I’m not even sure what thumbnail to choose for this entry on account of how long it’s been since I last wrote anything here and how productive I’ve been in the meantime. I think I will choose the digital painting I submitted as a design for this mural project in Orlando, because it looks nice and it’s extremely probable this design will not see much of the light of day otherwise.  In that it is unlikely I will be chosen for this project despite the very legitimate quality of my design and application.

Designing and applying is a good muscle to build.  It’s worth applying for things just for the sheer sport of it, regardless of the fact that all these things are both hyper competitive and political. Plus I’m not a resident of Florida so I feel like that doesn’t help. One interesting things is that on the submission form there was no place to put your Instagram or your pronouns (etc) so perhaps those social deficiencies will not be held against me and I will instead be judged on the raw merit of my mural painting experience, my capacity with the written word and the design I created and defended in the application.  Anyway, these are good muscles to build and this is of course “the hustle”. Even though I have decided to transcend this hustle for another hustle (academia).

The next creative endeavor that has been well underway in the meantime is the execution of the Rosemary master copy painting (I don’t know what to call it). I am putting the final marks on it this weekend and will take it to the gallery next week.  I want it out of here, in the best possible way. Nothing I ever give to the gallery I need or expect to sell but if I’m being very pragmatic I need this thing to move. I will say I was pleasantly surprised by how effortless and without major conundrum the painting process was.  I maintain that this would have not been the case 12 months ago when I was initially tasked with this “commission”.  In that sense I am glad I put it off for as long as I did.

I think one of the main landmines I tried to avoid in the production of this painting was not overworking the picture. The reference painting that I worked from was really about 50% abstracted with intensely loose and thin brushwork.  The brushwork is so loose that it is impossible to even know what it is even trying to suggest.  I see all different forms in these abstract passages that may or may not be what the artist intended.  The point is I tried to keep as much of that around the periphery of the picture as possible.  The only places where I worked into the painting with a super small brush was on the central figures portrait.  All the other portraits were increasingly less rendered as they moved away from the focal point.  This is my favorite type of contrast to create within the picture – to render the heck out of the focal point and be more and more low resolution as you expand out from that intended place.  One would also do this with saturation and contrast.

Just like with the Orlando this, whether this thing sells or not it will now live for infamy in my portfolio.  This is certainly portfolio level execution despite the inconvenient but immensely important fact that this is essentially a glorified master copy.  I wonder how the gallery will handle this.  I am actually just now making a funny connection in regards to this and another “artist rights” occurrence happening in my life that I am unable to reference at the moment.  I will be eager to see how this painting is received at the gallery, where it will live, how long it will take to be framed and most importantly (because I am unemployed and needing to think practically) how long will this thing take to be sold (if at all).

So there was that too. In the meanwhile since I last wrote on this website, I made a fairly successful painting which can be seen here and I am also in the middle (60ish%) through a mural on the east side of Houston. The painting I made on this website was fun and another good reminder of how important it is to work from a combination of imagination and intuition. It was much like the painting I made after Gauguin that featured my painting of Jesus as the Man of Infinite Sorrow.  I am motivated to make another few pictures with this same working procedure, something tells me developing this muscle will be key for my next era of paintings.  Given the fact that, as I have made mention here, I am uninterested in rendering photos in oil painting with the expressed intent of only tricking the eye and flexing technique. As I have mentioned before this is the job of a technician and not of an artist.  I actually articulated the intention quite nicely in my Orlando application for my artist statement: 

“The expressive qualities unique to paint are too powerful to relegate to the narrow realm of rendering photographs with small brushes and stencil caps.  In my humble opinion it is the job of the artist to achieve more than just technical proficiency with their medium. I hold myself to this high standard despite often falling short.”

It is in these types of pictures, many of which are combinations of drawing and painting in both oil and acrylic, that I will find my voice with the materiality of paint and use the medium as the means in and of itself. That right there is the product of all the Robert Motherwell I have been reading.

There is much more to write on but I will turn this into a two parter.