One More Bop

A glorious day: I've finally been reunited with the love of my life, my beautiful Nikon F3 (not to mention a fresh roll of Ilford XP2).

Stopped by Coney Island this morning. First time I've ever seen snow on a beach! Riding the subway in the wee hours of the morning this past week, all I could think about was Walter Hill's The Warriors (great movie; thanks for introducing us, pop).


Actually, my first (and thankfully so far only) non-food/transit splurge was Sol Yurick's 1965 novel around which Hill based his flick. Maybe when I'm in a more ambitious mood I'll try tackling Xenophon's Anabasis, the spiritual forebearer to both texts. Some light Christmas reading, I guess.

There's Something About Mary

I found these two paintings (by Mary Henderson) in a gallery a little ways off Chelsea. I think on 9th Ave or something like that. But they absolutely took my breath away.

Sepulveda, 1988, oil on panel, 20"x16"

Tyler Dormitory, 1995, oil on panel, 16"x20"

I dunno, classical artists don't really do too much for me. But there's something about finding contemporary painters and knowing that there are people out there right now making these amazing pieces that makes me want to push myself. So good on you, Mary. One day I'll be hanging up there next to you (especially since each of these babies was retailing for a good $8,000 or so).

Hart in a Cage

Another Chelsea discovery: Sharon Lockhart.

I visited the Gladstone Gallery and walked in on her exhibition Lunch Break. While I really enjoyed her photographic work (mostly three-paneled series of lunchboxes opening up and revealing their contents; below) it was the video piece that took the cake for me.




I turned the corner into this installation room and was just engulfed by this hypnotic slow-motion video. It's a simple premise, really -- the camera moves down a shipyard hallway in a smooth single shot as the blue-collar workers eat their sandwiches and read their papers. But it's the inertia of the whole thing that's so captivating. You really feel every thousand pound footfall and bottom-of-the-sea movement as the industrial soundtrack fades in and out.



The gallery attendant actually kicked us out because I sat there until closing time. Probably a good thing, too, because I could've watched that thing all night.

Going Retro

First post from New York City.

I've kind of been avoiding the big touristy areas. Not just for my own monetary sake, but because I'd like this stay to be a different kind of experience. I suppose I got all that out of my system the first time I was here four years ago.

I spent the other day in the artistic treasure trove that is Chelsea. Slowly but surely, I'm making my way through all 213 of the galleries there. By sheer blind luck, the other night I walked into a retrospective of my new favourite photographer, Bruce Davidson, who wasn't only present but giving a photo-by-photo reflection of the entire exhibition.


I was particularly enamored with his series Brooklyn Gang (below), shot in 1958, when Bruce, then 25, wormed his way into a tribe of 15 year old knuckle-busters for one year. It was fascinating to hear his dozens of stories, from the chieftain who went on to become a successful dealer, then user, then drug counselor, to the banger turned police detective who contacted Bruce years later when he recognised himself on the cover of one of his books left at a precinct after he was mugged.


In the spring of 1959, I met a group of teenagers in Brooklyn who called themselves "The Jokers". I was twenty-five and they were about sixteen. I could have easily been taken for one of them ... I found myself involved with a group of unpredictable youths who were mostly indifferent to me. In time they allowed me to witness their fear, depression and anger. I soon realized that I, too, was feeling some of their pain. In studying close to them, I uncovered my own feelings of failure, frustration and rage.

- Bruce Davidson

If I had any cash left I would've bought all of his books in a heartbeat, but Manhattan's an evil money-sucking vortex. One thing it has taught me though is the fine art of turnstile-hopping, a skill that I am putting to great use.

Elvira

I'm just leaving the small upstate New York town that's been my home for the past four months. Sniff. Next stop: the big city.

One of the nice traditions at this school that's somewhat lacking at mine back home is that students trade their work. It was fun picking up souvenirs like this woodcut of one of the natives, which was rendered in a single all-night marathon. I think it turned out well.


I actually wanted to post five of my own prints but I never got them back from my teachers in time (they had to photograph them for a book they were making of the class' work). Since I've got the plates I guess I'll re-print them once I get back but it's still a bit of a drag.

The Lammer

My last painting for my Junior Painting class. Working in conjunction with the previous one, the two comprise an exploration into the idea that portraiture can be about more than just the depiction of an individual. The people that we choose to paint and draw inadvertently map out who and where we are at specific moments of our lives.

