Modular Considerations--Minimalist/ Maximalist

                             
                              
 Open Studios at my building offers a chance to curate--studio as gallery space. This time the exercise led to these modular compositions. And with paints, brushes, and source materials still stowed away, I've been playing with the formations ever since.

 

 

  The groupings satisfy a long- held desire to meld  painting with a sculptural presentation. In other words, paintings where the panels on which they are painted do not "disappear" in service to the imagery, but are present and accounted for.
 

                                                             

              

                                      
                                                                        Long Cross

                                                                    

 

L 

 

                                                Stacks at human scale---5'6" on left  6"1 on right.

 

                                        

Groupings/The Space Between

 

 

 I've been thinking for a while about how the installation of paintings--specifically grouping work at close proximity-- activates otherwise autonomous pieces in a way to create something new. Above, paintings are stacked with a small space between them.

 Below,  four paintings butted up next to one another.

 

 

 The same grouping with a bit of space between each.

 

 

 

 I prefer the first version of this quartet--there is a tension created by the forms in each discrete work seemingly pushing up against each other. It's also somewhat awkward, which I like.

 I've "framed" the four paintings with a background of reddish- brown painted on the wall. A somewhat random choice, as I was working with a selection of  latex paints from a give-away pile of an artist leaving our building. Ideally I was thinking of a sort of sap green (or hot pink?), but this works, for now.

 

This pairing  makes me think of mirror images and repeat patterns. When grouped as multiples the presentation becomes somewhat sculptural-- I am more aware of the dimensions of the panels-- and not just the images alone--which is what I want to have happen with these.

 

Then again,  not all pairings work out. Above, the top painting is quite articulated. The bottom piece--the direction I want to go in--is less so. It's a stand-alone piece, at least for now, and my favorite of the summer. (It is also the same painting, different incarnation, as the top one in the "mirror image/repeat pattern" photo above.)

 

Fall Update: Here's the next phase of pairs--something kaleidoscopic occurring in latest work--and not just because this is a blurry pic. But that helps!

It Changes Everything-- Postcard Series

I've developed the habit of using the edge of a postcard as a guide when painting. Almost as much paint ends up on the cards as on the painting itself. As they become soggy, I set them aside to dry, and then reuse. In 2009, I began exclusively using postcards from a box- full leftover from a  group show, It Changes Everything, I was in that year.

After a while, my studio became littered with the cards, and I started to appreciate how all the paint build- up interacted with the color and text. Tacking them to the wall, one after the other, the phrase It Changes Everything was altered in each. Splatters and stains of paint obscured some or all of the title, and sometimes cover the entire surface.

The postcards have morphed from tools, to hybrid tool-as-art and an on-going modular project tracking a near-daily practice of painting.

           

* It Changes Everything was exhibited at Kingston Gallery in Boston in January, 2009.

Painter Sue Post designed the postcard and organized the show, which also included work by Kirstin Lamb, Antoinette Winters, and Hannah Bureau.

Trippy: Of Studio Time and Dehydration Headaches

I've been sitting in my studio on day two of a dehydration headache, which maybe I should credit-- in the way they say insight can be had during fevers or sweat lodge visits-- with allowing me to see the central axis, or cross form, which shows up super-consistently in my work. I had never noticed it so clearly before. The horizontal axis is formed both by the house imagery and the stripes  used to suggest sky and earth. The tree form, particularly where it intersects with the house, creates the vertical axis to create the cross.

I often employ a sort of  "superstructure" within which I paint these images. Frequently I've used a sort of bubble- X form (see below).

 It occurs to me that it's another an kind of cross.