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

Picket Fence

Well, I have been putting up a friend in my studio for a week and therefore have not had an opportunity to work on my Watermelon girl so I will continue here with another of my word based series from 1980. Finally the complexity of the real landscape of Santa Barbara county had crept into my work, and though this painting is primarily conceptual in nature, I was beginning to have fun with the representation of real things.

1980
acrylic and painted wood
35 x 45

Santa Barbara 1979

Santa Barbara Landscape #2 Horizon Line

Continuing with word work, I did this early in my 17 month stay in Santa barbara. Huntington Beach had given relatively simple landforms with a basic straight line horizon and only trees and the walls of the subdivisions to break this up. This was especially true in the case of the ocean. The mountains around Santa Barbara come in close to the city and the ocean, and rise up all around crisp and clear. This complexity crept into this painting a bit but I did not yet have enough experience with this perspective for it to fully intrude into my painting. It might have been a more successful painting had I made it four months earlier, in the presence of a truely dominating horizon, looming through a hazy atmosphere.

Acrylic on two stretched canvass'
63 x 28

Hang Glider Painting 1980

A pair of wedge shaped canvass' put together to form this 2' x 8' wedge. It is an illustration of the rate of descent of the two basic types of hang gliders in use in 1980. Paragliding had yet to be invented1

More Word Painting from the Archives

GAME PLAN (Ping Pong Green) 1978
Using paint color from a can called "Ping Pong Green" which was really the inspiration for this piece, I constructed stretchers that created a window into the canvas where I ran a small section of ping pong table netting for this painting abvout games and rules and strategy in competition.

40 x 48
rubberized playing table paint, acrylic and spray paint on canvas
1979

Gimmik Painting 1979

Title says it all!
This image doesn't adequatly show the rotation of the dayglow paint color flags attached to an electric clock motor that rotate every 15 seconds or so.
Other gimickery includes painting on the reverse side of multiple layers of plexiglass with irredescent paints, and of course the phonetic spelling of the word gimmick itself (though perhaps I should have used only one M in that case) At the time of this piece I had a philosophical opposition to any kind of illusion in my work as well and included a nod towards perspective as another gimmick in this piece. As a final gesture to throw this piece over the top, I signed it in the lower right corner "Art" Sadly the electric motor no longer works. I do not know if that can be restored

Road Test 1979

Second of several paintngs that explored language, the first being the previously posted "Surface Painting" These involved single point conceptual ideas with every possible link that I could think of wrapped into the excution. Road Test was a study of the asphalt and how it's used and what I actually found there. The canvas is stretched on bars in the shape of a road in perspective with related text and items actually found in the street fixed to the canvas, including dirt.

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"