Paintings: Shown 2001

Here are some of my most recent paintings, shown at Pierogi in 2001.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Obviously, I'm fond of illusion, and things that look vaguely natural.  I think the "it looks like something macrocosmic; it looks like something microscopic" vein of abstract art can be pretty trite, but it can also cut right to the core of abstraction and have you feeling something deep in spite of yourself, because our ability to interpret illusion is built in, along with the urge to pick out the essence of things.  You can feel things in your gut before they're processed by your intellect because you are built to see them.

And that's one thing art is really good for, isn't it -- letting us think and feel deeply at the same time, and run at 100% of what we -- as brains strapped onto animals -- can be?

I'm also fond of simplicity, and of "internal consistency," so the symmetry of process and results here -- where a process similar to erosion produces images that look eroded -- appeals to me.

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

• 
• 

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.

• 
• 

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.

Illusionism 101

• 
• 
• 

I used a section of a failed painting in all kinds of digital experiments because, with a simple light-for-dark inversion, it looks even more like terrain than some of my other paintings.  See, left to right above, how it looks right side up, rotated 180 degrees, and then inverted in Photoshop.

I've noticed that not all eyes read the same 3D relief from shading in a picture.  At a certain distance the relief in the gold painting below flops inside out or looks flat to my eyes, but the relief emerges for other people I've had look at it from the same place.

This difference in the way people perceive illusion made me wonder if there were cases where I saw relief and others saw nothing.