Colorful and dull birds

So here are three of my paintings on printed photos. They have a connection to the pigeon portrait paintings with their square shape and individual portrait style painting but with the major difference that the background isn't white and the bird breaks the plane of the panel. I'm pretty interested in these as an experiment and I plan to do more (as soon as I get more ink in my printer) but I am not sure where they will go. This semester has been big on experimentation, and I think a big determining factor in what will be in the thesis show will be what the space we are using looks like.

I have continued to work on the large painting as well and it is trickling along. It's interesting that it seems to be working from the bottom to the top in terms of being resolved, which may be because of the connection that I have with what is below. I think my brain is starting to wrap itself around the upper areas of the image however. If anyone has seen those Scott's bird seed commercials that promise more colorful birds and have little digital cardinals and buntings on one bird feeder while the ugly grackles and sparrows are at the other will start to recognize the theme of this painting once the birds are painted in the top panel. I love that commercial! I've been looking for it online, but haven't found it yet.

Interlude

If I have learned anything in my program it is that I should have a few irons in the fire. I took my day back in the studio to prepare for a different project that my mentor and I had discussed. I have taken hundreds of photographs of the mill and areas around it, and a lot of these images have become backgrounds or parts of backgrounds on other paintings.

In order to make the photographs literally part of the finished work, I have printed some of them onto canvas that can go through an inkjet printer. I have then mounted them on 7 x 7 boards and trimmed them to fit. I tested the first four last night and you can see them here, as well as the back of another. The blocks of wood glued to the back will be used to hang it and help them act as sort of a floating image.

The plan is to paint pictures of birds directly onto the canvas paper with the photograph as the background. They are cut to the size that they are to not refer to the standard inkjet paper size as well as to refer back to the square pigeon portraits that I had been doing previously. My thought is to display them in a line like a filmstrip, helping to create a sort of narrative.

Evolution of a Painting

So this is a delayed post as I haven't had a chance to work since late last week due to a very busy work schedule. I am looking forward to getting back at it in the next few days.

I have to admit that having some sky in this painting was worrying me. I have been painting these dark, hidden spaces for such a long time now that I am almost a little afraid to open things up. Well I solved my issue by refusing to consider blue as a sky color. I mixed a little ochre with white and ended up with a sort of golden, late fall sky which I am really happy with. Maybe next time I will take a detail of the paint texture because it has a very heavy feeling to it.

It's always nice to go from nothing to something. It's hard to not feel like you have gotten a lot done. It isn't until you go from something to something more that you realize how much there is to do.

I am feeling pretty good about the composition of the painting at this point, but I can already tell that the building in the background is going to be a challenge. It is the same material as the wall in the foreground, but can't be painted in the same way, with the same colors or values. It might surprise me, but I'll have to keep my eye on it.

Evolution of a Painting

So this is how it always begins, a large blank space. This painting will be an extension of an earlier painting in a vertical direction, so the composition is to some extent determined by what

is already below. The scene is a door in the Bynum Mill with two birds, a blackbird and a pigeon, looking through a metal grate at a dog in the sunlight (an homage to our dog who passed away recently). This new part will be the broken wall that you can see above the door, other parts of the building in the middle ground, and trees and sky above. The beautiful birds of the world, cardinals, bluebirds, gold finches, etc, will be perching and fluttering in the vines and branches. At least that's what I think it will look like.

After laying the two panels out on the floor and mapping the lines that will cross the border, I went to my photos of the mill to get ideas of what the broken wall and background would look like. The piece will be a mix of structure and chaos, which is what interests me about the subject. How does something so structured and strong slowly return back to the landscape?

A lot of work was done in terms of laying out the composition and creating the space. It is at once more open and more closed than the previous panel. More open in the sense that there is an actual exit from the constriction of the building, but closed in there there is more actually happening in the piece. It will be a tightly packed and complicated painting, but it will be a good contrast with the monotonously repeated bricks of it's companion.

60/WRD MIN Art Critic

I had the opportunity this weekend to participate in Lori Waxman's 60/WRD MIN Art Critic performance piece. Artists who are interested bring their work and she will give them a short, considered and thoughtful, though not necessarily positive, art review. Waxman has been a critic for the Chicago Tribune and Artforum since 1998. See what she had to say about my work: