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.

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!)

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.

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!

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

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