For quite a while I was an avid landscape painter. Rarely en plein air but always referencing scenes experienced in my travels. Over time I started becoming interested in abstracting the vistas and in this example from 1997, I took a very common theme for myself (a tree, a rock and a skinny tall tree with a bird way at the top) and worked to obscure the ‘reality’ of the scene.
The painting is recognizable as a landscape but upon closer inspection you notice that your eyes are filling in missing parts as a fair amount of the trees are missing from the image.
Over time, this desire to obfuscate pushed the limits of my palette knife as my aggressive scraping frequently punctured my canvases. Solution? I started painting on wood.
In 1999 I attended MICA’s 9-month post-bacc program. (I still have to thank my two sisters – their financial help made that year possible for me.)
I was a kid let loose in a candy shop. I was on campus from crack-of-dawn ‘till the last bus delivered me back to Hampden. I took advantage of any and all departments that would let me explore their mediums and equipment. My light-weight scraping and sanding progress to power sanders and drills and my personal exploration of the abstract was full steam.
I cut to size my mdf boards and prepared them like the old masters did – with multiple layers of thin gesso laid on with tape knives – no sanding. The oil paint was applied with fan brushes – another old master technique – to allow for translucent layering and incredible colors. And then I punctured the surface with hand drills. My work became about creating individual holes and figuring out what to do with them.
In the “white” image, I ‘sewed’ through the surface. Incredible to think about now – I’m a weaver.
In the “red” image, I drilled holes and took each curly wood shaving and put it back into each hole. Over the years, the long shavings have broken off so that they no longer dangle out of the wood surface – dare I say like threads or fringe.
So up to 1997, I was painting a picture on a canvas. By 1999, I was puncturing those “canvases” to create 2-dimensional / 3-dimensional pieces.
Sometimes you just have to get out of the way and let the process happen. I could never have planned this evolution of stages and steps.
