Hello there, I hope you are enjoying your day. It's been a bit since I last updated this page. Over the next couple days that is my main desire is to update the site for all my newest paintings. Let's begin...09-06-202272 X 52 INAcrylic on Acrylic Yarn, Nylon, Poly Rope on Painted Chassis I don't get the opportunity to make many of these large format paintings, unfortunately as there are so many ideas in my head for numerous amounts of amazing paintings such as this one. I find making large paintings to be a magical moment of creation and I always look forward to the next one I can create and give much eye candy to myself and those that get to witness these in their own viewing. I include many detailed images also to help extrapolate it's presence. Click on images to enlarge them.
In August of this year, I was asked by Robert C. Morgan to write an essay for his catalog to his upcoming exhibition at Sean Scully's studio in NYC during the September through November months of 2022 (STILL THERE! GO SEE IT!). I was honored to be given this opportunity as Robert to me is one of the greatest Art writers out there today, along with being a great Painter, as the exhibition showed. Since he asked me to write about him, I felt it only respectable to ask him if I could publish the essay here, along with the rest of his catalog. The only thing missing is the essay from Richard Vine, unfortunately that one isn't able to be shared here. It's too bad because Richard, apart from being a great writer as well, is also a lifelong friend of Robert's, so they have a lot of history.
Enjoy the scans. They can be enlarged if you wish by clicking on them.
Have a wonderful day! And Thank You to Robert C. Morgan for your wonderful blessing. Thank You to Soojung Hyun for your wonderful book, and Thank You Sean Scully and Liliane Tomasko for your Foundation in giving worthwhile Artists a chance they could get nowhere else.
Not really back in NYC. But I had been in September. Got a really great opportunity to visit and to be a part of a great man's exhibition. I hadn't really given it much thought as to my coming back to NYC after 2019, but then a good friend and colleague asked me to write an essay for his catalog he was getting ready to publish during his exhibition at Sean Scully's studio in Chelsea. Robert C. Morgan. I'll post another one specifically about this opportunity and how it blossomed into this wonderful trip. But for now I wanted to share with you a few specific exhibitions I decided to film while there. The first is Lucy Bull who had an exhibition at Kordansky Gallery, which was my first time being in his gallery, obviously I haven't been to any LA galleries so it was cool that he had got a space in NYC and made this exhibition happen. If you haven't been to his space, you should, it's very well designed. The paintings were full of life and brimming with details you could swim in. These definitely looked like paintings that gave the artist a wonderful moment while making. These paintings didn't look like anyone else's which is a big thing in my book. I'm big on Originality and these paintings definitely had that going.
The next exhibition I enjoyed was the giant paintings of Jorge Galindo at Vito Schnabel. Having only seen his work online, it was most certainly a blessing to be able to take these giant flower paintings in. Jorge definitely has his own way of making some serious paintings. You can tell from the energy in these that Jorge definitely seems to me to be a painter who paints with a smile on his face. You can see the enjoyment in the work. The only thing that bothered me about the exhibition was the hanging. For paintings this huge, you'd think they would be hung low on the wall but they definitely weren't. Making viewing a bit difficult, but in person you could still get a lot from these paintings. Glad that I got to finally see his paintings, now I see them so differently online.
Strolling around Chelsea. I always pay a special visit to Paula Cooper Gallery, since she is the reason for the season when it comes to great painters of the 60-70's. This time she was exhibiting a tremendous show of Sol LeWitt. I hadn't seen much of his sculpture like these but the way the exhibition was assembled really made for one heck of a banger of an exhibition. The sculpture made me think of icebergs floating in a sea of his shape and colored wall works. I think if you listen carefully you'll even hear one of the directors talking about it. They were so kind to move out of the way, but frankly I should have just asked him if I could record him talking about it. I only wish I could have come back a few more times to take it in. It's sad to go into a gallery of this level and not seeing many people in there also taking it in, as Sol is such a tremendous artist, growing out of his desire to be an abstract expressionist, but it never really left him, he just channeled it into his work he became known for.
Just a few blocks and I found myself around the Lisson Gallery, another gallery I hadn't been to since they opened in NYC. FINALLY after all this time, I got to take in an exhibition of one of my favorite painters, Jason Martin. A beautiful exhibition of a masterful painter sharing a group composition in paint that to me had a lot to do with musical composition along with so many other connections. Most just saw a group of paintings they said all looked alike, but they are far from that, these are a group of paintings celebrating the freedom of being a painter, a freedom of movement, liberty in the brush and a love of color and energy. These paintings are just oozing with energy flowing from his body movement. Another painter you can tell just loves to be in the moment of creation.
I hope you enjoy these exhibition videos I made. My desire is to share exhibitions I loved seeing. I try not to talk during the video, but sometimes I think I need to. I actually did for the Lucy Bull exhibition, but unfortunately the video itself had been messed up because I made the first mistake during filming, an unclean lens. Not doing that again.
