skeletal [charcoal & conte on paper, 2006

Everything can be broken down to elemental building blocks. The bones of our bodies or the framework of our houses or the intangible bonds of family.  You get down to basics and you see how advanced those basics still are. I could draw figure studies for a lifetime and I’m not sure I’d ever get the lines just right.  But even with quick sketches, there can be glimpses of life, a-ha moments when imperfection stands by and recognizes potential. Potential for building something better.

untitled (oil on canvas, 2005) – private collection

I’ve long been interested in subtleties of texture and color – in the blurry lines shifting between ideas of what forms an image.

The process of painting can be very therapeutic at times. The repetition of a brushstroke layering over itself, working its way into a dense fog and then back out again. Streaks of tint and shade appear as if they once were something lucid… or soon might be. Transitive.

Like the hazy place waiting beyond consciousness. Somewhere between “sleep” and “dream.”

untitled (encaustic on wood, 2004)

growth (encaustic on wood, 2004)

Encaustic is somewhat of a cumbersome medium to work with, due to the quick rate in which melted wax returns to a solid at room temperature. It also tends to ruin any brush you attempt to paint with, so I would recommend old bristle brushes or a palette knife.

However, the rewards of dabbling in this ancient medium are worth a little effort. 

HERE is a useful beginner’s guide to working in encaustic.

One secret to encaustic, in my opinion, is that its biggest limitation is also its asset. The rate in which wax hardens makes it easy to build thick layers quickly. And because wax can be scraped off or reheated to liquid, it makes for a medium that can be reworked over an extended time period.

The two pieces shown above are examples of these basic concepts.

The first one, “untitled,” was created by layering melted wax and then carving into the hardened form before layering further.

The second, “growth,” is an example of mixed media encaustic. Illustrated images are collaged into the piece and then painted over with a wax seal of varied thicknesses.

the gourd (oil on paper, 2002)

Every autumn for as long as I can remember, my mother would take us to a local pumpkin patch to find decapitated heads for our Jack o’ Lanterning. We’d wander the hay bale maze, pet the farm animals and naturally, hand select the most original gourds we could find.

This would almost always lead to several long-necked selections, with twisty tendrils suggesting beaks.  We would take them home and affix a pair of googly eyes to each, giving a new sense of life, curiosity and personality.  These creatures would gaze up on Halloween and bring smiles to our faces all the way through Thanksgiving.  The ugly ducklings were swans to us.

This piece is a still life of one long-since-hollowed gourd, depicted largely in shadow and lying on its side. Absent here are the googly eyes. Gone are the playful expressions. Shadows could just as easily be bruises… rotten flesh… streaks of rain. The Halloween reveler has become the resting… the lifeless… lying in wait to be the zombie of another year.

But that, as always, is up for interpretation. Maybe I’m just out of my gourd…

Untitled (ink & watercolor on paper, 2001)

hands (spraypaint on canvas, 2005)

This was a piece I did back in 2005, and was really my first attempt at working in spraypaint.

I have always loved sketching hands because they are so descriptive and full of character. For this piece, I chose to take a simple line drawing of my own hand and cut it into a stencil. 

The diagonal placement of the facing hands (inspired by Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam) creates a visual tension, meant to pull the viewer in and create a sense of movement.

Juxtapose (paper collage, 2002)

Every now and again I need to escape from the dour side of art so that I don’t wind up cutting off an ear. 

This is a collage which I  thought was comedy (dark or otherwise).  I scoured some 1970s-era cookbooks and lush-living magazines for the background images.  I have always been a real fan of the imagery from that time period, particularly the color schemes and soft-focus photography.  The immaculate table settings I decided to use here are accentuated by the red of the tablecloth. 

Then somewhere I came across an old medical guidebook, with illustrated how-to’s for performing abdominal thrusts to choking victims.  As helpful as these visual aids are in times of need, there is always something funny about the way they are drawn.

While one set of images shows a meal set to entice and impress a dinner guest, the other is a choking aid for use in life-and-death emergencies. Juxtaposing the two very different concepts into an unintended context exposes a newfound silliness that I really love.

Modified Contour – Studio (Oil on canvas, 2005)

This is a contour paint drawing of an art studio which I did in 2005.  I refer to it as a “modified blind contour” because the subject matter was sketched without ever looking at the canvas.  The process was then reversed in the painting stage by focusing my attention entirely on the canvas - without referring back to the subject matter.  From memory, I tried to make sense of the garbled mess of line on the page and create an abstract view of the studio space. I am happiest with the brief moments of clarity in the painting.

Column at Dusk (Oil on canvas, 2005)

In 2005, I started playing heavily with monochromatic and grayscale techniques. This is a piece where I mixed together a fleshy salmon-like tone and then worked through shades and tints of that color until I found what I considered to be interesting combinations.

Around this time, I found a textural appreciation for the bristles of the paintbrush.  I began to emphasize the linear patterns of the brush by focusing largely on geometric compositions. The canvas itself is a rectangle.  The strokes of paint create clusters of thin line. A single color moving in multiple directions reacts to the light differently. Vertical and horizontal elements are distinguished.

The composition is dealt with a 2/3 horizon – the shade variation illuding to a landscape.  The darker register at the bottom is heavy like earth, while the lighter tint forms an illusion of  ”sky.”  The subtle emergence of shape in the upper register are to create a balance of  movement with the darker tones.  The piece is also split into three distinctive parts from left to right – the dominant centerpiece a sort of column.