Lost Show

These are paintings from a hard-luck show I mentioned earlier.  I painted over or destroyed all of them.  The verdict: individually I like them; all together, not so much.

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Nail Painting

It's not a great photo, but: the nails are stuck by their heads to the surface with polyester resin, pointing at the viewer (those diagonal lines are shadows).  The color is spattered spray paint.  It was 36 by 48 inches, and so poorly built (by me) that it fell apart after a few years.

I'm shocked I'm still alive after all the stuff I inhaled making this and a few other things with resin and spray paint.  One big battleship-gray nail sculpture was too ugly to be photographed, like giant, hairy wings.

I had a thing for painted sculpture then, lost in between the surface and volume of things.  For another piece, I stuffed some of my old clothes with newspaper, then covered it in layers of resin until it stood up -- shoes to shirt -- and looked just like me, minus the biological part.  I got more than halfway done hand-painting the surface with tiny dots and patterns when I stopped, wondering why I was decorating the thing, distracting from its form.

Lost Painting: Land of Lakes

Another resurrection from an old slide.  This one was the subject of an Idea Database item about light reflecting off a wet painting. It was 48 by 60 inches, and done in the late '90s.

Lost Painting: Resurrection

I resurrected this failed painting from an old slide.

The image above includes most of the painting, with sun from the window streaming across; the image below is a closeup.  The shadow makes me think of night creeping across a planet; I think this is one case where incidental lighting improved the image.

The painting was 48 by 60 inches, I believe, and done around 2000.

Lost Painting: Layer Failure

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The idea with these paintings (closeups above, full images below) was to have lower layers show through a mostly transparent top layer.

You can see the effect best in the blue closeup above: the black shading is on the lower layer, below the one with white highlights.

The blue painting (48 x 60 inches) is pretty boring, but I wish I'd held onto the other one (40 x 32 inches?).  The picture here is terrible -- with uneven light from the flash and dark blue digital artifacts in the corners -- but I like the painting's frosty look.

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Lost Painting: Golden Roots

This painting (36 x 36 inches) always had me thinking of roots in raking light -- a forest floor outside a golden city abandoned long ago?

I'm not sure what led to its downfall.  Too much gold?

Lost Painting: Underwater Mustard

This one was so thick (and lumpy as oatmeal) from overwork that it weighed twice as much as other paintings its size (48 x 48 inches).  The rim was dark and blurred so it didn't interfere with the center, which looked like a patch of rusty mustard corrosion glittering on the side of a sunken ship.

I kept this around for years even though I knew it was a goner, because I liked looking at it.  Every time I picked it up and felt that extra 15+ lbs. of invisible, buried paint I thought "It even feels like a burden."

Lost Painting: Strutting Hulk

I haven't put up a lost painting for a long time, so with plenty of time left before Halloween, here is a vaguely figurative apparition to scare you.

I kept this painting around for years before erasing it.  I guess once I saw the hulk (or steroid-pumped thunderbird?) strutting around in there, flexing its muscles, it was ruined for me.

The painting was 48 x 48 inches.

Lost Painting: My Favorite Potato

I've been saving this one -- it's my favorite of the paintings I made with a potato

Though it has a black hole at its center, and it seems to be a flurry of bones either coming apart or converging, I remember it being warm and friendly in person.

It was 36 by 36 inches.

Lost Painting: R.I.P.

This one was 48 by 48 inches.  I have deleted my reasons for destroying it (after keeping it around a few years) so that it may rest in peace and be judged on its own...

Lost Painting: Asteroid Belt Pelt

Shaped like a rabbit, some of it looked like fur and some like stones in space; an ungodly mix that if done better might have suggested a fur trading post on an isolated rock in the Asteroid Belt.

The painting reminds me of others I did long ago that were too dark and furry -- in spite of my never particularly liking Rembrandt's work because of its dark furriness and the melodramatic way he lit subjects.

The painting was 48 by 60 inches.

Lost Painting: Great Lakes

Great Lakes or great puddles, this has the look of water erosion at work on some unnatural blue material.

Maybe the color in the original was the problem -- even stronger than this? -- or the effect was more uneven than it appears here, so the depression lower-left was not believable?

I think the painting was 48 by 60 inches.

Lost Painting: Skeletal

More vines, but this one looks skeletal to me.

I don't remember how I wrecked it, but would guess I overdid the glazed shading, done to smooth the edges of some too-raw bones, and it could not be undone.  It's from the mid '90s, and was 48 by 48 inches.

Lost Painting: Patches

(Update: Some uglier patches to make this more interesting.)

It was near impossible to rework or edit paintings with the processes I used.  I did repair a few and, to avoid the blahs of allover composition, tried a few with patches done in different ways.

But the patches either looked like boring formal elements or like paint rot had set in.  I liked this one at certain stages, but couldn't pull it off, even though the patches here are pretty similar.

The photo is of the painting's middle third, as it dries on the floor (the white is reflected light).  The picture doesn't get it across, but I remember it looked like a warm, flooded landscape -- something prehistoric.  The painting was 48 by 60 inches.

Lost Painting: Dark Green

I like this one in spite of its flaws.  It was a bit fuzzy and too dark, and had to be "vanity lit" (from just the right angles in a dim room) to look this good.  It was 48 by 48 inches.

If you look at another lost painting from the same period, you'll see I wasn't kidding when I said there wasn't much room for growth.

Avoiding the f-word -- formula -- is always a problem when doing creative work, but it's especially hard when doing process-based painting.  That doesn't mean you can't crank out thousands of variations, but doing so would likely turn you into an instrument of the formula, a gear in the machine, going through the motions.

Lost Painting: Loops

I like this painting's shaggy, Dr. Seuss look, and the loops feel "natural" enough to me.  So I'm not sure why I abandoned it -- maybe the color was off and couldn't be fixed?  Or I spilled something on it?

It was done in 1996, and was 48 by 48 inches.

Funny how it's similar to, but has a completely different feel than, this one.

Lost Painting: Dragon Skin

This painting's texture was too rough (partly because it was on canvas instead of the smooth panel I normally used) and hard to see.  But I kept it around for years because of its strange look, like a close-up of dragon skin.

I would pull it out every so often and admire its unapologetic ugliness.  "I am what I am" it would say, "now let me return to my cave, and leave me alone."

The painting was 60 by 48 inches.

Lost Painting: Sea Debris 2

This is another one that got away.  I remember I liked it a lot -- especially the color, and the "swept onto the beach" flow -- but that it had nagging flaws in some areas that made the whole less convincing.

It was 48 by 60 inches.

Lost Painting: Pink Rock

I kept this painting around for a few years before I painted over it.  I still like it in a way, but its suggestion of both flesh and rock bothered me.  I figured: one or the other, fine, but not both at once.  Note this issue has come up more than once -- see Frankenstein forest rescue.

This painting was 48 by 60 inches.

Lost Painting: Sea Monster

I've always been strangely drawn to this wrecked painting, and its suggestion of a sea monster and boat floating splintered after a typhoon.  It was 48 by 60 inches.