...for what I want to see

New painting in progress

Last night, I had a bit of a revelation about where I am right now with my work. There is now an overwhelming need for less density in the paintings, or perhaps a different type of density. I'm not sure what that will look like, but it will be different from what I've been making lately. I came to this realization after making connections between my recent work with the densely layered compositions of glyphs and my current emotional state.

The past few days have been rough, emotionally. The death of Walter Wallace at the hands of Philadelphia Police is the latest in a too-long line of similar events that did not need to escalate to an extra-judicial execution in the street. He was having a mental health crisis, had a knife and approached the police, who fatally shot him ten times from at least ten feet away. 

This didn't have to happen. Wallace didn't have to be killed in front of his mother, family and neighbors like that. I keep asking myself, "Why couldn't they at least shoot him in the leg, incapacitate him and de-escalate the situation and get things under control?" The outcome is always the same with Black lives when it comes to policing; shoot to kill, maybe ask questions later. 

Standing in front of a newly repainted work last night, I realized that I really needed to step back and re-evaluate things. I took some white paint and covered up all but one pink, blob-like form. When the white dried, I made a loose grid of lines with an acrylic marker, over which I brushed some matte medium, smearing and blurring the grid. I looked up an album of the Daily Observation photos in my photo stream and sought out something that I could use from one or more of those shots. I found a couple of curvilinear forms that loosely replicated and over those, placed a reddish blob form in the lower left corner. 

I felt such a relief looking at this relatively pared down image! All of the denseness underneath showed through in the textures, but other than that, this painting now breathed like it hadn't before. The heaviness was gone. I realized in that moment that I wanted and needed to move to a different phase of this project with the glyphs; that I needed to focus on some of the other surfaces and instances of marks that I see every day in the streets. So far, I've been concentrating on the 'communication' aspect of this work, which has a very graphic feeling to it. The painted, multi-layered systems I make are full of a type of tension that I like, but that same density now feels overwhelming to me. 

I'm sure that my emotional state has finally caught up to what I've been doing in the paintings and it's just too much. Between the ongoing problems associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, the continuing social strife brought about by the killings of Black men, women and children by police authorities and the current toxic political climate, I'm just feeling overwhelmed. I've been fairly successful at keeping myself focusing energy on painting, but now, I need to change the energy of my paintings to reflect the breathing room I need, instead of the suffocating mournful feelings that keep coming back because of everything going on. 

TM

 

The same and yet, different

In my studio: It's Not The Same You, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 60" s 60"

I've been letting this one sit for a while, although I mentioned it in my last post. It's a new 60" x 60" painting on canvas titled, "It's Not The Same You" (the title comes from a line in The Cure song, Labyrinth, that I happen to like a lot). This is the first large painting on canvas that I've attempted at my home studio in a while because, until a few weeks ago, I didn't have room to even think about making something of this size there. Most of my work in this space has been smaller and was being made in a former smallish bedroom that lacked adequate wall space for something this large. Most of the work that I've been making in-studio has been up to about 30-36" on the longer side. 

I realized a few months ago, that I was going to need more work space, but was stumped on how to make that happen. I don't have money to pay for an outside space, so I chose to convert the front room of the apartment into a work space in addition to the bedroom. I got rid of a couple of dressers and a bookcase, put plastic on the walls and floors, plus and additional layer of drop cloth on the floor. Now, I have a version of a studio that I've envisioned for a long time. I can make larger paintings like this and be able to step back at a decent distance to evaluate them. However, the only way that this is possible is because I've moved a good amount of my personal belongings into my girlfriend's home. Without that support, I would still be trying to figure out how to make this work. 

Over the past couple of years, I've been able to make large temporary murals and installation pieces, but they were either made on-site or in another space that could accommodate the scale of those pieces. Being able to return to stand-alone paintings on canvas of this scale has felt great and has also brought some of the usual challenges. From the start, this painting has felt like one that I had to get out of my system; it's a large scale amalgam of ideas that I've been working on in smaller contexts over the past four years or so. In the past, I've been fond of working on similar paintings at the same time, forming a series of sorts. My present feeling has me looking to break with the past by having more visible distance between some of the paintings. The glyph forms are the only thing that will carry over from one painting to the next. Some will have more of those forms and others will have fewer. For example, I've already begun painting a second 60" x 60" painting that will probably have little in common with this one, compositionally and colorwise, in the end; it has a shimmering black/purple background with a layer of gridded glyphs, so far. I've gathered a lot of new visual ideas these past few years and now I'm feeling comfortable exploring them more deeply on a one-on-one basis, and not rushing to make too similar paintings so much. 

TM

 

Thorough considerations

 Detail of a work in progress, September 2020

A few weeks ago, I purchased three 60" x 60" pre-stretched canvases made by *Fredrix. In the past, I would not have dared buy a pre-stretched canvas, preferring to stretch my own instead. Back then, and I'm talking about 15-20 years ago, store bought canvases were simply not well made at all. They were usually prone to warping and the quality of canvas, in addition to overall workmanship, was pretty bad. However, having worked at Artist & Craftsman for just over four years, I got to see and experience first hand the different kinds of quality of art materials that are out there. Seeing how well the Fredrix canvases were put together was great to see. The solidity and strength of the wood stretchers themselves won me over. That, and the fact that a very well-respected painter colleague of mine uses them for her work prompted me to try them out. 

Aside from the occasional temporary mural-sized pieces I've made over the past couple of years, I had not been making larger paintings of 60 inches plus for at least 6 years. All that changed this year  because of two things: needing larger sized works for some of Bridgette's clients and starting to work with a new gallery in Los Angeles called ParisTexas LA. Before this year, going back to 2013, I hadn't worked on canvas much at all, preferring birch panels, instead. For a lot of my work, I prefer the hardness of panels over canvas because the panels can take a lot of abuse from sanding and scraping. The flexibility of canvas is nice in it's own way, but I still prefer panels, overall. The only thing about panels that I don't like is the propensity to warp above a certain size and they tend to become too heavy and cost a lot to transport. 

So, a couple of weeks ago, I began painting on one of the three canvases I have and I love how the first one has turned out. With canvas, my painting habit is one that's additive, as opposed to the panel works where I can employ both additive and subtractive methods of image-building. What I love about the Fredrix canvases is that they are really tight. I've been able to stretch larger canvases pretty tight, but these are drum-tight for well into the painting process. 

The one new larger canvas I've completed is titled, "It's Not The Same You" and employs a lot of image-making practices I've introduced over the past three years of so on smaller surfaces. I feel like it's one of those stand alone paintings that I absolutely had to make in order to fulfill the promise of so many recent small works and ideas pulled from the temporary mural pieces  and wall- based installations I've been making as of late. The second of these canvases has already started out being something entirely different in how I'm envisioning it and I'm loving the potential in it. 

One thing about being able to focus on my painting full time is having the time and head-space to more thoroughly consider what I'm doing with my paintings. Being able to have the time to really let a painting sit for a couple of days and to be able to look at it any time of the day is still somewhat foreign to me. I'm excited at being able to engage with the work on a day-to-day basis and not have my energies redirected to day-job tasks. Having had all of those years of making the most of a few hours a week dedicated to my painting has helped a lot in terms of realizing how much I can get done now.

*Note: this is not a paid endorsement for Fredrix products, I'm just voicing my own opinions about their canvases*