summer studio sessions part I

Kerdieekrdaad spent the unbearably hot portion of the past couple weeks in her ethereal air conditioned studio.  I came out with a series of 12 3" square paintings and Bri is going to town on a bunch of source material with her exacto.  Here are the first five:

getting my mind out of the city

I'm on vacation.  Well, my body is still walking down the parkway to school every day, but in the studio I am walking through the woods behind my house in Maine, watching my mother tend her gardens, thinking of the colors of the late afternoon in Umbria two springs ago, and peering at the sky through the cherry blossoms of April.  And I'm wondering if the result of all this pretty and happy will be too precious or trite.  I guess I have every reason to revel in real beauty--this art isn't a brain twister or a solution to the world's problems, but perhaps it's a positive experience for my viewer and that is enough right now?

fellowship show, onward!

Can you tell how many panels I've finished now? I'm headed towards 50, and ideally more than that... This process is so intuitive at this point--I've gotten out of my head to an extent that has freed my hand. I have to keep letting habits die so that I continue to manipulate the trash and colors (the same trash and colors I've been working with since January) in fresh, not-boring ways. But it really involves spacing out, not overthinking it. It's as if my concept is just embedded in the materials and alive in my hands, I no longer need my brain to transmit the general idea. If I'm going to get to 50 of these things in the next three weeks, this is what needs to keep happening.

What I Have, What I Dream Of continued

it became clear about halfway through this process that a single layer wasn't going to allow me to express my understanding of the complex relationship between city and nature. Once I cut the original images into strips and situated them on top of one another (see last post of this piece) and then began to work back into the image as a whole (this post) I came to see this piece as a metaphor for the upward motion of the city.

The base layer of this work, upon which all the maps and geometric fields rest, can be interpreted as nature, before any human altered it. The rest of the composition is supported by that layer, and as your eye moves towards the uppermost drawings you may notice how simple, geometric, and sparse they become. In only two or three areas did I allow the eye to perceive clearly the organic that exists beneath all the gridwork, and I imagine these areas to be reminders--what if we were to lift up a stretch of the city and remember again everything wild that lives down there?

This blueprint is representative of how I perceive the city. If one were able to slice it into vertical strata, the lowest layer would be the richest and most organic, and the highest layer would only include empty air and the rectangles of the highest buildings. Everything in between would be defined in terms of the spectrum set up by the lowest and highest layer.

Fellowship Panels, Update

I'm beginning to slow down on these a bit for a lack of focus and a slight loss of interest, but I have to keep plugging. Hopefully continued work on them will get me off the plateau and help me pick up the pace!

additional work on The Beast

I just couldn't let it sit there; I started seeing things that were wrong with it. That's what happens when you turn a painting towards the wall and look at it again 30 days later. You see things. I'm seeing things.

SOLD (March 2010)

Ode to Vision and Revision

Over the past three days, as I watched this painting change rapidly beneath my hand, I remembered the a few lines from T.S. Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock that read:

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

For everyone else, I hope there is something in this painting that lifts and drops a question on your plate. While I've come to understand that I cannot share through color and shape the conversations running in my head as I make something, I hope that the art provides a starting point for new dialogues, new questions, new debates. I hope something I've painted causes you to be curious, to remember, or to hope--that you leave a little you with the painting and take a little of the painting home.

For me, this painting is about vision and revision. The colors I used and the moments I constructed with those colors resulted from, I think, an honest sense of wonder (to use Rachel Carson's words). Wonder at color, at the way it is dispersed in nature and at the power I feel when I can choose colors. To finish this painting, I needed to take the time to look, often, and have the courage to let pieces of it fall away. The process was one of intuition, serious contemplation, indecision (about every ten minutes), joy (especially when the colors I mixed were vibrant and good), revision, and exhaustion. Today I felt satisfaction, and chose to stop here.

I dedicate the painting to the people that use their senses vigorously and joyously to explore our world!

12 12" by 12" panels, in progress

just working on these a little every day until they're resolved.