TRAINS

Well yes, its called the "Railroad Avenue Studio" for a reason. It fronts the railroad tracks instead of the usual Main Street. So, if you happen to be traveling on the Crescent, the Cardinal, the Northeast Regional, or the Circus train, please wave to me as you fly by. (Circus train, please throw peanuts.) If traveling North, I'm on the left side of the train as you enter the town of Orange. If traveling South, I'm on the right.

The Painting Progresses from the 9-17-09 Entry

Marking Time in a Kung Fu Lunchbox

This is my Kung Fu Lunchbox. Its an art piece that will be finished, posthumous. I began putting the scrapings from my paint palette in the lunchbox in 1987, the year before I moved to Virginia. It reminds me that I need to waste paint in order to paint. It also reminds me of my mortality.

Matter Matters

I hold a deep respect for the matter I manipulate and the ensuing enmeshment of material and ideas that occurs in my creative process. This enmeshment in figurative painting often occurs when the material and the motif become one. When representation is evoked through the plasticity of the paint medium itself and the canvas becomes more than a mere illusionist picture. This is the heavy weight of Morandi’s paint turning into wet clay when he paints his still life objects as if he were painting gravity itself. Or the oily sea of Turner’s pictures when they submerge, churn and float in unison with his palette. Or Van Gogh’s “Potato Eaters” that he expressed to his brother, Theo, is an attempt to make the paint as the dirt that the “eaters” ate on their potatoes.
DeKooning once said that oil painting was invented to depict flesh. So, I ask, why was acrylic paint invented? I had always snubbed the medium as inferior to the great tradition of oil painting. That was, until I started to paint plastic toys and then my sixteenth century painting material failed miserably to depict a mid-twentieth century substance. For all its modeling and illusionism, somewhere in my pictures of plastic toys it had to flatten out like melted plastic stuck to canvas. Only with acrylic paint, (plastic virtually painting plastic), could I produce that magically place where the material and the motif fused into one.
Beyond the material, the motifs in my paintings struggle. The events of 9/11 profoundly shook my illusions of a safe and secure world. So the armies of cartoon characters and secondhand store superheroes that make up my piles of plastic toys have become a personal metaphor for the varying factions of external forces rallying to destroy or save us. In addition, abstractionism and realism struggle to co-exist on the picture plane and the antithetical applications of loose expressionism and focused control scuffle to find resolution. The paintings fall into a polar opposition from being critical of our consumer society to being complicit with it. Painting the toys from observation, I fight to find visual clarity when falling into vertigo over the extreme colors and mass consumer objects. Still, it’s the depiction of plastic that I feel makes my work truly contemporary and where it can best make a contribution to the development of painting. What is this matter that we have surrounded ourselves with increasing amounts since the 1960’s and how do I make humans aware of its omnipresence in their lives?

Derivative: a substance that can be made from another substance.

Sometimes I’m not sure what I’m doing in the studio. No, let me rephrase that: often I’m not sure what I’m doing. Its what keeps me coming back to work in this visual laboratory, the unawareness that eventually makes its self known only through the unfolding of one painting experiment after another. And because this blog is a journal of those studio experiments, I won’t always be able to offer the reader, (or myself), conclusive explanations as to the images I am posting. That being said, my latest studio exploration is “A Bunch of Dumb Bunnies” shown here, (front and back.) When recently asked by another artist why they were cut-outs, I had no answer. Other than the fact that I just happen to like cut-outs, perhaps it has something to do with the genre of still life painting? More than all other genres, artists through the ages who painted still lifes were focused on material, mass and matter. Somehow the stuff that bogs us down, the gravity of life, seems paramount in still life paintings, as opposed to the likeness of a portrait, the story of a historical painting or the space of landscape. Maybe I just wanted to do away with space and atmosphere all together and cut out the matter with its ensuing gravity? To that end, these bunnies have become what I call “derivatives” of their original material identity. They are varnished, acrylic paint on heavy, cut out paper with cardboard easels, resembling plastic toys that are attempting to resemble chocolate Easter bunnies.

Since mid-July, 2009, I have been working on these two large canvases, (one painting), of toy animals. My models are in two separate shallow boxes on the floor, one for each canvas. Though I often photograph my models for my own enjoyment, (or for this blog), I never paint from the photographs I've taken. I always paint from observation. Working from observation has been challenging on canvases this size. Though the composition meets in the middle of the two canvases, the boxes of models do not. Instead, they are centered in the middle of each canvas where I can hover over them and paint from the center, radiating outward. It is only with luck and fate that they hope to connect visually at the edges.

LeRoi's Toys

I began the painting "LeRoi's Toys" in the Spring of 2008, after my friend, Lisa, asked me to paint a special painting of army men for her fiance's birthday in October. Her fiance', LeRoi Moore, was the saxophone player for the Dave Matthews Band. He died that Summer 2008 and I finished the painting in his honor.

Charles Baudelaire

“I have moreover retained a lasting and a reasoned admiration for that strange statuary art which, with its lustrous neatness, its blinding flashes of colour, its violence in gesture and decision of contour, represents so well childhood’s ideas about beauty. There is an extraordinary gaiety in a great toyshop which makes it preferable to a fine bourgeois apartment. Is not the whole of life to be found there in miniature - and far more highly coloured, sparkling and polished than real life?”
- Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys”

Morandi for Robert

This writing was in response to my amazing painter friend and mentor, Robert Royhl, who lives in Montana and couldn't see the Morandi retrospective on the East Coast last year. He asked me to observe Morandi's whites and tell me what they were like, having heard that they were remarkable.

I'm not sure about the whites my friend Robert asked me to see for him? (As if he could borrow my eyes.) When Morandi painted, lead white was still in use and not illegal or known to be harmful. It is possible he used that as an undercoat or even in the paint itself? It did look like he used something other than Titanium. I would guess Zinc. Its a softer white than Titanium, and there was A LOT of white, like marble dust, mixed into all his colors.

I thought the show was curiously intellectually, but not as awe inspiring as the Turner show that we had seen together last year at the National Gallery. (I left that show exhausted, feeling like I just had had esthetic sex all day long.) I did find Morandi's show extremely optimistic though. Here is a man that painted quietly and persistently until his death in the 1960's, his life ending about the same time the art world was telling us that painting is dead. And yet, I was looking at objects that quietly asserted that the fundamentals still mattered, composition and form was still alive, painting was still powerful.

Being in Italy over the past several years made me understand better what might be considered as Morandi's Italian sensibilities. Italy is a nation of stone builders and masons. It doesn't use the same structural materials we do in North America. Its a world built of mortar pressed between stone, not clapboard, vinyl, steel or concrete. Walking the Italian streets of stone, on the cobbled sidewalks next to masonry buildings with ceramic tiled roofs, in the hill top villages across from the mountains that are being quarried for marble, one can taste the dust in the air. In the same manner in which Morandi spreads his paint like plaster, thick between his heavy objects like mortar, he paints like a mason with a trowel.

The Making of "P.Guston's Toys"

This is "P. Guston's Toys"

I started this painting in the Summer of 2008, by piling all my toys up against a large, plate glass window in my Railroad Avenue Studio. I then went outside to paint it in the "plein aire"