Consider that the subject of these paintings - my housemate for the past four months - is a person from the opposite side of the globe that I happened to meet by chance in this small town in upstate New York. Very soon our paths will diverge once more. But for this short period we existed in such close proximity.

Guitar Hero, 90 x 60 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted November 2009

Painting this felt about a million times better than the last piece. It was just nice to loosen up and go for a much more relaxed and casually intimate aesthetic. My source image was a grainy little photo on my phone and I think that gave me the leeway to play with the colour and composition. I do have some issues with the nondescript background (something that I think carried over from the last painting) but overall I'm happy with how it all turned out.

Here are a few more pictures of the painting in various stages of utero:



The area that I'm probably happiest with is the pthalo blue shirt design. I originally thought it would prove to be the stiffest challenge but I think (hope?) it turned out quite well.

Spanish Armada

Here's my latest painting, the first of two portraits for my final project. A while ago I promised my housemate that I'd make a painting for him before we left. And with our semester about to end I figured I better hurry up and make good on it. So here it is, from the preliminary paint sketch ...


... to the final thing.

Gitano, 120 x 60 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted November 2009

I wanted to go for a softer, more painterly look and while I am generally pleased with the result I also feel like I've lost a lot of what made the way I've been painting recently so interesting. It just looks so ... average, I guess. Maybe that's because I'm not technically proficient enough to blow anyone away with this kind of classical approach. I think that my next painting will be a bit more gestural; hopefully a happy balance between the painterly styles I've been playing with. Below is a rough sketch that I just did on the canvas:


Not sure how "realistic" I want it to end up looking. But the image is a phone photo of my housemate rocking it out on Guitar Hero.

Fastbreak

Here's the initial paint-sketch I worked off of. I always start my paintings as if they were line drawings, which I guess explains why I end up with a relatively graphic look at the end.


Here's the final piece after a few more adjustments. My bloody camera still isn't capturing the colours on the back wall which is fairly annoying, but oh well, what can you do.

Do It For The Kids

My latest painting. Sort of a thematic continuation of the last one I did. At least insofar as the subject matter is similarly derived from a movie still (i.e. a scene from Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men). Again, I wanted to supplant the importance of the image's original context with a greater sense of painterly atmosphere and narrative ambiguity.

Untitled, 150 x 120 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted November 2009

This is the largest painting I've worked on to date. It was a lot of fun having so much space to move the brush around, but of course that also meant that I had to fill it all. A couple of nagging issues -- I had trouble rendering the female character's face given that I wanted the emphasis to be placed on the body language in the piece. I'm thinking that I'll go back in and add a little more darks to it. Likewise, I still have to properly render the hand just to the right of the central figure's head. At the moment, it looks like a minced hamburger patty.

While I'm griping, I'd like to also add that this isn't the greatest photograph in the world. The back wall isn't quite that acidic looking in real life; it's a lot cooler and more subdued.

Ah, well. I'm going to go back to the studio right now to fix all this. So hopefully that'll mean that a follow-up post is shortly on the way.

Tardy

This is getting to be a bad habit, but once again I'm going to apologize for the inconsistent posting. I actually finished a painting for a crit today but there's one area that just irks me and I don't want to post any pictures up until I fix the bloody thing. Yeah, I'm a little bit anal.


This here's a test run for a silkscreen that I made a couple of weeks ago. For some reason I never posted it. I haven't played around with it as much as I want to but eventually I'll run the thing in a variety of colours over some painted grounds.

"Tomorrow Ain't Promised To No One"

Apologies for the lax posting. I was in a Philly for a while and got a bit sidetracked.

Here's my latest painting. Aside from the undercoats, it was done in a two day marathon session (ah, deadlines).

Keema, 150 x 90 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted October 2009

The actual image is an appropriation of a still from the HBO show "The Wire" (good viewing, check it out). But the artistic inspiration behind this piece was Peter Doig's work -- and in particular, his painting "Grasshopper" [below]. Love that texture!


