the western United States during the Gold Rush. I think the deserts of the Southwest are filled with little towns and small urban outposts that have sprouted up only to die and wither away like desert flowers when the heat of summer sets in. The above gas stations came into being and ultimately abandoned in more recent history, but I think that more fuel efficient cars along with the growth of surrounding towns had a lot to do with their demise. The need for people to stop and refuel at these middle of nowhere gas stations ceased and pretty soon these businesses ceased to be. I named Are You Hoping for a Miracle in light of how the owner and the employees of that business must have felt. I guess being an employee of a printshop that had to close it's doors due to the economic downturn and well changes in the industry (printing is used a lot more sparingly in the digital age) - I feel like I've been there. Your hoping desperately that customers will come back in droves to save the place from going under, yet you know that it would take a miracle for that to happen. I think about this when painting these paintings.
I also think about my childhood. My family would just pick up and move from state to state with no job or place to live lined up when I was a kid. There was a six to seven year period where my family migrated from place to place this way only to return back home to Phoenix where we started. Now I find it amusing, but at the time that was a dreadful twist of fate. The lesson I learned was that although my mom was looking for this ideal, perfect place across eight states; what she was really searching for was never out there to begin with. Almost like running to stand still.
This life experience though has given me a perspective on the reality of the highway. I remember us living in weekly stay motels or seasonal condos for months at a time, while we got settled in to new jobs, schools or my mom decided that the place wasn't for her. Most of the moves occurred during the summer to facilitate, but not always. I felt like I was either behind or ahead depending on where we moved to. Also, being the perpetual new kid wasn't all it was cracked up to be. It always seemed that as soon as I was starting to fit in or established a few close friends it was time to go again. I remember staring out the car window mile after lonely mile wishing that we weren't leaving while hoping the next place would be "it".
In short, the theme of this new body of work is still about a sense of place and people that inhabit them, but also functions as a intimate portrait of someone who's lived on the road and just like my memories are all the past, so are these stations my mom filled up at when moving my family all over hell and back.
