Slight Detour

Large drawing, Mon. 10.31.22

    Made three new large drawings yesterday, including the one above. I'm going to use them for the installation for my show at the Shipley School. I installed the paintings this past Saturday and will start work on the drawing installation Thursday. I already cut this one in half in anticipation of using the two parts in different places on the main wall. The ceiling is pretty high in the gallery space at Shipley, so I'm going to take advantage of that height and extend the wall installation to a couple of other spaces high up: one above the doors leading to the library and another one above paintings on the opposite wall from the main installation wall. I'm also planning on using some colorful rope that I bought the other day to visually connect the three areas. I'm really excited about this and can't wait to get started on Thursday. 

    For a while now, I've had this itch to experiment again with this geometric iconography in my work. It's origins go back to a 2013 painting titled, Everything Happens at Once, a black and white diptych that I showed at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in my show Presence in 2013. In that work, the surface was covered with the same triangular forms abutting each other but in a more compact configuration across two panels. In 2020, I returned to this idea in a few small, 11" x 14" panels I titled Shapeshifter. Those paintings had between two and three of these forms layered on top of one another, with different colors. Here, I'm attempting to keep it at one form over a background. I'll also probably make some with at least two forms above or next to each other, but not layered in my usual way. 

    It's kind of hard leaving just the one form on the page because my tendency is to create very dense compositions these days. I feel like scale is going to be really important for this work in order for it to have the impact it needs. Additionally, I feel that brushwork, different types of surface textures and color tension are going to be the things that will make this work at a larger scale since the plan is to let the forms live on one layer. I made a few drawings tonight and I'm letting those settle a bit before making the commitment to larger works. 

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