Category: x

#443

#443

33×19 Acrylic on weathered plywood This posed some problems. It was a paint-over of a piece with built up ridges of street dirt that were going to show up no matter what (see below #181 from 6/13). I had to build on that pattern, which meant layering and impasto, without hiding the the texture of the plywood.

View GALLERY HERE.

#181

Now that we have no future…

#86 When the Morning Stars

We know we will die. The courage and nobility of the human spirit resides in our ability to think beyond our individual lives, or the lives of our generation.

This is a question that first lodged itself in my thoughts during the Cuban missile crisis, standing at the back of the concert hall listening to a teacher from the music school at Wichita State play Bach’s Sonata’s and Partitas for Solo Violin to an almost empty auditorium. The countdown to doomsday had begun.

This is what it comes to… I thought– all the great accomplishments of our species: the art, the music, poetry… nothing. Less than nothing… to those whose only rapture is power and money.

What do we draw on now that we have no future? Now that we know that there will be no posterity to take up the work we have begun?

A question that has become a ghost I cannot exorcise. The ghost that will be all that is left of us. The ghost we have already become.

#86   “…and watered heaven with their tears” 40×20 Acrylic and mixed media

#441 Sky wrigting (sic)

#441 Sky wrigting

32×30″ Acrylic on canvas with roofing paper. This was a paint-over of a piece I no longer liked. I tried to remove the roofing, but the Modpodge had hardened to a point where I could only get a few pieces loose. Almost dividing the canvas in half, it posed a problem… how to include it in a different composition (the piece I’d painted over was a larger version of an ink & watercolor piece, with a central bar of ink… (#327 below)

#327 19.5x15.5cm water color, ink

…though not as successful. I painted it at first with the blue at the bottom, but didn’t want to develop the suggested seascape. I scratched numbers and letters to both halves, then turned it on its side, like a diptych, and added some black brush work graffiti.

View GALLERY HERE.