The Unfolding Painting

motorcyclist on helmet visor (in process)

I continue to paint portraits on cast off objects (see prior posts). My current portrait reminds me at every step of the way why I paint, and why I am an artist. For this portrait. a helmet visor was submitted and then a snapshot of the submitter's husband on a motorcycle....I immediately asked if a "better" photo of the man was not available. I had in mind a photo of his face, as this was supposed to be a portrait of him that I was painting. His wife paid lip service to possibly being able to supply something else, but then could not come through as she explained to me that "He doesn't photograph very well" and "he really liked this photo of himself on the motorcycle". I resigned myself to dealing with the photo.

Lo and behold, as soon as I positioned my first brush stroke on the visor, I began experiencing a natural unfolding of "something meant to be". One of those paintings where there is no false move, every thing just falls into place. This is not to say that I didn't overshoot here or there and need to scrape away an errant bit of paint here and there, as one of the beautiful aspects of painting on found objects is the balance of painting versus unadulterated found object. In other words, there is not "painting over" an errant brushstroke as there would be on a traditional painting on canvas....I must remove errant brush strokes so as to allow the object underneath to show unimpaired. I'm always hoping that the final effect is somewhat akin to ink contour drawings by Matisse...no "mistakes".

So this "natural unfolding" resulted through accepting someone else's concept for the painting. It is expanding my sense of what this project is: the initial idea of this project was to encourage local residents in my area to identify "cast off objects" as potential painting surfaces, but now I see that the project is also about allowing me to let go of control and experience some accidental juxtapositions....this is so central to the experience of painting anyway; to be both directive in the sense of applying the paint to the surface, but simultaneously as receptive as possible to the painting as it unfolds. The painter must perform like a bus driver...steering the huge bus, but stopping for traffic lights, and delicately maneuvering around careless pedestrians, and other swerving vehicles.

Beyond Boxing: Bellows

 A friend clued me in that I would be missing something if I didn't see the George Bellows Show currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York City. I had bypassed the exhibit a month earlier when tired images of boxing scenes materialized in my head as I read his name on the Met banners. With some friends, I opted for a photography show and Chinese garden paintings instead. .

Paddy Flanagan  (1908)

Luckily, I got a second chance. After I made my way past a wall-size representation of one of the famous boxing paintings (which I was informed by a museum staff member was printed and laminated to the wall rather than replicated by artistic house elves) I was immediately overwhelmed by the first room full of painterly paintings. I picked one that I can't remember now and tried to concentrate. It wasn't until I got to the second room where I was confronted by Paddy Flanagan's challenging stare that I began to relax, confident that I was in for a good experience. It was in that second room that the urban landscapes and crowds of people initiated me into the confident and frenetic brushwork of Bellows. In many paintings, such as "Rain on The River" (below) the economy and frenzy of the brushwork suggests a rapid desperation rather than studied application of more traditional painting techniques.

Rain On The River  (1908)

 Color is sometimes startling and purposefully belligerent. Trees and bushes and buildings and trains are sketched in paint with a crude fast accuracy. . This is drawing with paint! This is painting!

Churn and Break (1913)

I can't help thinking that the boxers are the least interesting aspect of his body of work. I do think that one or two of the famous ones are actually not that well drawn. This thought was confirmed in the last room of the show where his later work was more stylized and stiff, with a complete loss of the rushed brushwork that so defined the paintings right around 1908-1913 or so.  Of course, one can understand the difficulty inherent in catching boxers in the drama of their physical engagement with each other. Bellows would have been working from studies and may have lost some of the natural gesture and eloquence of the scene just through the difficulty of rendering the action. He didn't have the same problem with the ever-moving ocean however. Compared to four roiling ocean paintings  hung together in one corner of the show, the boxer paintings that I did glance at felt stiff and forced. Looking through images now, I see some variation in the boxer paintings, with one or two seeming to have more of the drama and eloquence of the painting experience still evident, while others seem  stifled in every way, from a composition too lined up with the perpendicularity of the boxing "ring" and then the action rendered past any excitement in line, color, and paint.