It's not necessarily evident in the above piece, but I love the way that Doig mutates pop-culture imagery beyond any kind of purely figurative reading. He robs the viewer of any context, instead relying on that mystery of place to create an atmosphere of cultural nostalgia. What happened right before this point in time? And just after? I also really like how he relies on body language rather than facial expressions, as well as how he'll often completely abandon his initial reference entirely. On a technical level, I love Doig's stubbornly horizontal brushstrokes. He typically employs a three-tiered set of bands in his work (as seen above) which is something that I tried to replicate (without making it too harshly evident).

I actually had a lot of fun painting this one despite the time crunch. Next up is a 4 x 5 foot canvas, oof.

H.I.G.O.

I can't wait for this album to drop. Even without Hub on the bass, even looking past the fact that they fell in with Jimmy Fallon of all people, The Roots are still the meanest motherfuckers on stage.



If I can scrape enough cash together I want to check their show at the Highline Ballroom in NYC later this year. Lupe wowed me live earlier this year but The Roots still hold the crown.

Les Hommes d'FIFA

Just finished this painting for a project revolving around "flat space". I wanted to emulate the flatness of traditional Japanese composition using an image taken from the 2006 World Cup (that's Michael Ballack rising up for the header).

Untitled, 90 x 120 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted October 2009

I wanted to take some risks and really push myself on this one and while I am glad that I did I definitely have a lot of issues with the final product. Things just did not go well right off the bat -- the canvas didn't stretch particularly tight; my initial sketch was plagued with horrible anatomy; etc. I wanted to employ a range of mark-making in this sort of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon composition but the whole thing just feels rushed and scrappy.

Noir

Just looking back at some old photos I took. I snapped this image on a tram in Melbourne. The old folks shot me a dirty look afterward but it was too good to pass up.


I really miss my Nikon F2 and am kicking myself for not bringing it with me (I opted for the D70 because it's more practical ... ugh). There's just something soulless about having a delete button on a camera.

1st Grade Calisthenics

Look at us hustle! We appear to be on some sort of forced march.


Apologies for the delay in posting. I really hate the painting that I'm currently working on and am in the process of rushing it out just to get it done. Probably not the ideal attitude but hey.

Starting From Scratch

Here's a detail shot of the oil painting from my current two piece project. Since the other half was a print, I decided to emulate the feel of an etching by scratching in some rough lines with a nail. Unfortunately, I ended up with a painting that looks like an etched print and a print that looks like an oil painting. Sigh.

The Public Eye

An oil painting/monoprint tandem project. The two images are meant to relate and bounce off one another. I was going for a two-panel sequence of a security camera type of deal.



I'm really pleased with how the monoprint's cracked static image turned out but I'm afraid it's not very congruent with the scratched-in style of the oil painting. I don't consider these fully resolved pieces and will try and work back into one or the other or both tomorrow morning before class and see what I can do. We'll see how it turns out. At this point I just need some shuteye.

Director's Commentary

Here's a play-by-play of how this latest painting unfolded.


I started out with a red and yellow ground and built up some arbitrary pockets of colour. Originally, I envisioned the buildings on either side to be depicted in a highly realistic manner but I quickly strayed from that idea. Probably because the research requirements and time restrictions were cramping my style. But I like the monolithic look that I ended up with.


After shading in the walls, I turned my eye to the sea. This was one of those paintings where I got so caught up in the actual process of moving the paint on the canvas that it took me a while to step back and realise that it just didn't look that good. This is definitely pre-epiphany. The colours are so muddy and uncohesive and that pthalo green sticks out like a sore thumb.


At this point I was concerned with revamping the tonal qualities of the piece. I painted over a lot of the darker areas with ultramarine blue. I'd say this was probably the turning point since that change ended up characterising the entire thing.


After going back and looking a lot more closely at Tomory Dodge's work, I actually began to source my visual material instead of basing it on memory. Hence the vertical textures and cross-hatched areas. Also a bigger alteration in terms of the way the brush strokes actually looked.


The final touches consisted of darkening the shadows and adding in the surfer and sky. I knew I wanted the latter to retain that reddish colour and ended in shading in a crude cloud structure to complement the light-to-dark transitions along the walls. The surfer was a bit tricky and took me a few times but I ended up using a bit more violet in the blacks to subtly make him pop.

That's about it. Sorry if this ended up sounding self-congratulatory and pretentious. But hey, what can you do.