It's been many years I have making paintings. I have in the last era begun to make some amazing paintings on Rope, usually braided by myself. I have yet to use anything braided by another, except the factory in their creation of the base material I use. The impetus of my using rope in my art comes from a film called Herb And Dorothy, the Art Collectors of Legendary status. In the film there is a section including Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes in the 80's and he is being directed towards an extremely small artwork on the wall that just happens to be from the legend Richard Tuttle, a small 3 Inch slice of white rope and a small braid nail attaching it to the wall. It took many years for that one moment to soak into my imagination so I could work with it myself. But it hit me one night, like a thief in the night it just broke into my conscious mind and out came the idea that I could paint on a piece of rope. The original ideas have no photo documentation, but they were created in my place in Tamaqua Pennsylvania, I began by actually combining my appreciation for Fred Sandback by stretching my acrylic yarn around different spaces in my studio/home in PA. Then once stretched, usually using four strings instead of one to catch the texture paint. None of them really satisfied me at the time but they did light a fire inside me that came out months later back in Columbus Ohio. Ironic that as I sit here today and kind of wish I had taken some pics of the installations of those works. I can imagine the rough space that was meant to become a nice back room in my painting studio that I never got to move into. The yarn pulled tight in the middle of the room running from floor to ceiling, I had been able to anchor it because the space had been so raw and old without worrying about if I was about to mess up the space. I didn't go very far with the texture paint since at that time it was a bit on the lean side so I had to make sure that what I was messing with wasn't going to rid me of all my paint material. I remember it being a light blue yarn and I used yellow texture paint which created their own play of colors, maybe the reason people stick with white and black in their "developmental" periods is because of the highly contrasting way they play together. The one color really makes the other stand out and therefore can be judged in a more clear manner as opposed to just tossing every color at the work and hoping for the best. I kept the original work up for a few months and checking in on it everyday during my in's and out's of the building. One thing I absolutely loved about the idea of your painting studio below you is as you leave the house everyday, the work is all right there, just staring back at you and asking when you are gonna come play around some more.
For the time being I'll be posting up images of the new rope paintings. Thanks for checking in.
12-05-2021
Acrylic on Braided Poly Rope 28 X 5 IN 71.1 X 12.7 CM
I
made this alongside a larger sized as i was enjoying the idea of making
a rope painting that reminded me of an old chainsaw chain. One with
dried up dirt and wood dust in it. Reminding me of walking out to my
Fathers shed and seeing the landscaping tools in their well used states.
Many of you that have been around me know my respect for Barnett Newman and especially his series called Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue. I have over the years found that this choice of colors makes for amazing eye candy in paintings and I love making paintings with this choice of colors. I desired to continue this idea of making paintings dedicated to the primary colors and voila here is another. Enjoy!
This painting has a bit of a story behind it, along with the title. I had made the chassis a while before the event that happened which changed the course of my day and this painting. I don't really like telling stories like this because it sounds like I'm bragging about something nice I did. But I have yet to really tell many people about it. On the night of the 8th of December. I had went to the mailboxes and on the way there, I passed by a cat that had been laying on the sidewalk and making bad sounds, on the way back, I peeked at him and he really didn't sound good at all. So I went back to the house and grabbed a towel so I could pick him up and bring him into our home so he wouldn't have to freeze while waiting to die. It was such a heartwrenching time that it's still hard to talk about it. I won't tell the whole story here, but once back home, Mom and I cleaned up the area where he had been and we went back to our normal day. As I was in my room, I began thinking about something else I could do to make sure he was never forgotten about. And so I decided to make a dedication painting for him. I called it MORTHOND, as he was the name of a warrior in the movie Circle Of Iron that gets messed up in a fight and needs the hero of the movie to help him die. So now and forever to me his name will always be Morthond and he fought the good fight. He'll always be remembered.
The second date is the date I finished the painting.
Everytime I get to working I get into a mode of desiring to make multiples. So the triptych is a natural method for me in my work. The ability to work over three chassis is very freeing, definitely not the same feeling when working through a large chassis bigger than yourself. But it definitely helps with the urges. I can't help but want to work larger all the time but at the moment I am constrained. But this constraint does allow my mind to wonder into new and amazing methods for the creation of another of my paintings.
I had recently purchased a bottle of this amazing gold paint from Golden called Iridescent Bright Gold Fine, you know how it is for a painter, the second you get it home you wanna test it out. After my initial trials, I knew I wanted to hurry up and use this in a larger painting. Hence this. It's such a wonderful paint and is the best representation of what the color Gold is that I have seen over my years of looking at dirty pigments that said they were metallic, from the days of spraypainting my microphone stand that me and my friend found while coming home from school one day. Today's metallic pigments actually look like the metals they are made for.
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