Monday, March 31, 2008

Thumper


"Thumpers Dream" 1986
oil and acrylic on canvas 40 x 23



"Thumper and His Toys" 1983
When he was a kitten he liked to bring things into the kitchen and bat them about on the smooth lineoleum. Eventually they would end up under the stove. In this portrait I collected and assembled some of these objects about him on the canvas.
mixed media on canvas 36 x 48

Friday, March 21, 2008

Paul Landacre 1893 - 1963

"Sultry Day" 1937

Well, here is an image from an artist whose work was pivitol in bringing me into the fold of representational and poetic imagery. At the time, I was working through a process of creating paintings that were scuptural objects and intended as spirit traps. In Paul Landacre I found imagery that evoked a kind of mystical connection to the landscape of the Southern California of the 1930's and 40's and the powerful images created by his medium of black ink and wood block printing spoke richly of a grand landscape in spite of the intimate size of the actual image. I saw an extensive collection of his work in 1983, which was a very productive year for my own work. As I look back on my work through that period I can see that my work was to be deeply effected by what I discovered at that show. It took a couple years to assimilate this new language and my production in 1984 was at an ebb wile I strugled to reconcile what I was doing with my work, and what I now wanted from it. I found my new path in 1985 and my inspiration blossomed while I focused on perfecting a new craft, in the use of oil paints. Then in 1987, my 15 year hiatus began.

This beautiful scene shows Landacre's wife and cat in their Los Angeles home at a moment of blissful tranquility. In the background, the hills radiate with the heat of a summer afternoon. The only other artist I know of to capture this so beautifully, is the author John Steinbeck

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Putting Green


Continuing with artwork based on polite sports for upper class Englishman, this painting comes from 1981. A large scale, shapped canvas, painted in acrylic, it's about 6' across with a hole in the middle of it. This is one of the numerous "object" paintings crafted during my early years. This was a family line that died out in favor of first, painting that was part of my search into the primitive aesthetic roots of image making and written language, and then my true calling; poetic narrative and landscape paintings.

This may be purchased for $2.200.00 through Rake Art Gallery

Monday, March 17, 2008

Tennis Anyone? 2


As I said, the tennis ball made it into the serial assignment. We were to make four paintings, and were free to find our own subject and approach to the assignment, Divergent thinker that I am, I made two large square canvases and completed the four painting requirement by putting two separate square images on a single large panel, (actually an un-used sliding closet door from my parents house complete with it's aluminum frame and nylon wheels)
This painting is also from 1977, is 78 x 42 and the tennis ball is rendered in oil paint while the rest of the painting is in enamel. The figure in this series of paintings came from a newspaper photograph of a fireman climbing over a chain link fence during the course of his duties and I placed him in a new setting. Neither of the paintings on canvas have survived.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Tennis Anyone?


Well, going deep into the archives again! From the same period in early 1977 as "All About Surface" I came up with this solution to an assignment to work with light. A painting in triplicate! I don't know what became of these and had forgotten that they existed until I found a slide image of them and scanned it to disk to include in my portfolio. Sorry about the dust scanned with the slide, it's all I have and I doubt that these paintings exist anymore! I don't recall most of my thought processes behind this exercise but the tennis balls made their way into an assignment to create a series of paintings later that semester. What interests me about it now is that it is essentially three identical paintings, which is what I happen to be working on right now. After many years of creating landscapes from subconcious recollections, I have recently begun to accept photographs occaisonally as source material for painted images. For my cucrrent triptych I refered o a photograph for my starting point, but the really interesting part of the process is duplicating the loose brushwork from the initial painted interpretation of the photo, onto the subsequent canvases without using the photograph at all. The end result is very similar but the mental process is quite different (and frustrating to a large extent but the discipline seems to be worthwhile as the finished product is developing into a fairly interesting set of paintings!)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Mount Goddard


Well, I'm enjoying the process of looking through my archives and digging up my painting roots to share here. Here is my earliest painting reference to those California mountains I so love. In 1974 when I was 17 years old, I ascended Mount Goddard in the Ionian Basin near Kings Canyon. The view from on top was nothing less than astonishing and a permanent and powerful impression was made. At that time I knew nothing about art and had never made a painting before, but that was about to change. Two and a half years later, I knew very little about art, and not much about painting, but I knew that being an artist was what I was, and that I would be painting for he rest of my life. Here was a language that I understood naturally, and could speak, and this was a new and exhilerating experience for me. This was one of my earliest pieces, and I was grappling with the concept of abstraction. I wondered, if you render perfectly an abstract image from your environment, is the resulting product realism or abstraction?
This 48" x 48" painting in enamel on canvas is an enlargement of a portion of a topographical map of the area surrounding Mount Goddard. I find the relationship between this painting and Andy Warhols soup can paintings very interesting. I was a few months perhaps away from learning who Warhol was, and almost 30 years away from understanding his work.
Andy Warhol was a minimalist.
I don't know if my painting is abstraction or realism.

Monday, March 10, 2008

More stories about soup cans


I was lucky to be able to take notes from the original work in person before beginning work on my version of this installation of Andy Warhol Soup Cans from The Museum of Modern Art NYC. These were the original paintings from Warhols freshman exhibition at Irving Blums Ferris Gallery in Santa Monica California. They caused quite a stir but the show was a failure in terms of sales. This turned out quite well for Mr. Blum, who eventually sold this set of paintings for $15,000,000.00. None of my paintings sold at first either!

