Category:New Artwork

The red and lavender palette and tissue-paper-looking paint call up images of muscle, cartilage, brain, all of the softer parts that make our insides work. The colors also remind me of kings and queens in their plush, royal cloaks and gold crowns. These colors are some of my favorite to work with, when I can pull it off.

I’m making the effort to present the artwork in different environments. Being made entirely out of acrylic, these 14″ x 10″ paintings love to be held and photographed. You could leave one in the yard during a week of rain and hose it off and it’d be fine. Is that a selling point? I don’t know. But if it adds a little human touch, a little flare of the real, to this modest piece of plastic and paint, then that’s what I’ll settle for.

All of these paintings, being made on clear plexiglass, have an altogether different view from the back, so I’ve included one photo of the back of this piece, because it is particularly distinct from what we see on the front. Please don’t be the one who says, “I like it better on the back!” That won’t help any of us. What’s done is done, and the hardware on the back is permanent. Need I say that I prefer the front view? The loops of paint look contrived. I’m more after spontaneous grit.

A common thread in my artwork seems to be an urge to use every color in every piece I make. This goes back a long time, and if you look at thumbnail images of all the work I’ve put on this site, you can see that trend at work. If you were to take a jpg of pretty much any piece of art I’ve made and reduce it to 1 pixel, thereby forcing the color content of the piece into a single square that represents the average color of the entire work, you would likely get grey. I don’t mind this tendency in what I do; in fact, it’s something that’s fun to find ways to push against.

For example, in these sanded works like the one above I actually use quite a range of color as I build up the layers of paint. If you ever hold one of these paintings in your hands, you can flip it over and look through the clear plexiglass (the substrate I use to make these paintings) and see a record in reverse of how I put the painting together. There is almost no resemblance between what you see on back and what you see on the front; that is part of the adventure in making these.

But, because all these different colors are layered, the top color is obviously dominant, and the thicker the coat the more dominant it is, even if you spend all day sanding it. In this way, I can use Technique to fight against Habit, in this case, my tendency to throw a rainbow at every painting. In these sanded paintings, the rainbow is still there, but buried, and I dig and scrape until I reveal those pieces of the spectrum that contribute to a nice looking picture.

So, even though I’ve used all kinds of color to generate this painting, it’s basically a blue monochrome with noise in it. The effect is one that really works for me because my eyes–enjoying the wash of blue, darting around with the different brush marks, picking up bits of maroon, taupe, black, and so on–get a lot out of these 140 square inches of acrylic.

Vernon Fisher told us undergraduates at UNT that an artist is a problem-maker. We go into the studio with an intention to make something, and in the process of making that thing, we encounter problems that we have to solve to get us where we want to be. Really, we create the problems, confront them, and in working through them, we create more problems. A working artist isn’t likely to run out of directions in the studio, because each piece conjures up problems that spiral outward into what becomes new pieces of artwork, and, of course, new problems.

In this way, and in so many others, the conventional wisdom that artists and scientists dwell in opposite realms–right v. left brain, passion v. reason, etc.–is just bogus. We artists and scientists love the chase. We love a good question: it gives us the occasion to focus our powers of observation and channel our experiences into the pursuit of Truth and Beauty, which is the dual prize artists and scientists seek, and is, as the Romantics tell us, a singularity.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

That’s what Keats says, and he’s right. In our hunger for the experience of Truth and Beauty, we artists and scientists look closely at the world and try to find new places where they might reveal themselves to us. It’s like a drug addiction, except that both seeking and obtaining the fix actually make life better.

This centrifugal cycle of problems begetting problems in the studio or lab, all in pursuit of the elusive, noble duo of Beauty and Truth, this is the grandiose version of how such paintings as the eight above get here. I have so much to figure out about what happens when I try different approaches to my studio techniques, so I lay out some panels, open some paint, and start working through and creating more problems. When the result looks good, I make it available to you; and, when it looks bad (which happens a lot!) I just paint over it and start the chase again. An art studio is just a science lab with more paint.