badfishpress

For those interested in how a painting gets from here to there. I created these paintings in the late summer of 2009 for the opening of Coda after putting my daughter to bed, between the hours of 8pm and 4am. Alone in the drafty studio, I don two pairs of pants and extra socks and am most productive then, without interruption.

I created a playlist of songs I listened to over and over: The Wayfarin Stranger soundtrack consists of as many versions of  Poor Wayfaring Stranger as I could find, Jack White’s live version (obsessively),  Mad world, Lou Reed’s Perfect day, and pretty much everything by Jeffrey Luck Lucas.

waiting for godot  34 x 35  $1000

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

In this series I use gesture, color,  and texture to explore the places where the broken and the transcendent meet. The paintings are unified by an emotional use of color, and by heavily worked surfaces which almost appear to have sustained water-damage. I re-use old paintings, actively "distressing" the surface by adding then scraping away layers  to give each painting a history: hidden then revealed, just below the surface. The way I work with paintings is to respond to what is evolving before me via the chance effects created by this process. My hope is to affirm a more authentic concept of beauty while making paintings which retain an evocation of mystery.

Standing woman oil on canvas  18x24  $500.

 Late for the Party   64 x 40   $1500

the you tube clips are the music i listened to while creating the series.

Mother of Saint 36 x 36 oil on canvas   1500         

"Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
your path struggles on through incomprehensible mankind.
All the more futile perhaps for keeping to its direction,
keeping on toward the future,
toward what has been lost.

Once. You lamented...
What was it?
A fallen berry of jubilation, unripe.
But now the whole tree of my jubilation is breaking,
in the storm it is breaking,
my slow tree of joy.
Loveliest in my invisible landscape,
you that made me more known to the invisible angels.

work in progress  sunday morning aug 2009

(detail) sunday morning   64 x 34 oil 2009    $1500.

 

Recently someone told me, "I saw your paintings. they're so sad."

My joys are equal only to my capacity for sorrow. In this deep well are the waters in which  I swim to meet a shining and vibrating light, my constant companion through long nights. The job of the artist is to translate with conviction and clarity the inchoate longings we all feel for that which is authentic and true: to unravel the poetry of the soul.

still from a film by Tarkovsky