Tag: Willard Art

#489 Basement Stairs: additional work

14″ x 17″ Charcoal, pastel, acrylic on Bristol paper. View from my easel: my dungeon studio. Thinking about Joan Eardley, whose work I wasn’t aware of till someone posted some of her paintings on Facebook… just blown away by her paintings. The write ups on web pages–the kind of dismissive praise I guess you have to expect when male critics write about a woman artist. She’s so much more than a painter of ‘Scottish identity,’ and her paintings aren’t ‘expressionistic’ –just doesn’t capture the tension she creates between her sometimes minimally suggested subjects and the powerful abstract structures that govern and contain them.  They never lapse into a mere expressionist mess. There’s no need to hold their representative subjects in mind to feel the power, the pure visual power or her re-imagining them. So much of what I aspire to do.

Photo with additional work with pastel. What do you think?#489

#489 View from my easel

#482 matted

I matted 36 pieces the last couple days. I’d like to get away from ‘framing,’ but so many of my pieces, especially the smaller ones, none more than the metalpoints, look so much better when they have that focus.

Here’s a crow quill ink piece… the one that started as a drawing of a crumpled paper bag. I think it’s pretty striking in tonal contrast, and in the detail… which doesn’t show so much here.

#482 matted...

Patterns/texture–revolutionary chaos

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“Bio Filters,” posted on DeviantArt,  speaks to my fascination with organic textures, which I’m coming to understand as a fascination with pattern: after all, texture in nature is but the sensuous expression of pattern, and discovering patterns–and combining them, combining them in antithetical (or should I say, incommensurate) combinations, plays an increasingly important role in my art. I think this is visible in 3 of my recent works:

#480

#481

and #482

…as well as my Pavement Series of last year, and all of my trash assemblages (we too, are ‘Nature,’ and all things we do and make, we do and make by Nature’s rules). I’ve only begun to see how this works with my acrylic paintings and larger larger pieces.

Pattern & structure are present in deterioration & decay. Entropy simplifies, but doesn’t destroy, structure. Political, social and economic structures become rigid, resisting change, stifling freedom. Visualizing decaying patterns becomes a psychological extension of a search for fissures in the borders, locations of breakdowns where new, generative patterns may begin to form. I think of my most abstract work as no less political than pieces with explicit “messages,” … and more truly subversive.