My House, Woodstock (1924)

Finally, a painting towards the end of the show made me laugh. I immediately  thought that it was the painting that I might shove in the closet if I had made it, realizing that it had got a little melodramatic with its color. It was wonderful in the context of the exhibit however, as it was a lurid example of the daring and "belligerent " color that I mentioned above. And sometimes, the mountains around Woodstock do look like they could lift off and fly away with the clouds.

Portrait Update

Brother and sister on pink plastic carrying case

The portrait above has been a real pleasure to paint; the person who gave me the materials is an artist and really knew how to pick a great photo and a fabulous surface on which to paint. The color alone is really fun to be working with and against as I apply color. Like all the surfaces, it comes with its challenges. There is something slightly unreceptive about the plastic, so that the paint, especially as I apply multiple layers one on top of the other as I try to get the likenesses just right, almost seems to "crawl" a little, but overall, I LOVE this surface. The images below are all the remaining portraits that I will be executing. I have "dragged my feet" on the portrait below because the surface is a bit scary...It is a vintage foil paper wrapped around a cardboard gift box. I have thought long and hard about how to isolate the surface from the ravages of oil paint, and I explained the problem to the person who gave me the materials when they initially asked about it's usability. In the end, I applied two polyurethane-like coating layers to the surface. I hope that the recipient of the portrait understands the extremely experimental nature of this surface preparation!

young man on vintage foil covered box

Woman and baby on woven placemat

I have applied a coating of medium to the fabric where I intend to paint the image. This project has its own logic, I keep thinking of the "shroud of Turin" because the photo image is very blurry and kind of indistinct and so I expect to make a portrait that sort of has the appearance of "materializing"  onto the placemat....

rider on helmet visor

progress on the pink carrying case 

more trash portraits!

Completed baby on tray

I'm trying to work consistently on the portraits now, knowing that my studio will shortly become uninhabitable once winter kicks in....we may get the wood stove installed sometime this winter, but then again, we may not!

The baby above is the second completed portrait, and I've begun the third below. Collecting the "commissions" and then issuing letters to everyone who had submitted objects took more time than I had budgeted in. That's a weird thing about being an artist...you spend a lot of time with paperwork and documentation, and emails.

I sent out letters letting people know that I had received their materials and planned to complete as many portraits as possible before December. I had to send two letters out that asked the recipients to please send me a photo of someone to be painted on the fabulous object that they had left for me. I have received no response from either one. I can't figure out why they would leave me an army green plastic canteen, for example, with no photo of someone to paint on it.

I'm very excited about the two kids below...I can't help feeling that the commissioner of this one really understood the project!

bother and sister with Betty Crocker started....

Cleaning that desktop

rubber rage? along the route to NC in Delaware (I think)

So, I am struggling to regain space in my computer so as to transfer some video footage for a  job, and I find myself finally culling through the files and piles of images that my family of 6 has amassed and "dumped" into the computer....To be perfectly honest, it is mostly myself and my 13 year old son who are the villains here. He takes tons of photos....and unfortunately, a great proportion of them are worth looking at. So here are two that particularly caught my eye.

This makes me want to stretch a canvas in these dimensions and channel Botticelli or Fra Angelico.... 

the "Free Portraits"

I received a local Arts council grant this year to undertake a "free Portraits" project. (funds made possible by the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the arts) My idea was to invite the general public to submit throw away objects to me with a photo of someone whose portrait they want painted on the object. I made a brochure about the project that I distributed throughout the summer, largely through "Commission boxes" installed in the public library and at the Agroforestry Center.

 I was excited to see when I got back from my summer travels that I had several submissions in the "Commission Box" in the Catskill Library. I am finding that there are twists and turns to working with the public that of course I did not anticipate. Several people submitted objects, but no photo. Most of the submissions came with phone numbers and no email, which is my chosen way to communicate. So today I created a form letter that I will send out by regular mail to let all the participants know that the painting of the portraits is underway.....

