All Memories are Traces of Tears Installation Project

For the past 6 months of been part of an art management company that leases out artwork to clients of various kinds. Below is an installation shot of All Memories are Traces of Tears installed in a fancy loft that someone was trying to sell. I had previously only exhibited this piece once at St. Cecilia’s in Brooklyn where I built a pedestal for it and showed it lying flat. I thought that laying it flat on a pedestal made it sculptural and, being that it was shown in an abandoned nunnery, made it seem like a religious object ready for contemplation. I don’t mind it being shown on the wall and even had it hanging in my studio, but without the ability to see it in the right perspective I find that it looses most of it’s excitement. I think that this is the problem with most art objects; once they are pulled out of their intended contexts they lose most of their original meaning, becoming aesthetic shells that serve someone else’s purpose. That being said, I certainly welcome most opportunities to show my work but find that more and more I have no control over any meaning for my work and am instead left with settling for whatever I can get.

The Visible and Invisible, Valis and Tone Float Paintings

I finished The Visible and Invisible this week. This one took me about 3 weeks since I don’t really have long stretches of time anymore to work on art so I had to do it a bit at a time. I also photographed Valis and Tone Float.  I don’t think that I’m going to make a smaller version of The Pleasure of Deceit.

A Theory of Forms and Ideas #18 Painting

Here is a painting that I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks based on the Theory of Forms and Ideas Gouache Painting #18. Late last year I was asked to be part of an art organization that sells, commissions and rents out art work. There has been particular interest in the gouache paintings and was asked if I would consider making them bigger which I hesitatingly agreed to. I generally do not like to pollute the creative process with other peoples ideas but I find it necessary to explore other ways of making money besides handling art for museums. The original gouaches have a quality that is particular to both their size and the paper that they are made on and the thought of enlarging them ruins what was so nice about them. I decided to take the bull by the horns and make an example that employs the same techniques that I used to make Burning From the Inside and From Safety To Where…?.

I started by using one of the canvases that I had prepared for the last series that I had been working on that included Valis and Tone Float. I sketched the original plan onto the canvas and then painted the black areas using acrylic latex as a base color. Then I painted over the black acrylic latex with black non-acryla gouache and used FLP acrylic latex white for the back ground. I painted both the black and the white areas 3 times and also blended the edges to create a blurry and unfocused grey transitional space between the black and white areas.

I have to say I’m not super happy with the results and I don’t think that I’ll make any more until I hear something further about a commission.

   

Valis

I finished Valis the other day. This is a photograph of it in front of my fireplace. I’m going to wait to photograph it “professionally” until I’ve finished all 4 of the paintings so that they are photographed in the same light.

Valis

Last week I started working on the second painting in the series that I started with Tone Float and The Pleasure of Deceit. The first photograph shows it with just the gouache painted in for the first time and the second photograph shows it with the grey painted in. The second photograph could almost be used for digital purposes since it looks finished but it’s only a third of the way done at this point. The last photograph shows what it looks like from the side as I start applying the second layer; if it’s glossy than I know that it has already been painted.  

Tone Float

I finished the first new painting from the series based on the gouache on paper series that started with the painting The Pleasure of Deceit. For this painting I started by first building the panels using 1/4″ hardwood and 1″x3″‘s and then stretching canvas over them. After priming it I projected the original sketch onto the canvas to mark my corners and then finished drawing it in using a ruler and pencil. I made the lines 3/8″ thick to try and keep the proportions of the original gouache paintings correct; I don’t want the lines to be too thick or too chunky. After I finished with the drawing I painted the orange lines in using yellow (orange) gouache followed by gray acrylic latex paint. The grey paint is actually house paint left over from one of the walls in the house but the original can froze out in the garage this winter so hopefully this new can is close to the original. After the whole painting had been painted once I painted the orange lines again to fill in any left over white areas on the border where the grey and the orange meet. I then painted all of the grey again to try and flatten out the blotchiness of the surface and to continue straitening out the lines. After I finished the second coat of grey I used a sort of scumbling technique using a very coarse brush and a very thinned layer of grey paint to blend the edges around the orange lines. One of the nice things about the non-Acryla gouache paints is that they can be re-activated by adding water to them which makes them easy for blending. I’ve used this technique many times on other paintings like Burning From the Inside and From Safety To Where….? and prefer its blurry organic effect to my earlier hard-edged lines like those in Journey Into the Realm of Reason. The thing is, digitally the difference is mostly imperceivable but I’ll continue to do it anyway and hope that one day I’ll be able to actually exhibit them somewhere so that they can be viewed up close and personal. After scumbling all of my edges and retouching them I painted my last layer of orange and then repainted the grey a third time to really solidify it.

