Cellist And Drummer, 48” x 59.5”, oil on canvas, 2022
Detail
Detail
Detail
Detail
Detail
Detail
48” x 96”, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2021. I have primed the canvases to retain their raw color while creating a unique surface and texture. The painting is comprised of two canvases, each measuring 48” x 48”, stretched over panels that I constructed.
Exposure Assessment No. 4
Gallery view. The painting is 8 feet wide and 4 feet tall, one of my largest paintings to date.
Detail of the left panel.
Detail of the right panel.
Detail of a portion of background.
Detail of people.
Detail of people.
Detail of texture.
The Past, Present, And Future
I created this painting on the reverse side of a painting I completed in 2008. That painting never really saw the light of day, as it sat in storage soon after its genesis, only to have its stretcher bars removed years later and regress into a rolled-up canvas that was lighter and took up less space. Now transformed once again into a new work of art, with the remains of the past still present but unlikely ever to be seen again. I remember painting that piece and cannot believe it has already been over 12 years ago. Time flies, as the present quickly becomes history.
This painting, titled The Past, Present, And Future, was created in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and completed in December, 2020. The number of Covid infections are increasing at record-breaking rates across the country, each day bringing more infections and hospitalizations than the previous day. As a resident of Los Angeles County, one of the most infected regions of the world, I have no control. And I have no choice but to just let go, allow the powers to play out. The present is bleak and the future uncertain. But there is hope. Effective vaccines have supposedly been invented, and the first wave of distributions have begun. While it remains unclear when the general public may have access to the vaccines, vaccine effectiveness is still questionable.
These are some of things I was thinking about when I created this artwork.
Detail: texture and color
Angled detail of Tell Us Where The World Went. From the angled view, the gold paint becomes more visible.
Philosophy Of The Eternal And Universal
How to create art that is timeless? I think it must represent the eternal and universal. In my endless mission to create more meaningful work that transcends cultures and borders, I went back to a few philosophers for guidance.
Although it appears that Arthur Schopenhauer was a cynical sexist asshole, he had some interesting thoughts about art:
The deliverance of knowledge from servitude to the will, the forgetting of the individual self and its material interest, the elevation of the mind to the will-less contemplation of truth, is the function of art.
A work of art is successful in proportion as it suggests the Platonic Idea, or universal, of the group to which a represented object belongs. The portrait of a man must aim, therefore, not at photographic fidelity, but at exposing, as far as possible, through one figure, some essential or universal quality of man.
For example, tragedy may take an esthetic value, by delivering us from the strife of the individual will, and enabling us to see our suffering in a larger view. Art alleviates the ills of life by showing us the eternal and universal behind the transitory and the individual.
The title of this painting is Tell Us Where The World Went. Over the summer of 2017, I camped in and just outside of Yosemite with some friends. I took a photo of them and used it as a reference for this painting. Only a few days after we left, a huge fire broke out and destroyed the area and thousands of acres and homes. The year 2017 is going to prove devastating with regard to wildfires.
Tell Us Where The World Went, 36.5" x 48", oil and acrylic on canvas over panel, 2017.
Note: The title of this piece comes from a line in The Road by Cormac McCarthy, p. 166.