Rembrandt and Guston

Just as a child’s relation to a beloved toy blurs reality and pretend, so also moves the creative activity and play of an artist in her studio. The painter Philip Guston once wrote; “In Rembrandt the plane of art is removed. It is not a painting, but a real person – a substitute, a golem.” With my portraits of Pinocchio, Ms. Oyl and Ms. Mouse, this quote was foremost in my mind. As these puppets “sat” for me in my studio, I wanted to lovingly create an image that represented them somewhere in between reality and unreality, static and animation, flatness and volume. Like the story of Pinocchio itself, the still life object, the artist and the painted picture plane endeavored to be real.

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.