Here is a photo of the initial sketch on the canvas and the final painting leaned up against my fireplace. I’m going to wait until I’ve finished all 4 paintings before I try and photograph them professionally.

 

The Pleasure of Deceit Gouache

I finished the last gouache painting this weekend. These are all 6.75″x9″and painted on watercolor paper. Here it is.

Gouache on Paper

Here are 2 more gouache and acrylic paint on paper pieces. The last one that I’m going to do is a gouache reproduction of The Pleasure of Deceit. 

Tone Float

I finished a new gouache and acrylic painting last week called Tone Float that is part of the same series as The Pleasure of Deceit. Like The Pleasure of Deceit these paintings reference a partial viewing from the isometric perspective drawing series A Theory of Forms and Ideas. This continues my exploration into optics and perspective that I started with Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled. Right now I have 4 paintings planned of which The Pleasure of Deceit is the first. I’m going to make 4 small gouache and acrylic paintings on watercolor paper and then make them again larger. I’ve decided that I don’t want to continue to make the series the same size as The Pleasure of Deceit (36″x48″) but  to instead make them a 24″x32″ due to storage concerns and cost restraints; The Pleasure of Deceit hangs nicely over my fireplace but I’m afraid that, like the rest of the work that I make, the rest will be left to languish in deep, deep storage.

Tone Float is an album and song by the band Organisation, a precursor to Kraftwerk.

Here is a photograph of Tone Float and a photo of The Pleasure of Deceit above my fireplace.

Future Perfect and Way Out Gallery

Here is what I wrote for the show at Way Out Gallery.

Future Perfect

 

fu’ture per’fect

adj.

1. 1. of or designating a verb tense or form indicating that the action or state expressed by the verb will be completed by or extended up to a time in the future.

n.

2. the future perfect tense
3. a form in this sense

 

These works were gleaned from two separate but related projects that I’ve been working on for the past 8 years: Minimalism Elite, which re-imagines the past, and Future Living Projects, which imagines the future. They are similar aesthetically but differ in context. Minimalism Elite began as a collection of work that looked for inspiration from the past, at a short period of time after the prevailing trends of Modernism but before the post-capitalist strategies of conceptualist art, driven by collectors eager to consume and invest in a new growing corporate art market. Future Living Projects started as an exploration of art that existed somewhere between design and architecture, a theoretical construct to organize potential possibilities for both a utopian and dystopian future.

The sculpture series A Theory of Forms and Ideas takes its name from Plato’s concept of idealized form which postulates the existence of a “reality” inhabited by the ideal or archetypal form of all things and concepts. The sculptures posit themselves as anti-monuments, an articulated set of organized possibilities that inherently create an awareness of scale that shifts the viewer’s relationship away from traditional, monumentalized work, toward a position of enhanced intimacy. Their form is perceived in one instantaneous and inseparable way as mere simple objects concealing the planning and craft needed to complete the final product.

The painting The Pleasure of Deceit offers a mental construction of an insidious fantasy, a projected form that intuits the cynicism of human nature while Journey Into the Realm of Reason, Burning From the Inside and From Safety To Where…? expose the ambiguity of space–between knowledge and fiction and disorder and the Cartesian grid–distorted by unending vanishing landscapes. Perspective is used as a marker of spatial infinity, a visual reminder of the simultaneous existence of both a theoretical probability and physical impossibility, the antinomic dialectic between an optical glitch and mathematical certainty.

The Architect’s Tomb functions somewhere between sculpture and furniture and hints at the possibility of an intrinsically temporal dimension, a space that is internal and external in which nothingness eternally asserts itself as a permanent unknown. Light becomes a hypothesis of suspended physical transformation where mass and energy collapse, imposing a new, more solid and immanent objectuality, an entombed immobility of a future that is both present and past.