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Admittedly, I've been neglecting the blog a little bit. This Fall has been a jam packed season for me with four shows one right after the other. The work above will be in my solo show at Modified Arts called "Amor fati" this November - Crash acrylic, ink and collaged materials on canvas, 36w x 60h inches.
I had two songs from two different bands come up in my Pandora cue and both were titled "Amor fati", so I looked it up and it was a perfect fit for how I've been feeling lately. The loose translation is "love of fate" the concept being that whether good or bad at the time - everything that has happened in your life has made you who you are and is therefore for the best. Considering you wouldn't be who you are if you had not had to live through those experiences.
That fits for me. While painting my abandoned desertscape paintings I really have tried to make sense of the events of my life, particularly my childhood. I have also dealt in those pieces with feelings of disconnect and how my memories feel like empty shells or abandoned buildings, because I can't really go back into that past and most of the people within those memories are now gone from this world.
I don't paint it to dwell in the past so much as to deal with my feelings and to achieve a deeper understanding of who I am. I also feel that the message is ultimately - to let the past go and be in the present and that the present is all you have. Once it's past all you can really do is apologize, forgive or release it.
There's no going back to fix it and constantly bringing it to the forefront of your life only cobbles your present and stifles your future.
On to talking about Crash. With this piece I wanted to create the sense of it being a memory. There are strong shadows to represent our mind's natural tendency to dualistically view the world as black or white, but at the same time there is this murky, distant/untouchable, dreamlike quality.
I was interviewed by a journalist for Sunset Magazine who is doing an issue devoted to Roosevelt Row and Downtown Phoenix the month of my show. My fingers are crossed that they'll use one of my images as well.
Another Day and Unrecorded Moment were completed during the second leg of the trip before returning home. Another Day was started at a campsite in the Redwoods, which felt a little amusing considering that I was sitting in the woods performing a city scene. It was more of a matter of staying on course and getting some work done for the upcoming show though.
The tentative title for the show is "Lost in Transition". My thought is that the title is both about what I'm going through and what I see the world around me going through as well. It's more of an artist's view of the world at play, but it seems like music, fine arts, film and fashion seem to be borrowing from the past and remixing elements from different eras rather than creating something new. Now, something new can and will likely spring out of these explorations and that's the "transition" part of it. I feel like we're on the brink lost within that transitional moment. For the rest of the world I feel like we're running late, but that we haven't fully entered into a new age as well.
Now personally, I guess I just feel like I'm entering into another big period of my work. A new level of understanding and working. I'm just in that transitional period right before making the next leap, of course you only know that you've made a huge leap a year after the fact sometimes.
Finished up Clutching on Saturday morning. I worked really hard to capture the feel of the drawing while introducing the wonderful abstract distance and depth that happens more naturally within the medium of painting. What I like best about my drawings is the clarity that line provides, but what I love about my paintings is the brush strokes and ambiguous abstract areas that allow the viewer to fill in the blanks. With the last batch of works, I'm working to establish a synthesis of the two almost a hybrid style that possesses both qualities.
With some of these works the collaged elements has fallen to the wayside for the moment. I guess to focus in on developing the new technique really. Another part of it is that each piece or body of work calls for it's own mode of working. If a piece needs collaged elements it comes naturally, if it doesn't that comes naturally as well. I paint very intuitively and don't really have a natural flowing way of working. Yes, my paintings start by inking followed with varnishing after the ink has set and the first layer of underpainting. This layer of underpainting is then followed up with another inking session, but this time around I will either paint directly into this layer or varnish before the ink sets fully, so that it will bleed and create distortion. Afterwards I typically clean things up and repeat this process until the work is finished. That is a fairly set way of working, but the collage aspect if needed for a given work happens between these varnishing sessions. The layers of varnish also give the paintings the luminosity that is seen within oil paintings.
I enjoy working with oils, but when I started collaging and incorporating drawing materials in my work, I found that acrylics provided a more ph stable environment for those materials.
Another big part of this was that while in college two of my painting instructors joined together and received a research grant to explore new painting material technologies. Two painting classes were joined into one and I believe the class time was lengthened as well. We were given a huge amount of materials to experiment from a wide range of binders (different acrylic polymers, urethane, nylon, and more), powdered pigments to mix our own paints, additives that would either cause surface effects or prevent crazing, orange peeling and air bubbles, and a host of other things. The materials were free for us to use and we were to provide panels of technique exploration documenting what we had done to get the effects. I guess for me that really set the stage for moving away from oils and working with acrylics.
Just finished Lost in the Reverb. I debated a few different titles, but felt this one worked the best. My thought with this piece is it's a typical evening walk home past the places you pass everyday to and from work, past the same people, and only the seasons vary it seems. Each day is like a reverberation repeating only slightly different.
I know that may sound boring, but our lives have a certain level of not necessarily monotony, but routine. There's kind of a safety and maybe comfort in traveling the same route to and from work each day. For instance, if I'm riding my bike to work and I'm playing tag with the 15th Avenue bus I know I'm running late and need to pedal harder. I also notice the same folks jogging, walking the dog or pushing strollers in the morning as well.
