Old School (Part 4)

Back as a painting major in my undergraduate days, I was very much into "art for art's

sake." 

The image of this painting is not very good as you'll notice by the glare. The colors are actually very brilliant and it looks like an arial view of a field of flowers. Pretty, I know.

With the "flat" image ideology of Colorfield painting, the image is suppose to be uniform without "popping" of colors, or illustrative illusion. Of course I felt the need push the envelope a little bit. I have always been a fan of recycling and using waste products as materials in art. Often, I included my studio waste materials in the paintings themselves. In this painting, scraps of paper and empty paint tubes with their caps litter surface. These items cannot be seen from afar and are only revealed upon closer inspection, or bad lighting. This piece was titled "Man on the Dump" after a poem by T.S. Elliot.

I don't know the current location of this painting.

This next piece is similar to the previous one where reclaimed materials are used to produce the image. Bits of dried paint were peeled from a plastic tarp I used in my studio at the time then applied to the wet surface as the work was produced.

This painting resides in my parents' house in New Jersey.

This next piece was my favorite from the series of paintings I made at the time. It incorporated a whole slew of thick media, such as wax, styrofoam packing material and ceiling texture. This combination of materials piled the surface a few inches from the canvas.

This painting's last whereabouts was in West Hartford, CT.

The next piece was the largest of the paintings I made. You may have noticed a Jackson Pollock style to these works. I was very influenced by his painting method. Except I didn't like throwing the paint; it's too easy to make something look cool or artsy when paint is thrown and Pollock already had that area covered. Instead, I carefully and methodically dripped the paint onto the canvas, letting gravity do work.

I mixed paint to a particular consistency, dipped the wooden end of a paint brush in and at about head level allow the paint to fall where it would land in round spots. If I moved my hand too much, this would leave a paint trail on the image, like a comet in a starry sky. I did my best to paint over them. I didn't want the paint trails because this wasn't Action painting.

The title of this piece was "Solemn." It was destroyed in 1999.

The next piece is the most "naked" of the works in this series. Raw linen sized with rabbit skin glue was used as a painting surface. I wanted the brown color of the linen to be a part of the image. Due to the "nakedness" of this painting, some paint trails are visible but I allowed them to stay because I didn't want to overwork the image.

I came to a realization when I was making this piece: I was painting people the whole time. Abstractly, of course. Each drip on the canvas was a person, individual and unique, interacting with others. It was everyone, everywhere, all at once, different but working together as one. These paintings were my vision and hope for the world.

The last whereabouts of this painting was Farmington, CT.

After this realization, I began to search for a way to better express that idea. Although my work these days looks dramatically different and topically more diversified, the core influence is people just like you and the better world we could have together.