Current Work Process

Still Life, gouache, 7 x 9.25 in, (17.78 x 23.5 cm), 12/10/2008

This year I concentrated on a program of self directed study. I’ve gone back to basics to focus on color mixing, drawing, and composition. I want my work to convey the weight of history but feel modern. Often times I miss and they look old-timey. I’m asking myself how to imbue the work with meaning and emotion without crossing into illustration. The bookshelf in my childhood home had Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney right next to Michelangelo and Rembrandt. Cultural wires were crossed. Growing up in the era of mass produced reproductions meant you could consume enormous quantities of visual information but never really land anywhere for yourself. Gouache copies are a way to create a somatic experience of the art that resonates.

Progress with drawing and color is occurring, but composition continues to be a sticking point. I work with pictorial space as opposed to designs on a flat surface, meanwhile exploring varying points of view. With the current series, I’m maintaining the outside dimensions consistently across media, scaling the format to keep the ratios uniform for sketch, gouache, and oil, in order to better understand the spatial qualities of a particular size, currently 11 x 14.

Avigdor Arikha writes wisely about the relationship of objects in space to the edges of the canvas in his book ‘On Depiction.’ His work has an honest spontaneity that is deceptively hard to achieve. It’s no wonder that Manet was criticized for looking artificial compared to the Spanish realists he loved so much. Seeing Morandi’s work two weeks ago rekindled the excitement of 20th century issues: the tension between representation and abstraction being a locus of meaning; the way people look at subjects and painters look at paint; painting as a repudiation of the world’s strife and chaos. I’ll continue to post the good with the bad of what I’m doing. I am taking many small steps.

Still Life, micron pen / ink, 5 x 8.25, (12.7 x 20.95 cm), 12/3/2008

Still Life, oil on paper, 7.5 x 11 in, (19.05 x 27.94 cm), 12/1/2008

Still Life, gouache, 7 x 9.25 in, (17.78 x 23.5 cm), 11/29/2008