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"