Red Sky Diaries

Here's my landscape painting. It's been two weeks in the making -- kind of a visual combination of "Point Break", "Apocalypse Now", and "The Road", I guess. Actually, the style is a direct emulation of Tomory Dodge. I was looking to capture those really visible and deliberate brushstrokes.

Untitled, 120 x 60 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted September 2009

Here is a detail shot ... just because:


I'm quite pleased with how it all turned out because at one stage (as is always the case) I was ready to turn this canvas into kindling.

Connections

This painting is an extension of the systems of chance printmaking project. In continuation of the theme, I randomly selected one of my Facebook friends and asked her to supply me with what she thought was the best photo she had ever taken. This image, of a child on the streets of India, was the result.

Untitled, A1 dimensions
Oil paint on paper
Painted September 2009

Some things that I need to work on (courtesy of today's critique session): the transition from dark to light is too abrupt, especially on the left shoulder. The colours are a bit overdone, especially on the clothing where things get a bit confusing. The folds themselves aren't especially well done. That jutting vertical line in particular irks me.

Overall, however, it was a fun painting to do that came together quickly and easily. Plus, I enjoyed the constructive criticism. It's all stuff that I agree with and would like to incorporate into my work moving forward.

Boy Wonder

Here's a detail shot for an oil painting on paper that I hammered out in about 2 hours. There's still a few kinks to work out tomorrow so I'll post the whole thing then.

Darwin's Blade

This is my first print in a year and a half, a chine-colle. I was a bit rusty around the press but once I got back into the flow of things it was all smooth sailing.


Our project was to produce art that was created by a system of chance. For this particular print, I clicked on the random article button on Wikipedia and then did a Google Image search of the results ("Galveodon", a prehistoric Spanish mammal). The first image was this bizarre image of a half-man half-ape Charles Darwin which I then replicated and superimposed over the Wikipedia text.

RRCCCCBBB

Interesting sound effect for a swing set.


I'm currently suffering through a printmaking assignment and thought I'd post this in the interim. Hopefully, some much needed sleep + a last minute adrenaline rush will produce a wondrous result before 1.20PM tomorrow.

Woody

Behold the wonder of my 10th grade woodwork education. I just built my first canvas having spent the morning in the woodshop cutting the timber down to size and screwing it together.


There were a few snafus. I double drilled the short lengths of wood instead of the long planks on two instances, which is a habit that I'm going to have to very quickly break. And I had to iron some creases out of the canvas (which I just stretched). I hate ironing.

I'm going to apply some gesso right now and then try and get started on the actual painting sometime this afternoon/evening.

Cahulawassee Blues

Here's the concept board for my latest painting project. We have to create a landscape image that relates to the relationship between man and nature. At first I wasn't enthused at all, because let's face it: landscapes suck. However, looking at the wide range of contemporary artists out there working on the subject (Lisa Sanditz, Sharon Ellis, Amy Chan, etc) really inspired me.


This is kind of my own surrrealist take on that kind of introspective "Apocalypse Now"/"Heart of Darkness" trip down the river. I want to transpose the claustrophobia of the jungle into a delapidated urban setting. I picture the character kind of quietly paddling down this empty flooded ghetto; sort of a tourist in an ambiguously post-apocalyptic scenario. He's actually taken from a photo my brother took of a river surfer in France.


I'm currently fixated on the work of contemporary American artist Tomory Dodge (see: above). The way he crafts his compositions out of these haphazard rectangles of colour is amazing. And I really dig the allusive qualities of his subject matter. Definitely the primary inspiration behind this current piece.

I'll post more updates in the coming week. Right now I'm currently trying to assemble my first canvas -- that is, cutting the wood, fitting it together, and stretching the canvas. Good stuff.

Made in the USA

Here's the results of my first week-long painting exercise. I'm a bit disappointed with the execution. If I had more time, I would have changed the composition within the white spaces -- either use a fragmented image or something with more densely packed text of different sizes and types.






The idea was to mirror the technical transformation in the shift in subject matter (i.e. natural to urban environment). I've been wanting to try and replicate the effect of a ripped poster on a wall for a while, but I'm not entirely happy with these results. Might try again further down the road.

Evidence Locker

An exercise from my printmaking class (to be used in a future project) in which we had to trace around objects using ink and a wooden skewer. See if you can guess what they are.





From top to bottom: a knight from a chess set, a crumpled leaf, a razor, and a palette knife.