Empty Sentiment

Just finished "Empty Sentiment", acrylic, ink and collaged materials on canvas 15 x 60 inches on canvas. I started it back in March and it sorta spawned other work and then I did some other projects. I looped back around to it this week. I'm not sure I understand my creative process or if I should even try. Maybe, I should just work the way I do and not worry?

This is an abandoned station right at the tip of Arizona on the boarder with California. It's actually across the street of a former in-state customs checkpoint that's been converted to a border patrol station. It seems odd it's so far north.

I woke up this morning realizing how much the visual technology of my age is part of my work. I also was struck with how my peers and I have only scratched the surface of what is possible within this golden age of visual technological tools.

I'm not sure what the next step is, but I know that in some regards that I'm shackled by conservative norms and traditional thinking when it comes to art making. I studied both painting and intermedia back in college. In the end I decided that I was a painter at heart and communicated best through paint. With that said - I also felt as if intermedia-conceptual work although not tethered by object creation and materials was still governed by conventions. In short being unconventional and radical is still governed by a play book and a set of mental constructs. I always hear "think outside of the box", but ultimately our linear minds can only create new boxes to think within. 

Riverfront Property Somewhere Else

Just completed Riverfront Property Somewhere Else oil on canvas, 24h x 48w. It's based on a source photo I took along side Route 66 in California halfway between Kingman, AZ and Barstow, CA. My wife and I had gone up for the Rockabilly Festival up in Lake Havasu, AZ and decided to go exploring before coming home.

The title is based on the billboard, but as an aside it does seem like the grass is always greener somewhere else. In this case that may very well be true, but no matter where we are or how good we have it - inevitably it seems like we want what someone else has, because it's better than our lot in life.

In the desert works I've been playing around with the addition of monsoon skies. In the summer growing up in Phoenix the monsoon storms have been a big part of my life. They also have a wonderful double meaning. The storms during the summer are particularly turbulent, but at the same time with the destruction that they can bring they also bring life giving water to a parched landscape. There are very few moments in our lives that don't mark transitional periods, but sometimes in my life some years are more transitional than others.

Lost in Transition - Finished

Just completed Lost in Transition, acrylic, ink and collage on canvas, 36 x 120 inches. It's the title painting for the show at Modified Arts this October wit.h the opening on Third Friday the 17th! There will be a healthy mixture of paintings and drawings. 

At the moment I'm basking in the glow of the two newly finished paintings. It's that time during the preparation of a show where works come together and are finished. Thanks, to my habit of working on several pieces at a time they all seem to just about finish together.

Initially, I was going to name this painting "Come as You Are", because that Nirvana song just kept popping in my head, but this morning I realized that it was the piece in the show that epitomizes what the whole body of work is about.

Everything is in a perpetual state of transition. A constant state of becoming something or someone else. Sometimes though a person, a society, or a place gets stuck and lost in the flux of this change. Two Guns, Arizona is such a place.  An abandoned and re-inhabited several times, but now only the ghostly remains of it's checkered past remain high on a desert plain with each season slowly cleaning the remnants of its history away.

All the Dreams We Waste

Finished All the Dreams We Waste last night. Part of the abandoned desert series. There are several more awaiting their turn in the studio. I also have a bridge painting or two planned.

This cafe and the motel behind it was along a frontage road off of I-40 outside of Kingman. I'm not sure, but the frontage road may be part of the old route 66. The modern ruins in the area seem to date from that time period. Just down the road was what was left of a old Standard station. Now the signs just stand like grave markers over cracked concrete foundations.

I guess that brings me to the title of this piece. I'm sure I have probably said this before, but to me I look at these places as someone's dream that they had to abandon. Businesses for one reason or another that didn't survive when the world left these places behind, but someone put their life's blood into running these places. They waited the tables of this cafe cooked food for it's patrons with a smile and started every morning by sweeping up the store front a little after dawn.

Now a guy like me photographs them with the wind howling through the empty shell of the building with the old wiring scraping across fallen ceiling panels. The paint bleached by the sun and cracking off the brick walls.