Green

Green has been on my mind for a while now. I don't really know why, but it has. It's one of the colors I gravitated towards a lot when working on my latest paintings. Even though I'm a city person, born and bred, I love the outdoors. I've been so busy this summer that I haven't spent much time out in nature. Nevertheless, the green thing has been nagging at me for a while, just sitting at the back of my mind and poking me every once in a while. I came across this photo by German artist, Thomas Demand in the latest issue of Adbusters magazine.

Thomas Demand's work process is exacting and encompasses sculpture and photography. He builds life-sized enviornments almost entirely out of paper and then photographs them. The resulting photos are themselves printed on a life-size acale. The scenes, like the one I linked to, appear life-like at first glance, but closer inspection will reveal many small, but important details that may be missing or that clue you into what he's actually done. For example, with The Clearing, Demand made every leaf out of paper. He's done other interior/exterior scenes which also play around with perceptions of reality and the manufactured image, which sits well within the contemporary art world's obsession with irony, but that's a whole other thing I don't want to get into here.

Demand's photograph, in addition to the journal change combined to set off the spark for what I think will be a new series of paintings. All I know right now is that the color green and as many variants as I can come up with combined with other colors is going to play a prominent role. Some will be more monochromatic and others less so, I think. I was also was working on a crossword puzzle which had as a clue, "like many rain forests". The answer was 'lush'.

This is just the bare surface of an idea. I'll see where it goes from here. I'll have to file it with 'proposed projects' right behind the ten other ideas I have brewing in my head. There's just not enough time...

......

Received some good news from Bridgette today. The postcards for my exhibition have begun to arrive in the mail and so far, the feedback has been good. One of her clients was interested in the painting on the cover of the postcard, Logical Progression (also the title of the exhibition), below. However, he doesn't have space for it (it measures 36"x36") and wants to commission a smaller version of it. Bridgette told him before even calling me that the resulting painting won't look like this painting. It was done fairly early in the series and even though only three months seperate that the newer paintings from this one, they've evolved past the stage I left this one in.

Anyway, Bridgette and I talked about it and I thought it would be an interesting challenge to undertake. I had it in my mind to do more like Logical Progression, but wound up moving into new territory before I could pursue the idea any further. The main idea was to have mulitple grid structures dropping down from the upper edge of the canvas, flowing over each other and taking over the canvas surface. This was actually the second version of this idea. The later paintings have a less rigid line quality to them. There's still the grid, but it's morphed into something more organic looking in more recent paintings.

He only wants one, but I'm thinking I'll do two, maybe three, just to see where I can take the idea. The client is puttng up a non-refundable chunk of the cost up front and I should have it by the end of this week. A good thing, since I'll be able to use that exclusively for materials and not have to use my own money for it.





Tim McFarlane
Logical Progression
2005
acrylic on canvas
36"x36"