MUSINGS

ABOUT PAINTING

Realism, like any other style, is an exploration of painting as a process and its consequences. For me, the visual research entailed in representational painting is a necessary and gratifying form of scholarship. Since knowledge is freedom, this genre, which on the surface appears to be confining, actually becomes profoundly liberating. Such artwork is unhampered by narrow, one-dimensional ideologies, so it can articulate, instead, a more personal vision that stems from the insights and discoveries of an actively creative life.

Ordinarily, I paint in the indirect oil technique used by the Old Masters, which employs multiple layers of transparent color over a tonal underpainting. This transparency enabled artists of that day to achieve a brilliance of color previously unattainable and unmatched until the advent of the contemporary pigments we enjoy today. After several centuries, however, that profound technical innovation, with all its advantages, spawned a formulaic way of painting that eventually, by the time of the Impressionists, caused it to fall into disrepute.

It is, however, relevant again today; precisely because it is so slow, it allows enormous possibilities for discovery as well as powerful tools for the analysis of a painting’s constituent elements. First of all, it allows the tonal and color aspects of a painting to be seen, understood, and solved separately. Secondly, since the components of a color are applied in discrete layers, they can be manipulated independently. Since color mixing occurs optically on the canvas as the paint is being applied, the effect of that layer of color on the other elements the painting can be evaluated and augmented as it is happening. Finally, the technique encourages experimentation, especially in color, since both large and small areas can be painted, viewed, altered, or erased without fear of damaging or losing previous underlying efforts. Fearlessness is not a function of style, nor is it the domain of abstract expressionists.

ABOUT “THE INTENTIONAL TOURIST: REFLECTIONS ON ITALY”

Inspired by multiple visits to Italy, the pieces in this series use Renaissance frescoes as a metaphor for the palpable historical presence that permeates contemporary Italian life. They explore a pictorial space and a nostalgia that are the consequence of the onstage collision between a current time and an historic place, and I hope the title of the series establishes this artist permanently as a visual predator.

ABOUT “PAINTING AS ARTIFACT”

This body of works springs directly from “The Intentional Tourist”. These pieces explore the formal and expressive potential of an image that has been lost and fragmented by time and then given a new meaning upon its subsequent resurrection in the present. Towards that end, they are either cast or constructed in concrete, a venerable material that, cracks and all, evokes a profound sense of durability in the face of overwhelming wear and stress.

ABOUT “PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY”

This series is an elaboration on “Painting as Artifact”, and owes its name to Salvador Dali’s 1931 work. These paintings on cast concrete represent mirrors that, with the walls that formerly supported them, have fallen into ruin. Upon their resurrection as architecture fragments, each has inexplicably retained a reflection from its past. Each reflection is a frozen moment in time, a temporal fossilization, that initiates an investigation into the mirror’s role as a passive witness to daily events.

ABOUT FIGURES AND NUDES

Because the tradition of the human figurine art is so long and enduring, and perhaps because we know our own parts so well, the nude is probably our most demanding subject. While it requires constant study and evokes perennial reflection, it remains such an enigma, that even after thousands of years of collective struggling to unravel its magic, artists are still finding new ways to explore its expressive and pictorial potential. Indirect oil painting is particularly suited to figure painting, because glazing is unique in capturing the translucency of skin.

ABOUT STILL LIFE

Still life as a genre is relatively new. Though the Romans explored it extensively, its more recent emergence can be traced to a rising mercantile class in the late Renaissance that sought to have its newly acquired wealth depicted. It offered artists new opportunities and freedoms in the exploration of shapes, colors, surfaces, and composition that are still enticing today. Those same possibilities are the the driving force in my still life paintings, where the objects were selected randomly, not for the sake of their own depiction, but for the sole purpose of seeing what kind of painting they would make. Many of the setups were for my classes, where I would choose and place a glut of objects from which students could pick their own vantage point; afterwards, I would return to “discover” my own composition just as I had asked them to. While the subject of an artwork never determines that work’s quality, it usually initiates and always shapes the ensuing investigation.

ABOUT SCULPTURE

While commercially casting is merely a method of production, artistically it needs to be integral to the conception. My castings often incorporate the sprues and vents into the design of a piece, and sometimes they are the very reason behind it. Similarly, irregardless of idea or form, a piece is always, first, the material from which it is made, so in casting, where anything can be poured into a dark hole, that choice should never be automatic.The material and the process by which it is manipulated must always be reconciled with the idea; these three elements together influence each other towards the ultimate resolution of a successful sculpture.

No matter how abstract, painting is always about illusion; sculpture on the other hand, no matter how shallow the relief, is always about that thing itself, that object that shares your space. Though I’ve carved wood and stone, and fabricated other pieces, I’ve come to prefer the indirect method, first modeling something out of clay and then casting it. All materials are intrinsically expressive, but clay is unique and utterly remarkable in its ability to record every texture, stress, impact, pressure, and torque imparted to it, while its plasticity enables it to be molded into configurations limited only by one’s imagination, even enlisting gravity when in sheet form. And as in painting, it is mercifully forgiving of tactical, technical, and conceptual miscalculations that would otherwise impede discovery and experimentation.

ABOUT ALUMINUM

I first used aluminum for casting with my students in order to offer them a cheaper, more readily workable alternative to traditional bronze. However, I quickly discovered that in our room temperature sand molds, aluminum’s superior fluidity allowed it to run into areas that bronze was reluctant to go. In addition, because aluminum is much lighter than bronze, and has a lower melting point, our bonded sand molds suffered much less degradation, and that resulted in finer detail. Also, because aluminum is relatively new on the industrial and artistic scene, students were not burdened with bronze’s long history and intrinsic beauty. Often students would decide to cast their more abstract works in aluminum and save the bronze for figure or portrait pieces were the subject would be enhanced by the tradition.

Nevertheless, as significant as those factors may be, for me, aluminums’s primal allure is its dead pan grey color, its absolute color neutrality. For me, it is screaming to be painted! I’ve been painting over grey tonal studies my entire life, and now the grey castings are an extension of that; they are, in fact, 3-dimensional underpaintings. Only now, colors are glazed and scumbled over actual forms and recesses instead of illusory ones.

ABOUT “SOJOURNER”

These pieces are landscape sculptures. By intimating enormous scale, they are intended to be man-made habitats, complete with sky, water, forests, and fields. These islands of humanity travel through space as does our planet Earth. As sculpture, they investigate ideas with form and texture that as a painter I would normally explore through illusion. However, unlike painting where the viewer is always part of the scene, these works encourage the viewing of landscape as an object from afar, from the outside instead of from within. This “stepping back” is a perspective that is essential to seeing our planet as the closed system that it is, and that is crucial to embracing any environmental imperative.

The iconic, paradigm changing photo on the right, probably the most significant image in human history, says it all.

ABOUT “SOLAR REEF”

Perhaps because it represents the sun, the source of all energy, the circle has been a key symbol in agrarian cultures for thousands of years. Solar Reef is a habitat like the other Sojourner pieces, but here a stylized sun nourishes a myriad of landscape elements that surround it with the warmth of the polished inner rim. It is that warmth that necessitated the piece be cast in bronze instead of aluminum.

More than any of the other Sojourners, Solar Reef takes full advantage of the unifying capacity of the casting process. The model was constructed of multiple materials, particle board, clay, pegboard, logs, burl, washers, wires, even a piece of shop-vac hose. Casting integrated all these disparate elements into one cohesive whole that now has a life distinct from its piecemeal origin.