I completed the first portrait largely in the Greene County Council on the Arts gallery where the project was installed as part of the Whale Oil Show in July. I set up my easel and painted right in the window of the gallery at set times twice a week. I completed the first portrait, which is pictured here....Rob aiming a gun painted on top of an exploded can of spray insulation! This was a creative submission on his part, though it may fall short as an actual "portrait" as his face is not that easy to make out. He came to my studio during the local studio tour last week and did not realize that he would get to keep the portrait. he had the idea that I should sell it as part of my body of work!

I am nearing completion on the second portrait which consists of a very cute baby girl painted on a wooden serving tray. This has been a challenging painting assignment as the baby's face is proportionally very different from an adults and I have had to keep increasing the height of that immense forehead and the distance between the eyes, etc. It still is not enough of a likeness for me so I will continue working on it this Sunday....

More to come! For now, I must address the form letters and then correspond with a few "submitters" by email so that they all know I am working on it!

Making pizza and paintings

my glasses where I left them

 Channeling William Carlos Williams here:
(but the female multi-tasking version)
making pizza
need yeast from fridge
old celery in fridge
recipe for celery soup?
need glasses to look in cook book
where are they?
outside hanging from the garden fence post where I left them several hours ago
go get them
take camera with me to take a picture of the inside of the compost bin.

interior of the compost bin

Which brings us to the main idea of this post:
I have become someone who thinks of "planting" plastic bags on my property so as to allow it to get embedded into the natural environment as it does in the woods around here....I want to make some more paintings of this phenomeon...and when I went to get compost out of the big bin, there were some beautiful plastic bag specimens curling through the compost....

Detritus #4 oil on linen

About Painting on "Trash"

metal refrigerator drawer, red plastic piece, yoga mat packaging

I received a local arts grant to undertake my proposal to paint "Free Portraits" on cast off objects. A crucial aspect of this project is the creation of a brochure that not only explains the project but convinces the general public that they want to "commission" one by placing such an object with their photo in a donation box. I will list the locations of donation boxes in the brochure.

I will be working on the layout and design of the brochure in the next week or so, and took some preliminary photos of some potential trash painting surfaces that I have collected over the last few years.

I think they look good enough to paint on!

Painting

"Second Reflection" oil on linen 60"x48" unfinished

"Jellyfish" oil on cardboard packaging 14"x22"

My son Ivan has a blog that he posts his better art works on from his first year in animation school. He thought I should be doing the same.

I just photographed both of these paintings in order to include them in my NYFA grant application. I have been applying for a NYFA grant for many years. "Second Reflection" to the left here is not finished, but it is now too cold in my studio to work out there. I was working on it up until 2 weeks ago when I had to be careful not to hold my brush too high above my heart for too long or my hand would go kind of tingly and numb. ANd then I would be so cold that I kept accidentally knocking my brushes to the floor. The paint seemed to stay wet longer in the cold, but I had a weird problem with thin wet applications of paint "crawling" when put on top of already dried paint. It was like using water-based house paint on top of oil without sanding first....

    Anyway, aside from weather-related technical probs, I have never had such a great experience with a painting. I get completely lost in it for hours which is different. Until now, I used to get completely involved working on a painting for about an hour and a half. Then I would feel a burning desire to take a break, stop, call it a day, or whatever. This painting is different. If nothing from my "real" life called me out, and it wasn't too cold, I would work on it till I was too hungry or tired to continue, which might be entire days. It leads me on and on and on. Each new mark that I make seems to point to the next spot that needs addressing; I am aware of the whole thing being a carefully synchronized "machine"? Not a machine, more of a web, where a change of one strand can compromise others, or indicate others that need addressing. I also think of orchestral analogies, which I alluded to in my grant application. I am the conductor of this visual symphony...guarding against dissonance unless needed, toning down the loudness here and there, making sure the different moments lead one to the other....keeping the rhythm going throughout, etc, 

   The "jellyfish" painting on the right was a much faster accomplishment, but it is a beautiful integration of "found packaging" (complete with holes in it where water gun was yanked from cardboard) and painting. It is painted from a photo of my son LEo when he was about 5 holding jelly fish in both hands. I worry that no one will know what he is holding (thus the title), but Ivan thought that it didn't matter, that he is obviously holding something and it just doesn't matter what.