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Andy Warhol Bar Code Project, - 32 Cans Of Campbells Soup!


Each 15 x 23 canvas details a bar code with fir trees representing a particular flavor of Campbells soup. The actual flavor and position corresponds with the flavors and positions from Warhols original soup can paintings from 1962 as they are currently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art. Two flavors are discontinued and he section of the UPC code in those paintings that identifies the specific product is left blank, appearing as a break in the tree line. The individual paintings go together to form a continuous image 61 feet long.

oil on individual canvases, available as a complete set through Rake Art Gallery

Realising that the uneven lighting in the gallery space makes this image a bit hard to read, here are a couple detail images

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

I Bought Andy Warhol


In 2007 I completed a series of canvases that had Andy Warhol as a conceptual subject for landscape paintings with trees arranged in patterns according to UPC codes from product labels that related to Warhol in one way or another. I refer to this endeavor as "The Andy Warhol Bar Code Project" and it's main presentation was a 32 piece instalation of paintings based on the 32 flavors of Campbells Soup from Andy's first exhibit in 1962. In addition, I painted a triptych of larce canvases using bar codes from books related to him. This I call "The Philosophical Triptych - Reflections of the Philosophy of Andy Warhol" Warhols own book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, forms the connective tissue that binds the three paintings in this series. All three paintings have reflections of trees in a body of water and the common thread in the triptych is the trees in the reflections, all composed from the UPC code from Andy's book. The actual trees in each painting however come from different books. This is the center panel. It is a 72" square and features the bar code from Richard Polsky's humerous and revealing look behind the scenes of the international art market, "I Bought Andy Warhol". I have nicknamed it "Andy's Island"

This painting is featured in the current issue of Oregon Home Magazine

http://www.oregonhomemagazine.com/articles/portfolio/scan-this-the-art-of-the-barcode.html

I Shot Andy Warhol


This, the second image from the Philosophical Triptych Borrows the UPC code from the published screenplay from the mid 90's film of the same title about the assination attempt on Andy Warhol in 1968 by an angry aquaintence, Valerie Solanis. In this painting, unlike all of my previous images utilizing bar codes, the code is read in the negative space between the trees rather than in the dark tree trunks. The reason for this is directly related to the image in the third canvas

The S.C.U.M. Manifesto


Part three of the Philosophical triptych. The UPC code here is from the book authored by Valerie Solanis. It is the same landscape as "I Shot Andy Warhol" and as is the case in "I Shot Andy Warhol", the barcode reads in the negative space between the trees. S.C.U.M. stands for "Society For Cutting Men" and by using negetive space for the UPC code in these paintings, I was able to present the bar code for Valeries hate diatribe as flames.

This is the only painting still available from the triptych. It is 72" x 20" and is framed in a 3/4" 22k water gilded reveal picture frame with beautifully finished natural wood sides and can be purchased through Rake Art Gallery for $2,000.00. plus shipping. Free Delivery within the Portland metro area.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

All About Surface

In the late 1970's I worked with conceptual ideas and a minimalist non objective aesthetic, and for my own amusement and also that of my audience, I created art objects that were intended to be humerous, working with visual plays on words and language, or puns. The beginning of my journey towards landscape was a graffiti style representation of the outline of a hill. These images were perhaps more representational than I knew or intended - coastal Orange County where I grew up, Huntington Beach specifically, is flat with few features, and is often hazy so that distant landforms appeared only as flat hazy silhouettes. My outlined hill forms were in fact fairly accurate representations of both Saddleback Mountain, and Catalina Island, the only landforms that I was really familiar with in my daily life.

This painting from 1977 was intended to tell everything I could think of to say about surface, and took the form of both graffiti and a chalkboard. It is acrylic modeling paste on canvas painted with black chalkboard paint, with a window opening into a green chalkboard panel with definitions of surface and graffiti images drawn in colored chalk. Here you will find one of my earliest landscape images.

It is 48" x 48"

Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining (Storm Over The Island)


By 1982, my graffiti style landscape forms were evolving into a primitive form of naturalism. I was subconciously becoming tied to my observations of the natural world. This painting was intended to be a simple flat shape of a long hill in a non-representational context but I had been commuting along the coast during winter storms while I had been working on it. I was extremely frustrated with this picture until I had turned it into an island in a storm. Though the shape is different in real life, this is what Catalina Island looked like during the week that I found resolution in this image.

96" x 15" acrylic, powdered pigment and silver enamel on raw canvas NFS

Sunday, March 2, 2008

UPC code Guiness Draft


This Painting from 2005 was the beginning of what became the Andy Warhol Bar Code Project. The first of several landscape paintings where I duplicated the arrangement of the bars from various UPC codes as trees in silhouette against water, and in one case against the backdrop of a clear cut forest. This work culminated last year with the Bar Code Project, an installation of 32 paintings representing all 32 flavors of Campbells soup from Warhols 1962 exhibition at Irving Blums Ferris Gallery in Santa Monica California.

In this painting I was playing around with the idea of twilight, and trees in silhouette against a body of water. In this 40" x 14" work in oil on canvas the sky and water are represented by 12k gold leaf. This causes the painting to change dramatically with changing light conditions.

This work is framed in a custom hand finished reveal frame and is available for purchase through Rake Art Gallery for $1,500.00