Here's a couple progress shots of Finding Your Way. It's based off the drawing Crossing. I'm playing with a new kind of light within this piece. For be a big part of why the drawing works is the negative space and the fact that the details fade out into the white space. I'm working to capture the same effect within the painting. I'm also trying to integrate some of the elements within my drawing back into the paintings. I love the quality of line within my drawings and that aspect gets lost in the paintings. I guess doing art is really about endless exploration.
I'm just getting ramped up for the next big exhibit. It will be either April or May at the Lanning Gallery in Sedona. The tentative title that the Director and I have discussed is "Night and Day". It will be an exploration of the urban environment during different times of day. I haven't decided if I'm going to focus in on primarily city works or if I will do both urban and suburban environments. I guess the process of developing the works in the studio will tell.
Just finished Gum Wrappers and Fancy Cars. It's a whimsical title really. Maybe a musing really. As I was looking at the drawing thinking of a name it dawned on me that there's fancy cars, dirty streets with gum wrappers, lots of signs and...
I think it's an interesting contrast between super clean expensive cars and liter strewn sidewalks. I respond somehow to San Francisco - Chinatown's mixture of glitz, high intensity colors, decaying buildings and liter strewn streets. I remember when I was a kid the first time I went to LA's Chinatown I felt like I'd stepped into a scene from Bladerunner that I'd only seen six months earlier.
When I lived in Honolulu, Hawaii it was very similar. Once you made it out of the touristy parts I remember walking down alleyways where there were street vendors, grocers with chickens hanging from hooks, the guys with merchandise inside their coats, street performers, street preachers and lots of people. I lived in three different buildings. Initially, we stayed in a 20 story building that was okay, then we moved and lived in a 40 story and ultimately lived in a 30 story on the 28th floor. The last building was really the best for living space, ocean view and location. It was only five blocks from the beach where the bus stop that I rode to school was as well. It's odd to think about it, but I rode a public bus to school in Hawaii rather than a school bus. Nonetheless, I thought I was in heaven to be able to watch the waves and smell the ocean air during my 30 minute wait for the bus every morning.
Completed Hanging On a Curtain last night or really early this morning. I'm in the last days of preparing for the show. I have enough work, but I'm pushing to have even more. I haven't actually had a solo show at Modified since the remodel, so there's a lot more wall space to fill than before. Most of my works are large horizontal pieces, so it should be okay. Nonetheless, I'd rather push myself to create as much work as humanly possible before the hang date.
I completed Temporal this morning. It seem't like there were a hundreds of little areas that needed refined, but once I found myself having to repaint and fix areas that weren't in need of refinement - I knew it was time to call it quits. Sometimes you just know a painting is done and other times you know it's done when you start screwing it up.
My upcoming exhibit Temporal at Modified Arts - with the Opening Reception on the Third Friday October 18th was included in Phoenix New Times 11 Must-See Art Exhibitions in Metro Phoenix This Fall. Thank you, Katrina Montgomery for including me.
I've been working on Temporal a 24 x 48 inch canvas all week in a very focused effort. This will be the title piece for the exhibit at Modified Arts in October with the opening on the 18th. Originally I was going to use Cling, but this one is the one. It helps that the title of the show fits. This is really a temporal moment where the movement of the street crossers with the light and shadows is absolutely fleeting.
I've been going through my San Francisco and Downtown Phoenix photos with a new eye for the drawings and I'm discovering paintings I hadn't seen before. I guess a break from the figurative/urban works has done me some good.
I think the thing also about working on the desert/gas station paintings was the need to mix colors in bulk. I have carried the practice into the last two figurative/urban works and it has sped things up considerably. It's funny that something so simple has never dawned on me all these years. This new manner of working has also helped me solidify the new color palette as well. I like using more color, but maintaining a muted film noir quality. This painting reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with all of it's bluish grays.
Finished Before the Rush - pen & ink and marker on paper. It's based off of a photo I took the last time I was in San Francisco. It's time to go again. I have also been trying to plan a trip to New York, but at the moment it's just out of my budget. I know when I go I will want to be there for 5 to 7 days to visit galleries and museums as well as hours of walking the streets with a camera.
I watched a the documentary Side by Side, which interviews several movie directors on their preference of shooting with chemical process film cameras or digital cameras. The opinions were strongly divided with the pros and cons. I realized that in many ways I'm in the digital camera non-traditionalist camp comparatively. For me the invention of the digital camera and it's usage has influenced my work greatly. First off the freedom of being able to walk the streets of a city like San Francisco for hours and be able to take thousands of photos within a few days is huge. It's an economic thing as well. With a traditional 35mm it was completely cost prohibitive for me to even think of taking that many photos. Many of the shots that become paintings are truly the result of being able to take photos without worrying about getting the perfect shot. I have even created work based off of accidental shots. I also use Photoshop as a sketching tool, combining photos and sketches together. It's just not the traditional art school approach of doing things, but the technology is available to be used. I have not felt the need to stop using paint and canvas, but I like the level of naturalism I achieve and feel that my photography trips provide me with a connection to the cities I paint that I wouldn't have otherwise.
