Never Trust the Fox

left panel
15 x 60

right panel
15 x 60

I can run I can I can. This is another painting that got bound up in my decade+ hiatus. During a brief time where I had a small studio in a single car garage at an apartment where I lived in 1991, I was able to work on three paintings. The right panel of this diptych was freshly begun when I stopped work and moved to new digs, where I was unable to manage a satisfactory work space. The dimensions of the canvas had been specific to cover the ugly backside of some kitchen cabinetry that faced out into the living room of that apartment. My oldest daughter was three when I stopped working on it. It was a well defined rough sketch at the time, and used it for decor on the walls of various bedrooms that my daughters shared throughout the next ten years or so. It was however far from a finished work. When I resumed work in 2002, I was met with serious protests from my girls, who had grown up with the unfinished painting as a part of their lives, and didn't appreciate the changes that it began to undergo. Free from the original constraints of covering the ugly cabinet work in a long forgotten apartment, I began to re think this project and decided to develop it further as a diptych with text elements, similar to the word paintings I had done in previous decades. In addition, I am now in the process of fabricating an ornate gilded picture frame with the title " Never Trust The Fox"carved onto it as a decorative element and a part of the conceptual foundation of the piece. The panels go together as a long, horizontal mirror image with the text on the left and the folk art styled image on the right

Oil on canvas
15 x 120
1991/2002/frame in progress

0 Degrees 155w

Or otherwise known as The Sea Monster Painting.
There is an array of NOAA weather buoy's across both hemispheres in the Pacific Ocean that track weather conditions, water temperatures, and currents, in order to learn about and predict the El Nino events that cause such havoc in the global climate from time to time. The title of this painting is the latitude and longitude of the center buoy in that array. This would be sort of an allegorical painting I suppose but that is an awfully big word for me and I don't suppose I really know what it means! Really though, I wanted to tell a story about mans historical fear of the unknown and longstanding effort to tame the natural world and thus be safe. This painting is partners with the Drowned Man on many levels. I will leave it to the viewer to figure it all out. I will say that the sea monster himself is a hybrid of a fifteenth century nautical map monster and a manga styled dragon which I did to please my young daughter who was passionate about that kind of artwork at the time that I began this work. She has moved on in her aesthetic appreciations, but this large scale painting remains very popular with young children, especially ten year old boys!

2006
oil on canvas
72 x 84

Looking Out of the Bay

And here is the final painting. Too large to either put into my storage space, or to bring with me when I cleared it out and moved my artwork here to Portland, it has had a place on a large wall in my family's home in Huntington Beach California since it's completion in 1987

The Bay
Oil and 22k gold leaf on canvas
120 x 60

Looking Out of the Bay study

This painting served as the study for my final grand painting of 1987. Essentially a sketch in oil paint executed in techniques more closely related to my work with acrylic. It is about 25 x 30

In Contemplation of Kline 1987

Franz Kline "Nijinsky"

This six foot square canvas is the result of two divergent parts of my life coming together in a somewhat random fashion. This was a bit like my pondering the visual relationship between sihlouetted trees and UPC codes which then led me to translate Andy Warhols 32 soup cans into 998 trees alongside a river in the Bar Code Project. In this case, my work as a picture framer in Los Angeles in 1987 brought me in close contact with the Museum of Contemporary Art's collection of Franze Kline paintings which had been recently donated and were being prepared for the museums innagural exhibit at the new downtown location. I had a black telescope eye goldfish of significant size and finnage at the time, and whilst studying my fish as I wound down from my job I discovered a close relationship visually between my fish and the paintings I had been working with. See for yourself!

Note: As I'm reviewing this post I have discovered a surprisingly detailed resemblance between the right third of my work and the composition in the Kline painting that I found to illustrate my narrative here. This is pure coincidence but serves to illustrate my point quite nicely. I did my work from sketches taken from life, and only became familiar with Klines "Nijinski" during the google image search for this article!

1987
oil and enamel on canvas
72 x 72
Kline photo courtesy of timeout.com