getting mileage out of that string

Now I'm painting from the string spaces. Which is a challenge, when I'm working in oil and refuse to use a three haired brush. I don't think I'll be painting them as forms after this one, because, to be frank, I think blown up, fat looking string in a painting looks cheesy. I may be using them as flat color in the next painting as a way to break up the composition geometrically.

But the solvent saturated paint that being thrown around in the background of this piece, SO much fun!

string things

I've been toying with the idea of a visual representation of a single life, specifically the progression from innocence to experience. This is the form I've come up with.

String, a tack, all strings supporting a leaning frame and converging at the tack on the studio wall. To the left is a good explanation of how the object looks in my studio space.

When the viewer looks up into the frame, they are put in the small position of an innocent person, probably a child but not necessarily. Everything they see is within the frame, and there is very little color on their side of the frame; in their experience. But, as most people do, there comes a point where one must leave behind the framed world and jump into the mess of knots, twisted threads, uncertain roads.

Here, and from almost any other viewpoint around my composition, there is more color, more understanding, and a greater sense of the whole, the way of things. There is also more confusion, but it is confusion that is tangible and could be worked out.

Sometimes we all just need the beach

the painting that put me into a funk also released me from a bad painting rut. I was so stuck that I did a one-eighty and decided to destroy the painting with a bright orange courtyard. Which, of course, saved it, and my exhaustion of it. Nearly finished, just a little more work on the white umbrellas and the shadows that appear beneath them.

I've been looking at Diebenkorn and Hopper to get me through this one.


Now I'm onto the next one, full of color and layers and experimentation with solvents and drips.

lungs, cells, and other dark wet things

the progress is as follows

what happens when one paints over matte medium with oils?

Leonardo's Lungs

these are small drawings I'm working on. a series of twenty in total. I'm reading Da Vinci's journals of anatomical drawings, which he had to keep secret from a Roman government that forbade human dissection. The pieces, when finished, will have very dark, dense negative space filled with incorrect anatomical drawings that preceded Da Vinci, and are only guesses, as opposed to observed. I'm sort of talking about dark as an allegory for ignorance and also fear, and light as one for knowledge and also courage.

Obstacle

and a painting I've just begun about the harshness of transition in the city. (Inside to outside, dark to light, edges, boundaries, shadows...)

Line as Sculpture

here's where the lines as sculptures idea took me