Group show with the Fine Art Ramblers moves to NC

Coming up, opening on Jan. 27th, is a group show with fellow Fine Art Ramblers Patti Brady, Jim Campbell, Bob Chance and Phil Garrett at the Upstairs Artspace in Tryon, NC.

Commission piece

Titled by the client, "The Last Fall", documents a view looking north towards the North Carolina / South Carolina border. 15 x 48 oil on wood panel. Completed with Williamsburg Oils.

Near complete, just as studio is damaged.

Well, I was nearly finished with the still life when a heavy wind storm blew two large pine trees onto my studio roof and nearly demolished it. Had it not been a Wednesday evening, I might have been inside working on the painting, just under one of the large cross ties supporting the roof. These are now all down and all of the objects on the table were swept away. Lucky me! Insurance should cover most or all of this, I hope.

Weather is OK now, so looks like I'll be working out doors for awhile. I added the Hohner harmonica in an old style case, which they no longer make. This is the type of small cardboard box the harmonicas came in when I was much younger.

This piece was a particularly difficult exercise in exact realism, using personally significant objects from my youth. The tandem forces of music and painting, and the reference to religious indoctrination hang in the balance here. My fascination with light effects, particularly ultraviolet light, and my experimentation with DayGlo tempera paints are recorded in this autobiographical still life painting. I have submitted this to the Oil Painters of America Eastern Regional Juried Exhibit. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Progress on Black Light Confirmation.

Current state of "Black Light Confirmation". I have been working on this auto-ethnographic still life for a little over 2 years, off and on. I intend to finish it up in the next couple of weeks in time for submission to the Oil Painters of America national show. I am balancing natural light, artificial light from outside the picture and the glow of the UV lamp I used when I was 12 or 13 and started painting with Day-Glo tempera paints. The lamp glowing under the reflection in the dark purple/red glass lens came out pretty well. I still have the remainder of the cornet, small jars of paints and the lamp base, bracket and bulb cover to bring to a finished state.

Back in the studio.

Back to work on the still life oil (16x20) on panel in the studio. The heater I installed last winter works like a charm, and will do so even better when I finish insulating the remaining 2/3 of the walls and ceiling. This is a picture of the studio interior. Making good progress on the painting itself and will feature that when I am done. I also have several notes about the process and will share those.

Industrial Skyways Exhibit

I will be opening a 2 person show with Grace-Anne Alfiero at the Studio @620 AnneX in St. Petersburg, FL on Saturday, Nov. 13th at 6:30. I will exhibit several new pieces, including West End Backside, bricolage no. 2, and a collaborative piece with Grace-Anne titled "Angels on the Beach".

West End Backside, bricolage no. 2

"West End Backside, bricolage no. 2" 2010
Oil on canvas, found object assemblage. 24 x 44 in.

This painting was entered in the 2nd annual juried exhibit at the Trillium Arts Centre in Travelers Rest, SC. It was awarded the 1st place honors at the show's opening and will be on display through September 11th. The piece includes the other two 16 x 20 inch oil panels which, together with their companion piece, West End Backside, bricolage no. 1 (see below) was conceived as a triptych landscape panorama. These two were made into a diptych and combined with artifacts from the location. No. 1 is currently on display at the Fuller Gallery Featured Artist Exhibit, SC Botanical Gardens.

I am also gearing up for a show at the Studio@620 gallery in St. Petersburg, FL opening the 13th of November. Here is a statement I developed for this piece:

In this present work I have combined two visual art traditions; realist urban landscape, painted entirely on location through direct observation, and found object assemblage of artifacts, collected from within the space pictured in the painting. This painting/assemblage is the second one from this location.* Together, they form a triptych arrangement of this view.

In using this process, I have tried to form a more complete sense of place. The paintings themselves could be viewed alone for their surface content; a painterly “moment” of time and space at a specific location. However, when seen together with the other objects in the assemblage, they become part of an abstract composition. Lines of motion, shapes and color in the painted image inform the arrangement of pieces of debris. The physical process of painting affords me the opportunity to study and observe over long periods of time.

I spend about 2 and a half hours each day sitting at the location and during “stretch breaks” I walk around in the vacant areas and in between buildings, helping myself to any discarded things which capture my attention. Some objects are just purely abstract in terms of color, texture and shape. Others are more literal, or sometimes more metaphorical in their relationship to my perceived understanding of the natural environment and human presence. Creating the paintings "on location" adds my own presence to the historical reality of that place, and the canvas and paint are transformed into yet more artifact. Together with the found objects, all are combined and on display become a form of contemporary urban archeology.

Because this work refers to a specific location, the surface representation often evokes stories and reflections from viewers. I learned, for example, that the building on the right (with the wooden staircase outside) used to host some pretty wild Halloween parties. One passerby told me of the prevalence of brothels in this part of town, many decades ago. I enjoy hearing stories like these.

I started this work in early December of this year and completed the first of three paintings by early spring. When I returned to finish the other two in this series, a building had been torn down and I was confronted with a large sumac tree which had decided to grow dead center in the composition. I kind of like that tree now, having gotten to know it so well.