website and update

working on my website earlier this week has provided an opportunity to revisit past work and consider it in relationship with my current work. my history of art-making can look inconsistent and disparate at times, but there are recurrent themes. for example, lines pop up in ways that reflect an interest in pattern, borders, gesture, branches, and striations in natural and painted forms. one small body of work from 1997 is a series of small drawings made up entirely of more or less straight lines moving from left to right across paper with horizontal orientation. my site-specific sculpture, mudquilt (above), from Land Arts in 2002, was a "quilt" of pleated mud balls formed by scraping the semi-solid surface of a dry riverbed with my fingertips. here again, there are lines. a much utilized technique in my painting is to pull a brush through thick, unmixed acrylic color, causing the paint to form linear striations of color, resembling the layers of sediment which hardens into rock.
there are also other recurrent themes, or interests, processes, inspirations: working with semi-viscous material, physicality of process and material, and attraction to the unpleasant (the gross, dangerous, and controversial), just to name a few.

doodle and words

here's a computer doodle of a recent painting (because the camera is in south africa with my significant other). the following words are in regards to the painting, not the doodle. the central form becoming much more aggressive; colors range from the sickly to the synthetic. the colors aren't necessarily ones i like, but i choose them because they deserve a place.

the latest

working on a 40"x66" painting now (3 more canvases that size stretched and waiting in the wings). the increased size makes me wilder. feels more like grad school.
i had stopped doing large-scale, expensive work after i left grad school. i could only see the path i was on leading to serious physical injury and a broken bank account. i went back to working on paper, working without color, and working in much smaller scale. maybe this was good. i had a renewed interest in working within a 2-d picture plane.
but now the work is growing in scale once again, though it is still (so far) consistent enough to still be considered part of the same body of paintings i've been working on for the past 4 months or so. the more i work on this series, the further i can feel myself moving away from what i believe are mainstream interests. but when i think about this, i have often not been interested in mainstream interests. i mean, i still love abstract expressionism, which has never fared well with mainstream viewers.
unlike grad school, this time i want to see what happens when i stick with the picture plane.

finished painting

so here's the finished painting.

process

back in the saddle again after about a week's hiatus. i'm at the point now in this series where i can work toward perfecting my technique and editing out all the unnecessary elements. here's another process shot. ideas in my mind: gas, pollution, chemical waste, the color of poison, warning signs.

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